Chapter 4
CHARM AND SUSPICION
Lydia received the news of the militia's arrival the way a general receives word of a war, with joy and an immediate need to be at the front.
"A whole regiment, Lizzy. Encamped. For the winter." She set the pace down the Meryton road at something near a forced march, bonnet ribbons streaming. "Maria Lucas says there are to be a thousand men at least."
"Maria Lucas also says her cat understands French." Elizabeth shifted the parcel of her father's books under her arm. "There will be a few hundred officers and men, and the officers will be invited everywhere, and by Christmas you will know all their names and they will be very sorry for it."
"You may laugh, but you will be dancing with them by Christmas the same as anybody."
The village, when they reached it, had surrendered without terms. Red coats moved along the high street in twos and threes.
Every shop window had developed a sudden need of being looked into by the young ladies of the neighborhood.
Outside the milliner's, Mrs. Long's nieces were buying ribbon they did not want at a counter that faced the door.
Kitty and Lydia were across the street and into the thick of it before Elizabeth had decided to let them go.
Her own errand took her to Aldridge's, the bookseller.
A volume of essays her father had ordered sat behind the counter in brown paper.
Mr. Aldridge added it to her parcel. He observed darkly that a camp of soldiers did nothing for the reading habits of a neighborhood.
Then he bowed her out. The street delivered her directly into the orbit of her aunt Phillips.
"Lizzy! The very person. Come here at once, I have officers."
Aunt Phillips had stationed herself at her own front door.
From that position she could conduct the high street like an orchestra.
She had two lieutenants already in keeping, and a third stood a little apart.
Elizabeth received the introductions in a volley.
Mr. Denny, returned from town that very week.
Mr. Pratt. And Mr. Wickham, newly commissioned into the corps.
Aunt Phillips produced him last, with the air of a woman playing her best card.
He had quite the most genteel manner of anyone she had met this twelvemonth.
"My aunt is generous," Mr. Wickham said, bowing. "She has known me three days. I have been on my best behavior for the whole of them, and it cannot possibly last."
He was handsome. Elizabeth had her opinion half-formed before he straightened from the bow.
Good features, an open expression, a smile that arrived at once and appeared to cost nothing.
The red coat helped, as red coats did, but he would have made a good first impression in homespun.
He had the trick, rarer than beauty, of looking at a person as though the street behind them had gone quiet.
"And how do you find Meryton, Mr. Wickham?"
"Improving by the hour." He said it to her, with a glance at the company that turned the gallantry into a joke against himself.
Elizabeth laughed before she had decided to.
"In honesty, Miss Bennet, I find it a relief.
A man enters the militia and discovers his merit is issued to him with his coat.
It saves a great deal of time the other professions waste on earning. "
"You are severe on your own coat, sir."
"I am fond of my coat. It is the most reliable thing I own."
The company was still laughing when two riders came up the high street from the direction of Longbourn. Mr. Bingley, in front, was already smiling and pulling up to greet them. Mr. Darcy, behind him, was not, which surprised nobody.
What happened next surprised Elizabeth very much.
Mr. Wickham touched his hat. Mr. Darcy looked at Mr. Wickham and went still.
Elizabeth recognized it. She had seen it once before, across an assembly room.
The color left his face. Mr. Wickham held the salute, easy as paint.
A red flush climbed Mr. Darcy's jaw where the white had been.
For the space of three heartbeats the two men looked at each other over the heads of the company.
Mr. Bingley said cheerful things about the weather to aunt Phillips.
Then Mr. Darcy bowed from the saddle. An inch of bow, the civility of a man settling a debt he did not owe. The riders went on up the street.
Elizabeth watched them go. Beside her, Mr. Wickham watched them too. His pleasant expression stayed exactly where it was. Every other face in the circle had openly swiveled from rider to lieutenant and back, hungry for the story. His did not change at all.
"You are acquainted with Mr. Darcy?" she asked.
"All my life." He said it lightly, and then seemed to hear himself. He looked down at the pavement with the first unguarded expression she had seen from him. "Forgive me. You noticed our meeting. Everyone noticed our meeting. I had hoped to manage these things more gracefully when they came."
Aunt Phillips could smell a confidence at fifty yards. She announced cards for the following evening and commanded the attendance of every officer in reach. Then she began herding the company into motion so the talking could be done properly.
Mr. Wickham fell in beside Elizabeth at the rear.
It looked like accident. It was not quite accident.
He had waited for two of the nieces to pass.
He offered Charlotte his arm and surrendered it to a lieutenant before the offer settled.
Then he arrived at Elizabeth's side with the ease of a man who had been there all along.
She noticed the maneuvering the way she noticed a good card player's shuffle: too smooth to be artless, too pleasant to mind.
He waited until the party had drawn ahead. When he spoke, his voice had dropped below the register he used for company.
"You will think me forward, Miss Bennet. What passed on the street just now — I would rather you heard the truth of it from me than from whatever version reaches you by Sunday. Meryton strikes me as a place where news travels faster than the post."
"Slander. It travels faster than the post and arrives improved."
He laughed, and then the laugh faded into something quieter and well-fitted to the subject. He glanced once at the party ahead. Charlotte and the parcels, twenty yards up the road. He seemed to confirm the distance before he went on.
"My father was steward to the late Mr. Darcy, at Pemberley, in Derbyshire.
I grew up there." His voice stayed low, confessional.
"I was the old gentleman's godson, and I will say plainly what everyone at Lambton knew: he loved me like his own son.
Like his own, Miss Bennet. He had me educated with his boy, Cambridge after, all at his expense.
There was a living in his gift, Kympton, a good one, and it was promised to me.
Written in his will as a promise. He told me of it himself, the last time I—" He stopped, and looked at the hedgerow a moment.
"I held his hand at the end. I was at Pemberley when he died, and I held his hand, and the last thing he asked of me was to be a credit to the name he could not give me. "
He delivered it all simply, with no flourish anywhere, his eyes coming to hers only at the finish.
The name he could not give me. The words went past and then circled back.
Elizabeth, noticing them, found a whole second story assembling itself underneath the first. The unusual love.
The education beside the heir. A godfather's generosity stretched past any godfather she had ever heard of.
She did not say it. He had not said it. The thing sat between them, courteously unsaid.
"And the living?" she asked instead.
"Denied. The old gentleman was not a month buried before the ground had settled on the grave, and his son made his feelings known.
The living went elsewhere. I was given to understand the promise of a dead man weighs nothing against the resentment of a living one.
" He shook his head once, a man declining his own bitterness.
"I do not say Mr. Darcy is without qualities.
He is loyal where he loves, I believe, and clever, and his judgment is the law of his county.
But he hated to share his father, Miss Bennet, from the time we were boys.
And a man with everything can always find one thing more to take from a man with nothing. "
"And so, the militia."
"And so the militia, which asks no questions, and a coat which is the most reliable thing I own.
" The smile returned, rueful at the edges.
"I have made my own way since. Not the way I was promised.
I have never gone back to Pemberley, nor near it.
I find I cannot bear to look at what was meant to be mine. "
Elizabeth walked a few steps in silence.
It fit. That was the thing. It fit without a seam anywhere.
The proud, cold man at the assembly was exactly the man who would strip a godson's inheritance.
A boyhood jealousy was motive enough for a man who pronounced a roomful of strangers beneath his trouble.
Her case against Mr. Darcy had wanted only this: a history, a victim, a motive.
Mr. Wickham had supplied all three in a quarter of an hour, and now the picture was complete.
"You should know," she said, "that you have chosen your confessor badly. I am the wrong audience for a kind word about Mr. Darcy. He insulted me at the assembly inside the first half hour, and I have been dining out on it ever since."
"Then we are friends already," Mr. Wickham said, "for he disinherited me inside a month, and I have been dining out on nothing else for years."
She laughed. He bowed over it like a man receiving change for his coin. The party arrived at the edge of the village. Aunt Phillips, distributing farewells, secured them all for cards with the satisfaction of a fisherwoman hauling a full net.