Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The room was still dark, for the sun rose late this time of year, but London was already beginning to stir outside the curtains.
Elizabeth was lying in her bed, not quite asleep, when the knock came from the sitting room door. She sat up. The knock came again, a little firmer now. There was only one person who would be at that door.
She had not thought Fitzwilliam would come this morning, or this early; she had not, if she were honest, allowed herself to think it would be any particular morning at all, though she had hoped. She sat up and reached for her dressing gown, hastily tied it at her waist, and padded to the door.
He was dressed, but his hair was not yet arranged, nor had he been shaved. Just himself, dishevelled, in her doorway at half past six in the morning.
She was married to a very handsome man.
“I am sorry to knock so early,” he said, “but I have something to tell you and I did not wish to be interrupted.”
Elizabeth stepped back to let him in.
He entered carefully, but he did not sit. He looked, instead, at her books on the table, Jane’s letters stacked on the writing desk, and her father’s small, smooth grey stone from the beach in Ramsgate sitting on the windowsill.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
Elizabeth regarded him warily. “What, precisely, are you apologising for? You have not told me anything yet.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I suppose I have not.”
“Then perhaps you might begin there.”
He looked at her for a moment. “It is about Wickham.”
“Not Mrs. Younge?”
“We believe they are still working together.”
Elizabeth nodded. She had known it, but to hear it confirmed offered something like relief.
“Tell me,” she said.
He unfolded a piece of paper, the same one he had held during their carriage ride the day before. “I shall read this now, if you are willing to hear me.”
She nodded once.
“Rule the second: I have not been honest with you, Elizabeth.”
Her heart began to beat a little harder.
“I have not told you all we know about Mrs. Younge and Wickham, and for that, I apologise.” Then he continued to read from his notes.
He spoke of Mrs. Younge first. Her whereabouts, the servants’ network, the whispers about Ramsgate, the intent, he and the colonel believed, to extort money from the Darcys to make the gossip stop.
“Mrs. Hadley had heard the rumours,” Elizabeth said.
“Among others, I suspect. She is not the source, only a channel.”
“And before that, the dinner at Lady Drummond’s. There were two women by the fireplace.” She had not told him about that, for he was aware there would be talk. She watched him absorb the fact that she had been hearing it longer than he knew.
“Yes,” he said.
She set that aside for the moment. “Very well. And Mr. Wickham?”
He told her about a letter to a creditor, intercepted by Colonel Fitzwilliam’s man, who had been vague about the precise scheme but promised payment, mentioning an associate with knowledge of a particular family’s private affairs.
No demand had yet been made, no figure named.
But it was clear enough. Mr. Wickham had failed at Ramsgate and both he and Mrs. Younge were positioning themselves to recoup something for the loss of Georgiana’s fortune.
She processed it all in order. Mrs. Younge, who was in league with Mr. Wickham and had likely planned the compromise, was now poised to benefit from the telling of the tale. “To what end?” she inquired.
“Wickham is always pockets-to-let,” her husband said. “I must presume he means to make his fortune.”
She shook her head. “I do not understand why you did not tell me this. It is not as though I was not hearing the gossip or did not arrive at my own conclusions about where they originated.”
“Part of it was that we had only just arrived here. You were learning the household and we truly did not know what was happening yet. But we were concerned that if you confronted it directly—” He caught the look she gave him and paused to revise his words.
“If you confronted it directly, which would be the natural response, Wickham would know we had identified his method. He has not yet committed to a specific demand. If we allow him to believe himself unseen a little longer, Fitz believes he will overreach and give us something more final to answer with.”
“Your cousin advised you not to tell me,” she said. “And you agreed.”
He lifted his eyes to meet her gaze. “I used Rule the Fourth to justify it. I told myself that withholding was caring, not controlling, that I had not lied outright, only declined to share what I knew. But I knew it was wrong, and it felt wrong. I ought not have done it, I will not do it in future, and I am very sorry.”
Her anger burned hot. He had sat across from her in the library nearly every evening.
He had let her talk about Miss Brunton’s Laura while he kept his own counsel.
She had said, plainly, that she would not accept being shielded from what was being said about her own reputation, and he had nodded and said nothing and gone on shielding her.
She closed her eyes.
It had weighed on him, she had seen it, but she believed waiting for him to speak rather than forcing a conversation was the proper course.
And now he had. He had come before the house was moving, before Georgiana was up, so there would be no necessity for her to pretend composure while receiving information she had a right to have been given far earlier.
He had done it badly, but he had finally done it.
She was aggravated and angry, yes, but also relieved.
“What evidence does your cousin have?”
He told her. She listened, asked two or three precise questions, and when he had finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“We could have done this weeks ago,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You will recall,” Elizabeth said, “that we are to be honest with one another, even when it is uncomfortable.” She tilted her head. “Caring for one another does not take precedence over that.”
“Yes.”
She met his gaze and held it, allowing him to see her hurt, her anger, her disappointment.
“Then I must inform you, Fitzwilliam, that if you feel yourself at liberty to either twist or set aside the rules when they inconvenience you, I shall feel at liberty to do the same. And I should warn you that I have a great deal more imagination than you do.”
“Are you threatening to do so?”
“No. I am stating a fact. What I require of you is not onerous. I simply insist that decisions that involve me include me.”
“It is entirely reasonable,” he said, dropping his eyes to the floor. “You are right. I should have told you when Fitz told me.” He said it without qualification or excuse, and she believed him, which was somehow more irritating than if he had argued.
“Yes, you should have.” She looked at him. “Do not do it again.”
“No.”
“I mean it.”
“I know that you mean it. That is why I am not arguing.”
She was angry. She wanted to argue, but his obvious remorse had quite taken the wind out of her sails.
She studied him for a moment, the unshaved jaw, the disordered hair, the guilty expression.
Her husband, who never had to answer to anyone, had come here at half past six in the morning to read her his notes, to tell her everything, and he was now sitting here awaiting the consequences of it.
She felt the anger begin, very slowly, to ebb away, despite her wish to hold on to it a little longer. He had denied her even a debate. Very well. There were other satisfactions available. “You read the Brunton,” she said.
He blinked at the change of topic. “I only cut the pages.”
“You told me you did not read it. And yet last Tuesday you said, without any prompting, that Laura Montreville had the most exhausting approach to her own suffering you had ever encountered in print.”
A pause. “That is not a direct quotation.”
“It is near enough. You have opinions about Miss Brunton’s novel. One does not develop opinions without reading.”
“I may have glanced at a few pages.”
“Fitzwilliam,” she said warningly. “Be honest.”
Two red spots appeared on his cheeks. “Several pages. While I was cutting them. It is difficult to avoid.”
“And?”
He glanced away towards the window. “And Laura Montreville has the most exhausting approach to her own suffering I have ever encountered in print.”
Elizabeth laughed. She could not help it. Although she wished to remain angry with him, making him admit to reading a novel was revenge enough for now. “You are impossible,” she said.
“I fear you will have cause to say so again.”
“No doubt.” She looked at him in the way she had been careful not to look for weeks, because looking too directly at this man produced sensations she did not comprehend.
They were alone, and married, and he had come to her through the sitting room door before anyone would know he was here.
She was in her dressing gown with her hair in a loose plait, and he had not yet been shaved, and the distance between them was rather less than it had been when he first came in.
“Elizabeth,” he said, and his voice was low and rumbling.
Her breath came a little faster. “Yes?”
He did not say anything else, just took one step towards her. Then another.
Elizabeth’s heart was doing something rapid and unladylike, and her dressing gown was not designed for this sort of situation, or perhaps it was, and oh—he was looking at her mouth.
“Fitzwilliam,” she whispered, though she was not entirely sure why she had said it.
“Yes?” he asked in a smug sort of way that suggested he knew perfectly well what she had not meant.
He began to lean down . . .
The knock on the door to the passage was sharp and firm and followed by a cheerful call.
“Elizabeth?” Georgiana’s voice, bright with morning energy, carried clearly through the panel. “Elizabeth, are you awake? I have had the most wonderful idea about the cutting garden.”