Chapter 27 #2
“You have said quite enough,” said Franks, and lifted the iron. “It is still hot. Do not tempt me.”
She would not wish there to be an altercation. “You are trying to wound me,” Elizabeth said, trying her very best to appear calm, for she was not, “and I think you know it has not worked, which is why you are still speaking. So let me be plain with you instead.”
She paused to collect herself, for she did not want to raise her voice.
“Miss Darcy does not owe you a moment’s regret.
Whatever you persuaded yourself she felt, you were clearly in error.
And as for me . . .” She chose her next words carefully.
“I would do it all again. Every bit of it. You may not realise it, but your bitterness has actually brought me great happiness. I would do it again because being married to a man of such sterling character as Mr. Darcy is worth it. The problem is not me, Mr. Wickham. It is that you cannot conceive of loving anyone more than yourself, and that is why you keep losing.”
His jaw tightened. That was all. No concession, no flicker of anything that might have been called reflection. Only the hard, fixed look of a man who has decided that the fault lay everywhere but with himself.
Georgiana moved to stand beside her. She did not speak. She simply stood at Elizabeth’s shoulder, and together they faced Mr. Wickham.
On the Ramsgate promenade, her new sister had been a stranger shivering in a too-thin pelisse. Now she stood in her own home, in the passage outside her mother’s sitting room, and did not flinch. That being the case, Elizabeth would not flinch either.
His eyes narrowed, his lip curled down in a scowl as he seemed to understand they would not be cowed. Something then made him glance past her shoulder to fix on something behind her, and whatever he saw there fed the fire rather than quenched it.
“You nearly had me fooled,” a deep voice boomed. “I reached the edge of town before I thought to ask myself why you would tell me where to find you.”
Elizabeth turned.
Fitzwilliam was standing just inside the entrance hall, still in his greatcoat, dirty from the road, and the relief that moved through her was so swift and so complete that her legs trembled.
He tossed his hat onto the hall table and looked at Mr. Wickham with an expression she had not seen on him before. It was not anger, precisely, though there was anger in it. Something older, colder, more settled.
Mr. Wickham said nothing. Thank goodness.
Her husband took several steps forward, towards Elizabeth and Georgiana. Mr. Wickham’s eyes moved past him to Tracy, standing alone now by the umbrella stand and the front door.
She saw Mr. Wickham decide, but before she could call out, he darted forward and ran for the front door. Elizabeth had one bewildering moment where she wondered why Fitzwilliam was not moving, why he was simply standing there watching, before she understood that he was watching Tracy.
In one graceful motion, Tracy drew an umbrella from the stand like a swordsman drawing his weapon from a sheath, lunged forward on one bent knee, and slid it between Wickham’s legs.
Down he went.
Three miniatures flew from his coat as he fell, all of them scattering across the floor. The etui followed, spinning until it found the skirting board.
Tracy remained where he was for a moment. He was on one knee, with his back perfectly straight. Then, with an audible grunt, he gathered himself, planted one hand against his knee, and slowly, very slowly, rose.
He stood for a moment as he unfolded his frame before returning the umbrella to the stand with the same deliberateness with which he had removed it, settling it among the others with care.
He smoothed his coat. He regarded one sleeve.
He smoothed it once more. Then he summoned the footmen with a small, precise gesture, as though nothing of particular note had occurred in the last thirty seconds.
Beside her, Georgiana drew a sharp breath.
The miniatures lay face up on the floor.
Elizabeth knew them. One would be Georgiana herself at perhaps ten years old, another Fitzwilliam when he must have been about to leave for university.
There was a third as well—an older man who looked a great deal like her husband.
Elizabeth looked at the frames. It must have been the silver he wanted, whatever a pawnbroker would give him for them, and the gold of the etui besides.
No one spoke. The household held its collective breath for a moment.
A door opened much further down the passage and the colonel’s head appeared in the gap.
He did not immediately speak. His gaze travelled the length of the passage, taking in the cast-iron skillet still in Cook’s hand; the scullery maid who had not yet lowered the broom; the scattered miniatures and the etui against the skirting board; Elizabeth and Georgiana; her husband; and finally, Mr. Wickham, face down on the floor of the entrance hall, just now grabbing at his face.
The colonel’s expression could only be described as a kind of professional satisfaction.
“Ah,” he said at last. “I see you are returned, Darcy. And Wickham too.”
From somewhere behind him in the room, a woman cried, “I accept your offer!”
The colonel took another look at Mr. Wickham before glancing back over his shoulder.
“Mrs. Younge,” he said pleasantly, just loud enough that Elizabeth could hear him, “Wickham is currently face down on the floor of Bereford House surrounded by a cadre of rather angry servants. I believe we can consider the matter resolved without your assistance.”
The screech that flew from the room was startling in its ferocity. “You could not wait even one month! You have not the slightest notion of restraint!”
“Your plan was not working!” Mr. Wickham shouted. He was covering his face with his hands, so the words were somewhat muffled. “Darcy had his story out before yours could take root!”
The colonel emerged fully from the doorway, turning to lock the door behind him and coming to assist.
“Mrs. Aldworth will be sorry she was out today,” one of the scullery maids told another.
“Good God,” said one of the footmen as he helped haul Mr. Wickham to his feet. “The way you used that umbrella was the most exciting thing I have ever seen, Mr. Tracy.”
The butler lifted one white, bushy brow, and the man shrank back. “Pardon my language, Mrs. Darcy, Miss Darcy.”
The colonel looked at Tracy. He looked at the umbrella stand. He looked at Wickham.
“Did Tracy—” he began.
“One step,” Elizabeth confirmed. “He did not even hurry.”
The colonel stared at Tracy for a moment with admiration. Tracy received it with complete equanimity.
The colonel turned to her husband. “Not until Tracy is ready, eh?”
Fitzwilliam only smiled. He then approached Elizabeth and Georgiana. “Are you well?” he asked quietly.
“Elizabeth was so brave,” Georgiana said. “She knew just what to say.”
“I am pleased you think so,” Elizabeth replied. “For I do not recall a single bit of it.”
After that, the hall emptied by degrees.
Mr. Wickham was removed by the footmen, none too gently, and after a time, a door was unlocked and Mrs. Younge emerged from what Elizabeth believed was a small storage closet.
The colonel took charge of both, directing operations.
Cook shepherded her girls back towards the kitchen.
Franks disappeared. Tracy made a final circuit, satisfied himself that everything was as it should be, and removed to his office.
Georgiana knelt and picked up her own miniature from the floor.
She looked at it for a moment, herself at ten, and set it carefully on the hall table.
Then she looked at her brother. He crossed to her to put his hand briefly on her shoulder.
Something passed between them that required no words and was not Elizabeth’s to witness, so she looked away.
She did not notice it at first. There was too much else to notice: the footmen carrying Wickham out, the colonel’s voice issuing commands, Georgiana with her miniature in both hands.
Elizabeth took a deep breath. Not the careful, measured breath of a woman who had spent months feeling a familiar pull in the chest, the thickening that warned her she had done too much. She simply breathed.
She had been frightened just now. Her heart had been hammering and her legs had trembled.
George Wickham had stared at her in anger, and she had been afraid.
Yet she had stayed, and the breath in her chest had not rattled, her voice had remained steady, and here she was still upright at the window.
Nothing in her body was protesting in the least.
Oh, she thought.
She pressed her fingers briefly to her sternum, as she had done so many times in Ramsgate, feeling for that heaviness she had grown accustomed to.
It was not there.
She remembered the morning on the promenade when Mrs. Morgan had practically dragged her to the end of the esplanade and back, and of the farewell dinner when she had coughed into her fist and Mr. Darcy had moved a chair to the fire without saying a word.
She thought of Margate, and London, and the long slow autumn of letters from Jane that she had answered from the writing desk in her room, of being so tired by nine o’clock she had to retire from the library.
She was not tired now.
Elizabeth gazed at all the commotion, the aftermath of an extraordinary event, and felt blissfully ordinary in the best possible sense of the word, felt herself again, meaning that her body’s long complaint against her had been quietly concluded.
Georgiana paused and looked back at Elizabeth. “Thank you,” she said, and accompanied a maid upstairs.
Elizabeth was still standing in the hall when Fitzwilliam crouched to gather the remaining two miniatures from the floor.
He straightened, holding one framed portrait in each hand. His own likeness he set aside almost immediately. It was the other he considered, the older man, broad-shouldered, with something of Fitzwilliam in the jaw and the set of the brow.
“My father,” he said softly, holding the miniature out for her to see. He was quiet for a moment as he regarded it. Then he took the pictures back into the sitting room.
She followed.
He set the miniatures back in their places. He picked up the etui from the table where someone had already placed it and held it for a moment, the gold box small in his large hand, before setting it back in the drawer. He stood looking at the mantelpiece for a breath or two longer.
“You are not hurt,” he said. It was not quite a question.
“No.”
“No cough?”
Elizabeth paused. She had only noticed it herself minutes ago, the absence of the tightness she had been carrying since June, the breath that went all the way down without catching.
She had thought it might be the shock of the evening, but it was not that.
It was simply gone. “Not a one,” she said.
“I believe I am quite well again. Properly well.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Good,” Fitzwilliam said, and his voice was rough. He sighed as he turned to take her hand. “Good.” He cleared his throat. “Wickham had a good deal to say.”
He had been in the house longer than she realised, then. “He did.” She paused. “Some of it was intended to wound me quite specifically.”
He turned her hand over, palm up, in his. “Did it?”
Elizabeth considered being evasive and decided against it. “One or two perhaps. No one likes to be termed insignificant. But the rest told me rather more about him than about me, and so I knew I must consider the source.”
He looked at her steadily. “I heard what you said as well, before I made myself known. I should have stopped him sooner, but I knew he would not act with so many about him and . . . I am not proud of it, but I wished to hear what you would say.”
The room was quiet around them. His father looked out from the mantelpiece. His own younger face looked out beside it.
“Wickham would have thrown them away,” Fitzwilliam said.
“Yes,” Elizabeth replied. “I believe he would.”
He was quiet for a moment. “My father thought very highly of him. We disagreed on any number of things, Wickham among them. But he trusted the man, loved him in his own way.” His eyes stayed on the miniature.
“To know that Wickham would have discarded his portrait in a gutter somewhere, for the value of the frame . . .” He stopped.
“My father deserved better than that. Better than him.”
Elizabeth said nothing. He did not require consolation or argument, only someone standing beside him who would listen. And so that was what she did.
There was nothing further required, not today, not in this room, not after what they had just lived through together.
They had time. They had, she was beginning to understand, a great deal of time, and they would use it as they had used the months before—imperfectly, and mostly with honesty, and rather better than she had believed possible.