Chapter 13
Mr. Darcy
November had settled over Hertfordshire like a damp grey cloth. Darcy saw them together at Mrs. Phillips's card party. The room went cold.
Mrs. Phillips's house was small and overfurnished.
The card tables had been arranged in the front parlour, which smelled of tallow candles and the sugared almonds piled on the sideboard.
The fire was too large for the room, the wine was too sweet for the company, and there were at least nine people more than the space could comfortably hold.
Darcy had been here for twenty minutes and had already been pressed into an introduction with a Mrs. Long, who had asked him about Pemberley, and a Mr. Robinson, who had asked him about game birds, and the solicitor Mr. Phillips himself, who had asked him nothing at all but stood uncomfortably close and breathed through his mouth.
Darcy had retreated to the wall near the bookcase. It was the only position in the room that did not require him to stand in someone's conversation.
Then he saw them.
Elizabeth was by the fireplace with Wickham.
She was laughing at something he had said.
Her head was tilted. Her eyes were bright with the bright sharpness that meant she was enjoying herself, the look she gave to people who could keep up with her.
She was giving Wickham her full attention, and Wickham was basking in it with the practiced ease of a man who had been collecting people's attention his entire life.
Wickham. Of all the people in England. Of all the regiments in the army. George Wickham was here, in Hertfordshire, wearing a red coat and a charming smile and standing close enough to Elizabeth Bennet to touch her sleeve, and Darcy could not say a word about it without exposing Georgiana.
He gripped his wine glass. He had been holding it for fifteen minutes and had not taken a single sip. The sweet smell of it turned his stomach.
He knew what Wickham was doing. He had watched Wickham do it before, at Cambridge, at Ramsgate, at house parties and assemblies and anywhere there was a woman with something Wickham wanted.
The formula was always the same. The warmth.
The confidences. The wounded story, delivered with just enough reluctance to seem authentic.
Then the lean, the close attention, the gaze held just past the point of propriety.
Wickham's charm was not spontaneous. It was a performance, rehearsed until the seams vanished. Every smile did the work of a buttress.
And Elizabeth, clever Elizabeth, sharp-eyed Elizabeth, was falling for it. Because Wickham was offering her everything Darcy could not: easy conversation, open warmth, the feeling of being seen without having to fight for it.
Darcy watched Wickham touch Elizabeth's arm. A brief contact, barely a brush of fingers. She did not pull away.
His jaw tightened. He looked at the bookcase. The titles blurred.
He thought about telling her. He could cross the room.
He could pull Elizabeth aside and say, This man attempted to elope with my fifteen-year-old sister for her fortune.
He is a liar and a predator and his charm is the bait on a hook.
He could say it and it would be the truth and it would save Elizabeth from whatever story Wickham was currently spinning.
And it would destroy Georgiana. The whispers would start within a week. Georgiana Darcy, nearly ruined at Ramsgate. The girl who almost eloped with her brother's steward's son. It would follow her for years. It would follow her forever.
He could not do it. He would not trade his sister's reputation for his own.
So he stood against the wall with his too-sweet wine and watched.
Wickham caught his eye across the room. Their gazes met over Elizabeth's head, and Wickham smiled.
It was a particular smile, one Darcy had seen before.
At Cambridge, when Wickham had borrowed money he would never return.
At Pemberley, when the old Mr. Darcy had praised his charm.
It was the smile of a man who understood exactly what he was taking and from whom.
Darcy looked away first. He hated that he looked away first.
The card tables were filling. Mrs. Phillips was directing the guests with the harried authority of a general managing a retreat, and Darcy was seated at a table with Mrs. Hurst, a young officer whose name he did not catch, and Mrs. Long, who had apparently not exhausted her curiosity about Pemberley.
"Is it true there is a lake, Mr. Darcy?"
"There is a lake."
"And a deer park?"
"Yes."
"And the grounds are very extensive, I understand?"
"They are adequate."
Mrs. Long waited for elaboration. Darcy examined his cards.
They were playing Commerce, a game he found tedious, but tedium was preferable to watching Wickham across the room.
Almost preferable. His gaze drifted toward the fireplace twice during the first hand, and each time he pulled it back with an effort that left his neck stiff.
At the other table, Elizabeth was laughing again.
She and Wickham had been placed at the same table.
She was holding her cards with one hand and gesturing with the other, telling some story that made the table around her lean in.
Wickham was watching her with an expression of delighted attention, his chin propped on his hand, his eyes warm.
It was an excellent performance. It was always an excellent performance.
Without Truffles to break the ice, Darcy was himself again.
Stiff. Remote. Silent. He played his cards mechanically and spoke only when the game required it.
Mrs. Hurst attempted conversation about a concert in London.
Mrs. Long ventured a remark about the weather.
Darcy answered each with the minimum number of words necessary to avoid outright rudeness.
He could feel the ice forming. At Netherfield, with the pig on his foot and Elizabeth watching, he had been someone else.
Someone who scratched ears and talked about Latin translations and did not mind being ridiculous.
That man was gone. The pig was at Longbourn.
The warmth was at the fireplace with Wickham.
Elizabeth glanced at him once between hands. Their eyes met across the room.
He made himself nod. It was a small thing — the barest inclination of his head, the kind of acknowledgement that cost most men nothing.
It cost him everything. His neck was rigid.
His jaw ached. But he did it. He nodded, and then, with an effort that felt like pushing a boulder uphill with his face, he managed something that was almost a smile.
Not a good smile. Not the easy, open expression that Wickham could produce the way other men produced pocket handkerchiefs.
But the corners of his mouth moved. He felt them move.
It was, by any reasonable measure, the least impressive smile in the history of English social gatherings, and it arrived approximately three seconds too late.
Elizabeth saw it. He watched her see it.
Something shifted in her expression — not warmth, not yet, but a flicker of surprise, as if a piece of furniture she had catalogued as decorative had suddenly moved.
Her brow creased. For a moment she looked at him with something that was not hostility, and the moment stretched, and Darcy held the not-quite-smile on his face with the grim determination of a man holding a door open against a gale.
Then Wickham said something, and Elizabeth turned back to him, and the moment closed.
But it had been there. A crack in the wall, barely wide enough to see through.
Darcy had made a crack in the wall, and he held on to that the way a drowning man held on to flotsam, and it was not enough but it was more than he had managed at the assembly, and he told himself it was progress.
She said something to Wickham. Wickham laughed. He touched her arm again. Elizabeth did not look at Darcy a second time.
Caroline appeared at his elbow during the break between games. She had been at the third table, playing whist with Louisa and two officers who had the glazed expressions of men who had realized too late that Caroline played to win.
"Mr. Wickham is quite the favourite this evening," she observed. Her eyes were on Elizabeth. "Miss Eliza seems particularly taken."
Darcy said nothing.
"She laughs a great deal in his company.
Though I suppose she laughs a great deal in most company.
It is her way." Caroline smoothed her glove.
"This Mr. Wickham is very charming, is he not?
Though charm without fortune is merely entertainment.
" She glanced at Darcy. "I should have thought a man in a red coat with no connections would be beneath your notice. "
She said it to flatter him. To align herself with his supposed disdain. To position herself as the woman who understood his standards and shared them. Caroline was always doing this, offering solidarity the way a merchant offered samples, hoping the taste would lead to a larger purchase.
Elizabeth, who was passing nearby on her way back to the card table, heard it.
Darcy saw her hear it. Her step did not falter.
She did not look at either of them. But her back straightened, and the brightness in her face when she returned to Wickham was brighter still, and pointed, and Darcy understood, with a sick certainty, that Caroline's words had landed not as a compliment to him but as a condemnation, and that Elizabeth now had one more piece of evidence that he was exactly the man Wickham had described.