Chapter 21
Elizabeth
Wickham's mask came off on a Sunday.
Elizabeth was in the garden. It was late morning, cold and clear, and she was sitting on the bench with Truffles curled in her lap and a book open on the armrest that she was not reading.
She had been not-reading a great deal in the three days since Truffles' return.
She picked up books and opened them and stared at the pages and thought about Darcy's face in the lane, and the books sat unread and the thoughts went round and round.
Truffles was pressed against her stomach, warm and solid.
Since the ordeal, the pig had not left Elizabeth's side.
She followed her through every room. She slept pressed against Elizabeth's legs instead of at the foot of the bed.
She startled at loud sounds and flinched when doors opened suddenly.
The shock was fading, but slowly, and Elizabeth held the pig a little tighter each time she felt the small body tense.
But she was recovering. That morning, Truffles had stolen a turnip from the kitchen and carried it to Mr. Bennet's study, where she deposited it on his open copy of Gibbon and stood back with the expression of a creature presenting tribute.
Mr. Bennet had examined the turnip, examined the pig, and said, "I accept your offering, madam, but I note with some concern that you have placed it on the fall of Constantinople.
" He had given her a corner of his toast and she had eaten it on the carpet and fallen asleep with her snout on his shoe.
Elizabeth, passing the study door, had felt something in her chest unclench for the first time in days. The pig was herself again. The pig was going to be fine.
She was scratching Truffles behind the ear, in the spot that made the pig's eyes close, when Lydia burst through the back door.
Lydia's bonnet was askew. Her face was flushed. Her voice was at a volume that would have carried across county lines.
"I was going to Brighton! Mr. Wickham said he would take me to Brighton! He said we would be married, and then we would go to Brighton, and it would be the most wonderful —"
"What?" Elizabeth stood up so quickly that Truffles tumbled from her lap with an indignant squeal. "Lydia, what are you saying?"
The story came out in pieces, the way all Lydia's stories came out: breathless, disordered, and with a complete absence of the self-awareness that might have made the telling less catastrophic.
Wickham had been cultivating her for weeks.
He had told her she was beautiful, which was the one thing Lydia wanted to hear and the one thing that could make her follow a man anywhere.
He had told her she was too spirited for Hertfordshire, too alive for a country village, too extraordinary for the small life her parents had planned for her.
He had painted Brighton in the colours of freedom and adventure, the sea and the balls and the regiment, and Lydia, who was fifteen and had never been told no in a way that stuck, had believed every word.
He had proposed running away together. An elopement. He had made it sound romantic instead of ruinous. He had not mentioned marriage first. He had not mentioned anything that a responsible man would mention to a fifteen-year-old girl he was luring from her family.
Lydia had agreed. She had packed a bag. She had written a note to Kitty, not to her parents, because the note was an invitation rather than a farewell, and she had been caught only by accident.
Colonel Forster's wife, Harriet, who had been charged with chaperoning Lydia at a card party, had found the note in Kitty's hand.
Kitty, who was crying, had given it up immediately.
The alarm had been raised. Colonel Forster had confronted Wickham at the barracks, and the elopement had been prevented.
By hours. The coach had been booked. The post-boys had been paid. Wickham had been waiting at the inn with a valise and a smile and a plan that ended with a girl's ruin and her family's money.
Lydia did not understand why everyone was upset. She stood in the Longbourn parlour with her arms crossed and her chin thrust forward and her eyes bright with the furious bewilderment of a girl who had been offered an adventure and did not understand why the adults were so determined to deny it.
"He loved me. He was going to marry me."
"He was not going to marry you," Elizabeth said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Flat and calm and very far away. "He was going to take you to Brighton and ruin you, and then he was going to leave."
"You do not know that!"
"I know exactly that."
Mrs. Bennet had hysterics. Real hysterics, not the theatrical variety she deployed for Jane's colds and Lizzy's refusals. She collapsed on the settee and wept and gasped and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and said "Ruined! We are ruined!" until Mary fetched the smelling salts.
Mr. Bennet went very quiet. He did not shout.
He did not lecture. He looked at Lydia with an expression that Elizabeth had never seen on his face before and never wanted to see again: the look of a man who had been negligent and knew it, who had treated his youngest daughter's wildness as entertainment rather than danger, and who was now seeing the cost.
He shut himself in his library. Elizabeth heard the lock turn.
She sat in the garden with Truffles. The pig was in her lap, pressed close, her body tense from the shouting inside the house. Elizabeth stroked her ears and thought.
She thought about the pig trembling against her leg in Meryton. The flat ears. The frightened squeal. The snap of teeth when Wickham reached toward her. The way Truffles had pressed herself against Elizabeth's opposite ankle, as far from the man as she could get.
The pig had known. From the very first moment, from the very first meeting, Truffles had known what George Wickham was.
She had tried to tell Elizabeth with the only language she had: fear.
She had trembled and snapped and refused to enter rooms he occupied and flinched when his voice carried from the parlour, and Elizabeth, clever Elizabeth, Elizabeth who prided herself on reading people, had chosen to believe the charming man and ignore the frightened pig.
She thought about who else Truffles had judged. She made the list in her head, because making lists was how she managed things she did not want to feel.
Bingley: loved. The pig had greeted him with cheerful enthusiasm, the way one greeted a person who was exactly what they appeared to be.
Darcy: adored. From the first moment. Without reservation. Without conditions. With the absolute certainty of a creature who had been held in gentle hands and had decided, on the basis of that single act, that this was the man to follow.
Wickham: feared. Not disliked. Not indifferent. Feared. The deep, instinctive fear of a prey animal recognising a predator.
Bingley was good. Darcy was good. Wickham was dangerous.
The pig had been right about all three. Elizabeth had been wrong about all three.
Her prejudice had blinded her. Not Darcy's prejudice.
Not the prejudice of Meryton society. Her own.
Her pride in her own judgment had been as destructive as Darcy's pride in his station.
She had looked at Darcy's stiffness and decided he was cold.
She had looked at Wickham's warmth and decided he was good.
She had been wrong both times, and her wrongness had nearly cost her sister everything.
If Harriet Forster had not found that note.
If Kitty had not been crying. If the alarm had been raised an hour later instead of when it was.
Lydia would be in Brighton now, or on the road to it, in a coach with a man who had no intention of marrying her and every intention of using her up and moving on.
Elizabeth held the pig tighter.
"You tried to tell me," she whispered. "You tried to tell me and I would not listen."
Truffles grunted softly and pressed her snout against Elizabeth's neck. The pig's body was warm and steady, the heartbeat slow and even against Elizabeth's chest. An anchor. The one constant in a world that Elizabeth had built on assumptions that were crumbling.
In the days that followed, the truth about Wickham unravelled through Meryton like a pulled thread.
Colonel Forster's investigation found debts in every shop in town and a commission purchased on credit he could not cover.
Darcy, when he learned of the elopement attempt, wrote to the Colonel directly with an account of Wickham's history — the living, the money, the pattern.
Her father told her. He called her into the study and closed the door and read her the relevant passages from Colonel Forster's letter, which contained Darcy's account in full.
Wickham had been given three thousand pounds in lieu of the living and had spent it within a year.
The denied legacy was a lie. Everything Elizabeth had believed was a lie told by a man who was very good at telling lies.
And everything the pig had known was right.
Elizabeth sat at her desk that evening and wrote a letter to Mr. Darcy.
It was honest and raw and it contained the word "fool" applied to herself four times, which seemed insufficient.
She read it, crumpled it, and threw it in the fire.
She would not write it. She would stand in front of him and say it: I was wrong.
About you, about Wickham, about everything.
The pig knew and I did not listen and I am done not listening.
She suspected the courage would be harder to find than the words.
In the meantime, the household reassembled itself around the crisis.
Lydia was confined to the house. She raged about the confinement for two days and then went quiet, which was more alarming than the raging.
Elizabeth found her on the third day sitting in the window seat with her knees drawn up, staring at the garden with an expression that was neither angry nor defiant but simply lost.
"He told me I was special," Lydia said. She was not talking to Elizabeth, exactly. She was talking to the window, or to the air, or to whatever part of herself was trying to understand what had happened.
"You are special," Elizabeth said. She sat beside her sister. "You are also fifteen, and he is a liar, and those two things together are dangerous."
"I thought he loved me."
Elizabeth thought about Darcy. About the man who could not say the right thing in public and who carried pigs inside his coat when nobody was watching.
She thought about what love looked like when it was real, and how it looked nothing like what Wickham had offered, which was flattery dressed up in a red coat.
"Love does not ask you to run away in the middle of the night," she said. "Love does not hide. Love does not require a coach booked in secret and a note left for your sister instead of your parents."
Lydia said nothing. Her eyes were wet. She turned her face to the window.
Elizabeth put her arm around her sister's shoulders and held her. Truffles, who had followed Elizabeth up the stairs, pressed herself against Lydia's feet. Lydia looked down at the pig with wet eyes.
"Truffles bit Mr. Wickham once," Lydia said. "At Longbourn. On the ankle. He was sitting on the sofa and she went right for him. I thought it was funny."
"It was funny."
"I should have listened to the pig."
Elizabeth almost smiled. "We should all have listened to the pig."
Truffles grunted and settled more firmly against Lydia's feet, and the three of them sat in the window seat and watched the garden and said nothing for a long time.
Mr. Bennet emerged from his library on the fourth day.
He was thinner. He was quieter. He called Elizabeth to his desk and sat with his spectacles off and his eyes weary and said: "I have been a poor father to the younger ones.
I have laughed where I should have guided and watched where I should have acted. The fault is mine."
"Papa —"
"Do not contradict me, Lizzy. I am being honest with myself for the first time in twenty years, and the honesty does not flatter me.
" He put his spectacles back on. "Wickham is removed from the regiment.
Colonel Forster has seen to it. There will be no scandal, or no more than the usual amount.
Your mother is recovering. Lydia is chastened, though I doubt the chastening will last."
"It might," Elizabeth said. "She was frightened, Papa. Underneath the anger, she was frightened."
"Good. Fear is instructive. I have been too comfortable with my own amusement and too distant from my own children, and the result is a daughter who nearly eloped with a predator because nobody taught her the difference between attention and love."
His voice was steady, but his hands, resting on the desk, were not entirely still.
Elizabeth thought about her own lessons in the difference between attention and love. She thought about Wickham's easy charm and Darcy's difficult kindness. She thought about a pig who had judged both men in an instant and been right about both.
"Papa," she said. "I need to tell you something about Mr. Darcy."
Mr. Bennet looked at her over his spectacles.
"He found Truffles. When she was taken. He rode to the farm and confronted the man and brought her back. He carried her inside his coat."
Mr. Bennet said nothing for a moment. Then: "Inside his coat."
"Against his chest. Because she was cold."
"Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. Ten thousand a year. Carried a pig inside his coat."
"Yes."
Mr. Bennet took off his spectacles again. He polished them on his sleeve. He put them back on. He looked at Elizabeth with the expression he wore when he was revising a long-held opinion.
"Well," he said. "It appears the pig has been right about rather more things than the rest of us."
Elizabeth smiled. It was small and tired and real, and it was the first smile she had managed in days.