Chapter 4 #2
Charlotte fell in beside Elizabeth on the Longbourn road, and let a quarter mile go by before she spoke.
"He tells it well."
"He tells it honestly. There is a difference between a story told well and a story that happens to be true, Charlotte, and I am capable of telling them apart."
"I am sure you are. But I heard it before, Lizzy.
Last evening, at my father's card party.
He told the whole of it to Mrs. Long and my mother over the loo table.
" Charlotte's voice stayed level, the way it did when she was being most careful.
"The same words. He loved me like his own son.
The pause before I held his hand at the end.
He looked away at the hedge today. Last night it was the fire screen, at the same place in the telling. The same place, Lizzy."
"A man who has been wronged tells the story of his wrong more than once in his life. Grief wears grooves. You have heard Papa tell the story of the Longbourn ghost for twenty years and the pause never moves."
"Your father's pause is for laughter. He waits for us.
" Charlotte looked ahead, up the road, at Lydia and Kitty performing officers to each other.
"This pause was for sympathy, and he placed it the way you place a candle.
I do not say his wrong is invented. I say the telling is built, and a built thing is built for a purpose, and you might ask what the purpose is before you furnish your whole opinion of two men on one afternoon's walking. "
"My opinion of one of the men was furnished three weeks ago, at the assembly, by the man himself."
"Yes," Charlotte said, mild as milk. "In one evening. You are quick, Lizzy. It is the best and the worst thing about you."
Elizabeth swung the parcel of books and declined to be ruffled.
Charlotte was practical as a pantry. She weighed everything by keeping qualities.
It was friendship's only flaw in her, this insistence on auditing other people's feelings.
It could be forgiven on a fine road in October with a new acquaintance to think about.
The story fit. The teller pleased. Her picture of Mr. Darcy was complete.
If one corner of her mind kept returning to the meeting on the high street, she put it down to guilt.
The salute held a beat too long. The white and then the red of his face. A man surprised in his own wrong.
A guilty man goes pale at his victim, she told herself. Nothing fit better than that.
Behind her, where she was not looking, the wronged man had not changed color at all.
Darcy heard the high street before he understood it. The salute. The hat brim. The face under the hat brim, easy and open and five years older. Smiling out of a circle of young ladies in a village in Hertfordshire.
The cold went through him the way river water goes through a boot, all at once and from every direction.
He managed the bow. He must have managed the weather as well.
Bingley, trotting beside him past the last houses, chattered on about Miss Bennet's recovered health.
He had no idea he was speaking to an empty saddle.
George Wickham. In Meryton, in regimentals, with his commission no doubt charmed out of some colonel between dinner and cards.
And beside him, parcel on her arm, eyes already bright with the beginning of sympathy: Elizabeth Bennet.
He knew the pattern. He could have drawn it from memory, the way a man draws the floor plan of a house that burned around him.
The chosen audience, young and clever and warm.
The patient first approach, all self-mockery and clean linen.
The history, deployed early, fitted to its listener, told and retold until the teller's eyes shone on schedule.
By the time Wickham's purposes showed, the audience was never an audience anymore.
She was an advocate, armed against warning.
The warning always came from the villain of the story she had already adopted.
It had reached the elopement stage before Darcy had stopped it at Ramsgate.
He had been in time by a margin of hours.
The margin had cost Georgiana the better part of her belief in people.
The secrecy that saved her reputation now sat where his voice should be.
He had given his word. The whole transaction was sealed inside it.
He could not produce the only evidence that would ever outweigh a sad story well told.
Wickham knew it. That was why he had held the salute with his eyes laughing, in the middle of the high street, daring him.
Three evenings later, at the Gouldings' table, Darcy tried what could be tried.
He had rehearsed it, which was its first failure.
He chose a lull, and Miss Elizabeth beside him at the supper table, and a tone he intended for lightness.
He said something about new acquaintance in a small neighborhood.
A man arrives complete with his own account of himself, and an account, like a bill, is more cheerfully presented than verified.
"You are speaking of the militia," she said. The brightness in her face had organized itself into something cooler. "Or of one officer of it."
"I am speaking generally."
"Generally. Then, generally, sir, some men carry their accounts in their manner, open to inspection by anyone at a street corner.
Others keep theirs locked, and stand against mantelpieces, and expect the neighborhood to extend them unlimited credit on the strength of ten thousand a year.
You will allow it is rational to prefer the open ledger. "
"I will allow the open ledger is easier to read. A man who shows his accounts at street corners, Miss Bennet, has generally prepared them for the showing."
"And a man who warns against him generally has an interest in the books staying shut."
It was swift, and it was clean, and there was no possible answer that did not prove her point.
Darcy heard, in the silence where his reply should have been, exactly what he had accomplished.
He had stood in the villain's place in Wickham's story and read the villain's lines aloud.
Jealous. Controlling. Bent on keeping the injured man down.
Every word of warning from his mouth watered the seed.
He could lecture for an hour and accomplish nothing but the ruin of his own credit.
Hers was the good opinion, he was discovering, whose loss he could least afford.
He withdrew to the Gouldings' fire and did what he did when speech failed, which was arithmetic.
He could not tell what he knew. He could not unsay what he had been.
But Wickham in a scarlet coat, in a county containing Elizabeth Bennet, was not a fact a man could simply observe.
Wickham went nowhere without a purpose, and the purpose was always money or spite.
In Hertfordshire the money was thin on the ground.
That left spite, and spite would look for the thing Darcy valued and was failing, nightly and publicly, to conceal.
Watching, then. He named it surveillance because the honest word was quieter than the others on offer.
He would learn the man's lodgings, his debts, his habits, his hours.
He would be wrong to do it, and he would do it well.
And if the pattern began to point where patterns had pointed before, he would be standing where it pointed before it arrived.
Across the room Elizabeth Bennet laughed at something her neighbor said. The candor of her whole face was given over to it. Darcy looked into the Gouldings' fire and added the last figure to the account he was keeping. He did not call it by its name.
She was already armed against him. Wickham had seen to it in an afternoon. Very well. A man who could not be believed could still be useful. A wall that could not be a door could at least stand between her and the weather.