Chapter Eighteen Brighton
He had reviewed the refusal eleven times.
He knew this because he had a habit, when he was processing something that would not be processed, of returning to it at specific intervals and applying fresh analysis, and he had been applying fresh analysis to the events of the Hunsford parsonage sitting room for the three weeks since his departure from Rosings, and the number of applications was eleven, and none of them had resolved the matter in a way he found satisfactory.
The difficulty was not the refusal itself.
He had understood the refusal. He had understood it in the carriage back to Rosings and he had understood it more completely in the days that followed and he was now in the position of understanding it so fully that the understanding had ceased to be analytical and had become something more uncomfortable, which was the specific position of a man who had arrived at a complete picture of his own failures and could not unknow the picture.
He had proposed to Elizabeth Bennet and she had told him, in the precise, even voice of a woman who was saying true things that cost her to say, that he was arrogant and conceited and had behaved toward the people she loved with the selfish disdain of a man who had never been required to account for the cost of his own judgment.
She had said he was the last man in the world she could be prevailed on to marry.
He had said these things to himself eleven times with the same precision she had used to say them to him, and they had not become less accurate on repetition.
He had also, in the letter, said what he could say, and he believed it was true and he believed she would recognise it as true, and he did not know what she would do with it, and he had told himself, with the specific firmness of a man who has limited his own options deliberately, that what she did with it was not his concern.
He had given her the accurate account. He had acknowledged what could be acknowledged.
He had written the line about the foundations because it was true and he was not able to leave it out when it was true.
He was at his house in Grosvenor Street.
He had come up from Rosings the week after she left Hunsford, because remaining at Rosings had been impossible in the way that places became impossible when they contained rooms you had said significant things in and grounds you had walked over with a particular person on consecutive mornings and a grove with a beech tree at its centre that you were going to have to stop thinking about eventually.
He was working. He was working with the determined application of a man who had found that work was the most reliable management strategy for things that did not respond to analysis, and he was managing well enough, and he was in the library with a correspondence relating to the eastern farm at Pemberley on Thursday afternoon when his steward came in with a look that Darcy recognised from twenty years of employing a man who delivered difficult information with the specific gravity of someone who understood the value of doing it promptly.
"There is a matter from Brighton," his steward said.
Darcy set down the correspondence.
The intelligence came in three parts.
The first part: Wickham had debts in Brighton of the kind and quantity that indicated they had been accumulated with no intention of payment, which was the pattern of a man who did not expect to be in Brighton long enough to require the goodwill of its tradesmen.
The second part: Wickham had been specifically and consistently attentive to a Miss Lydia Bennet, the youngest daughter of the Bennet family of Longbourn in Hertfordshire, who was in Brighton as the guest of a Colonel Forster and whose age was sixteen and whose supervision, by the account of the servant who had reported, was not what the situation warranted.
The third part came not from the servant but from a second source, a former footman at Pemberley now employed at one of Brighton's better hotels, and it arrived the following morning and it said the following: that Lydia Bennet and Lieutenant Wickham had left Brighton quietly, without informing Colonel Forster, at some point during the previous night, and that the direction of their travel was unknown.
Darcy sat in the library in Grosvenor Street with this information for a very long time.
He did not need to calculate what it meant. He was a man who had spent his adult life managing estates and people and consequences, and the consequences of this were immediately and completely legible to him in a way that was not calculation but the specific cold clarity of recognition.
Lydia Bennet was sixteen and had no fortune and had been taken from her guardian's protection by a man who had no intention of marrying anyone without money because he had never had any other relationship to marriage than as a financial instrument, and the direction of their travel being unknown meant that the direction was not Scotland, which was the only direction that could make anything recoverable.
He thought about the Bennet family.
He thought about Mr. Bennet with the quality of irony that did not serve him in a crisis, and Mrs. Bennet with the quality of anxiety that did not serve her in anything, and Jane who would absorb this with the total generosity of her character and the total cost to herself, and Elizabeth.
He thought about Elizabeth.
He did not allow himself to think about her in the way he had been not-allowing himself to think about her for three weeks, which was to say with the full quality of what he felt, because that was not the relevant thinking.
The relevant thinking was this: that Lydia Bennet was in the specific danger she was in because he had not disclosed what he knew about Wickham when disclosure was available to him.
He had not told Bingley the full history because he had not wanted the history widely known for Georgiana's sake.
He had not told the neighbourhood in Hertfordshire because the neighbourhood's knowledge of Wickham's character was not his concern.
He had told Elizabeth in the letter, where it was too late to be prevention and could only be, at best, information.
He sat with this in the library in Grosvenor Street and he did not attempt to rearrange it into a more comfortable configuration.
The configuration was what it was. His silence had been a decision made on defensible grounds at the time it was made, and the defensible grounds did not make the consequences any less real or any less his to account for.
He thought: Georgiana.
He thought about what it had cost Georgiana, at fifteen, to have been in the same position as Lydia Bennet was in now, and the single difference between them, which was that Darcy had arrived in time, and that the difference between arriving in time and not arriving in time was the difference between a rescued situation and a destroyed one, and that he had arrived in time for his sister and had not done anything to ensure that the same instrument of destruction was not applied to someone else.
He had known what Wickham was. He had known it for years.
He had known it specifically, in detail, with the kind of knowledge that could not be claimed as the general suspicion of a man who disliked another man, but had declined to make it widely enough known to prevent what it could have prevented.
He had kept his sister's secret.
He had also, in keeping it, kept a secret that did not belong only to his sister.
He stood up.
He did not think about the refusal, or the letter, or the grove at Rosings, or the bookshop in February, or the Netherfield library, or any of the six months of accumulated evidence of what Elizabeth Bennet was to him.
He set all of that aside with the deliberate completeness of a man who knows that acting from personal feeling in a situation of this kind is the surest way to act badly, and that the only way to act correctly was from principle.
The principle was this: he had knowledge.
The knowledge was applicable. He had the resources and the connexions to use the knowledge in a way that could limit the damage.
The damage was to people who had done nothing to deserve it and who were not the architect of their own vulnerability in any sense that warranted counting.
He went to his writing desk.
He wrote to his man of business in the city, who knew everyone of relevance in the relevant circles and could find a trail of debt and a forwarding direction more quickly than any other means available.
He wrote to an acquaintance who had a specific knowledge of the less disclosed geography of London's cheaper accommodations and the people who used them.
He wrote to Colonel Forster, briefly, to establish the confirmed details of the departure.
He did not write to Longbourn.
He sat for a moment with the blank sheet of paper that would, if he chose it, go to Longbourn, and he thought about writing to Elizabeth with the specific and urgent longing of a man who had loved someone for six months and had told her so and been told the terms on which she held him, and he set the paper aside.
This was not for her.
He did not tell himself this was not for her in the way that people told themselves things that were not fully true.
He told himself this as the most accurate thing available: that the action he was about to take was required of him by his own sense of what he owed the world and the people in it, and that if it happened to address a cost he had contributed to, that was the accountability and not the reason.
He would not act for Elizabeth.
He would act for Lydia Bennet, who was sixteen, and for the Bennet family, who had not understood what they were giving their youngest daughter permission to be adjacent to, and for the principle that knowledge, when you had it, obligated you to do something with it.
He picked up the first letter.
He wrote with the precision that he brought to everything, and with a quality underneath the precision that was not sentiment but was adjacent to it, the quality of a man doing the right thing in the specific way that men do the right thing when it costs them something they do not name.
He sealed the letters.
He did not tell himself this was for her.
He was not certain, in the back of his mind where the most honest thoughts lived without being examined directly, that he was correct.