Chapter Eighteen
I stepped into the room, which was a small room containing only two chairs and a writing desk. The fire wasn’t even built up in its fireplace. It was cold.
She was standing over in the corner, but he was sprawled out in one of the chairs. He smirked up at me, looking just the way he had in Meryton when he’d touched his hat to greet me.
I clenched my hands into fists.
“Fitzwilliam, it is not as you are thinking,” said Elizabeth from the corner, coming across the room towards me. “I can explain it all. It started when my sister Jane sent me a letter, you see, and I have had little choice since then—”
“Stop,” I said, shaking my head at her. Lord in heaven, I could not quite look at her.
I thought back over it all.
I do wonder if there is some way I could prevail upon you, with my fine eyes, to be a bit more charitable towards him.
God, had she played me like the keys of a piano-forte? Right after that conversation was when she suggested I should marry her soon.
Do you like me because I’m a scandal? What’s more scandalous than a frightfully short engagement?
Had he put her up to it?
No, how could it be, all of it, the house, the being trapped together, everything, he couldn’t have engineered all of that, could he?
Well, she had been very insistent to go in that house, after all, and she would not listen to reason and let me escort her elsewhere.
But no, that was mad.
Not everything was a scheme put in place by George Wickham.
“Fitzwilliam,” said Elizabeth, “you did deny him his living, and he should not have attempted to get your sister’s dowry, but he is, even now, only surviving because he is able to stand in for someone else’s commission, and do you not think you owe him something? Your father did promise.”
I turned on her. “What are you talking about?”
“He was meant to be the rector in Derbyshire,” she said. “And you prevented it. That is what I am talking about.”
“No, Elizabeth,” I said softly. “No, if that’s what he told you, it’s a lie. When did he spin it for you? Was it before or after we were trapped together in that house?”
“What?” she said. “You know when I met him, Fitzwilliam. I told you that it was after, because it was my Aunt Philip’s house and it was sparsely attended due to the whispers at the time.”
“Yes, but were you lying about that?” I said. I looked at Wickham. “You have some ridiculous power to convince women to do all manner of awful things for you, do you not? When did you begin poisoning my wife?”
Wickham let out something like a giggle. “Oh, well, simply ages ago.”
“What?” said Elizabeth, horrified.
“I mean, you didn’t think she came to your bed a maiden, did you?” said Wickham, leering at me.
“What?” said Elizabeth, her voice fainter.
I looked at her, swallowing hard. She’d been so… eager for me. I had tried to wait, but she had insisted. I felt stunned, off balance.
Elizabeth’s lower lip started to tremble. “Don’t look at me like that, Fitzwilliam, please.”
“The things I have done with your wife, Darcy,” said Wickham, stretching his neck on his shoulders. “Why, between your sister and your wife, I shall have soon planted my seed in every single one of the women close to you. Perhaps soon, you’ll just be raising all my bastards.”
Richard spoke up. “That’s enough, Wickham.”
Wickham got up. “Oh, don’t be daft, Darcy.” He sauntered across the room. “Here it is, with you, you keep thinking it’s got anything to do with you, and it doesn’t. I just need a bit of coin. Pay me and I shall leave you be.”
“I shall pay you,” said Richard, seizing Wickham by the arm and yanking him out of the room. “I shall pay you exactly what you deserve.”
Wickham shook him off, but he didn’t reenter the room. He stalked off and Richard went after him.
I turned back to Elizabeth, who was stunned and silent, arms wrapped around her own waist. Her features were entirely white. Her lips were bloodless.
My face twitched when I looked at her.
She bit down on her lower lip, and it was entirely colorless.
“Don’t do that,” I said in a rough voice.
She licked her lips. “P-please.”
“Stop looking at me as if I am going to strike you,” I said.
She started, lifting her gaze to me in fear, as if that had never occurred to her. But now she was frightened of me.
I felt… I knew not how I felt. It hurt. Yes, it hurt, and my hands were entirely numb and my heart was pounding away in my chest but I somehow felt this strange, awful sort of calm, and I knew that I could strike her now, that I had always thought I was the sort of man who would never hit a woman, but that I was quite capable of it, that I even wanted it, that it would be some sort of release, and she… she…
I clenched my hands into fists.
Her voice was faint, barely audible. She had hunched into herself, making herself very small. “You have to allow me to explain. He is lying.”
“Mmm, yes, you turn my words against me,” I said. “He is a liar, certainly, but you…” I scratched the back of my neck. “You did not bleed.”
She looked at me in fright. “I-I d-do not know w-why that was. I wondered why also. I s-swear to you, F-Fitz—”
“Stop stuttering,” I snapped.
She flinched. She went entirely silent.
“Why are you behaving like this if you are not guilty?” I said. “If you were innocent, would you be this afraid?”
Richard was back in the room. “I think we should kill him, Will.”
I glanced at Richard over my shoulder. “Perhaps.”
Elizabeth looked back and forth between the two of us. “Colonel Fitzwilliam, if I could explain to you, perhaps, because my husband—”
“I think not, madam,” said Richard quietly. “I have to admit, you are likely the most skilled sort of poison temptress I’ve ever met.”
Elizabeth let out a cry of dismay. She turned away from both of us.
“You take her away,” said Richard. “I shall give your regrets to everyone at the ball and smooth it over so no one suspects. Whatever scandal you thought she might have wrought, Will, I don’t have to tell you, this is worse.”
“Quite worse,” I said in a grave voice.
In the carriage, she found her voice, and I did not stop her from speaking.
“I swore to you,” she said, and all the time she spoke, she seized handfuls of the skirt of her dress and ran them between her fingers and then dropped them, “that I would never tell anyone about your sister, not even my sister, not even Jane. And I did not. I have not. I told no one. So when my sister sent me a letter saying that I should speak to you about doing something for poor Mr. Wickham, as she called him, I did not tell her that he had attempted to elope with your sister for her dowry. Indeed, I could not say anything to her about it. So, then she said she had told Mr. Wickham to come and speak to me when he was in London, because he would be making a trip when he had a weekend leave from the regiment, and I did not know what to do.”
“You met with him?”
“I did, but—”
“You had to do that in secret,” I said, “and it cannot have been easy, because we are always in each other’s company, wife.”
“He was simply there,” she said. “Not announced, nothing like that, simply in the room, and he said that if I cried out, he would tell you that I had invited him there, and that you would believe it, because you thought he would want to ravish his wife.”
I eyed her, feeling doubt splinter through me.
“He was awful,” she said. “But I couldn’t…
I should have told you. But I thought it was over, because he took money from me.
Money you gave me, I am sorry, but it wasn’t much.
” She clenched her fists around the fabric of her skirt.
“I told him I could not help him, and that you would never give him money, and he said that he could ruin your sister at any time, that he could tell everyone what had happened, and that you would be better to give him money, and I said I could not go to you because I was not going to admit to being in his company if he was going to lie to you that we were… that he was…” She let out a huff of frustrated air.
“But he saw the invitation for the ball, and then he arrived there and then you were there—”
“Elizabeth,” I said, “you are saying that he sneaked into your bedchamber?”
“No!” She shook her head. “Heavens, not my bedchamber. I know not that he was sneaking about. I think he has a friend amongst your staff, someone who lets him come and go as he pleases.”
More doubt. “You are saying he was awful?”
“Yes,” she said. “Awful.” She chewed on her lip. “Well, perhaps he did not start out that way?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fitzwilliam, the time that I met him, the only time I ever saw him before this, I swear to you, he was very charming. He was very friendly, and I thought he was… he seemed sort of the perfect gentleman in a way, sort of everything that is good and pleasing and handsome and—no, not handsome, God in heaven.” She leaned back into the carriage seat and covered her face with her hands.
I sucked in a long, slow breath. “So, then, you were charmed by him?” My mouth twisted as I said the words.
“He wanted me to speak to you about the rectory position,” she said.
“Elizabeth, years ago, he came to me and said he did not wish to have that position, and instead wanted the worth of it. I gave him three thousand pounds, and he took that and swore off it entirely. Then, some time later, I suppose he had gone through all that money, he came back to me and demanded I give the position to him, but I said he had already been given what my father had promised him.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Why could you have not told me this before? This I could have told Jane.”
“I seem to remember that you were the one who said we should not speak of him, that it was your error to bring him up.”
“Oh, God,” she moaned.
“Perhaps we should continue the rest of the carriage ride in silence,” I said.
“No, I have not finished explaining,” she said. “He was charming at first, and I thought perhaps I would… help him. But then, he got awful, and I told him I would not, and then he was all threat, and then he saw the invitation for the ball—”
“We have been over this,” I said. “If you had told him no, and told him also that you would not approach me because you were frightened I would think you were doing untoward things with him, why would he ask to see you in private at the ball? Why would you not simply say that you would not see him? Why would you leave the dance floor to meet with him?”
“Oh, Lord, I do not know,” she said. “H-he… he is all threat. He could ruin your sister. He could—”
“He could tell me that you and he were lovers.”
“No.”
I regarded her.
“Oh, dear, this is like the last two acts of Othello or something equally maudlin,” she whispered.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, disgusted.
“I don’t believe you,” she breathed.
“Quiet now,” I said, my voice very soft. “Please.”
She clenched her hands around her skirt and trembled in the seat across from me. But she was quiet after that.