Chapter 8
THE CIRCLE TIGHTENS
"Good man, Wickham," Captain Denny was saying, down the length of the Longs' supper table.
"None better in the corps. Generous, too, and I will give you the proof of it: he lent Pratt half his month's pay on the strength of a hard-luck story, and Pratt only two months in the mess.
Half his pay, mind, and Wickham with little enough of his own.
You will not find many men who do that."
The table agreed that you would not. Elizabeth kept her eyes on her plate. So much for her week of suspicions.
She had come to the supper carrying a week of small wrong things.
A rose garden bloomed overnight, a date that would not hold still, a head tilted on schedule, a man pricing books he never bought, a wilderness of doors in a four-room house.
And here was Captain Denny, who had no reason on earth to lie, saying the opposite.
Generosity was not the vice of schemers. She had built a monster out of pin-scratches. The relief of putting it down embarrassed her. She had wanted an excuse.
"Wickham," said old Mr. Hadley, surfacing from his wine at the name, in the loud flat voice of a man who had stopped hearing his own volume some years past. "Knew a Wickham. Steward's boy. At Pemberley."
The table turned. Mr. Hadley had lived his first fifty years near Lambton, a fact the neighborhood had stopped mining a decade ago. He addressed the company with the serene indifference of the very deaf.
"Sharp lad. Old Mr. Darcy was fond of him, uncommonly fond.
There was a living to come to him, Kympton way, a good one.
" He nodded over his glass. "Offered it him, too, after the old man died.
The young squire did. And the boy turned it down flat.
Did not want the church, he said. Wanted the money instead, and got it, by what my brother's people said.
Three thousand pound." He set each word down like a coin on the table.
"Three thousand pound, in his hand, in place of a parson's collar.
I call that a fair exchange for a steward's son, and so did Lambton. "
Elizabeth's fork stopped.
"You are thinking of some other family, sir, surely," said one of the nieces, who had heard the rose garden story. "Mr. Wickham was denied the living. It is well known."
"Denied?" Mr. Hadley looked at her with the mild pity the deaf reserve for the misinformed.
"He refused it, child. I had it from my brother, and my brother had it from the Kympton sexton, who buried three Darcys and never told a lie in his life.
Refused it, took the money, and went to London to be a great man.
Whether London agreed with him I never heard. "
The conversation moved on, because supper conversations do. Elizabeth sat very still. Mrs. Phillips leaned across with the happy face of a woman holding one more card.
"And here is a strange thing, Lizzy, since we are at Derbyshire.
Mrs. Carter, the draper's wife, has a sister at Lambton, and the sister wrote her in the summer that there was a charming officer about the village then, putting up at the inn, buying on credit and very free with everyone, and the name she gave was Wickham.
Last summer, mind. I told her she must be mistaken, for our Mr. Wickham has never been back into Derbyshire these five years, he said so himself in this very room, poor man, he cannot bear the sight of it.
She is very positive, but then she is positive about everything.
She was positive about the Gardiner baby and wrong, and positive about the curate and wrong... "
Aunt Phillips ran on. Elizabeth had stopped hearing her.
The dates were invented. The poverty too. Three thousand pounds had gone somewhere, and a man who had spent that sum had reason to price other people's property. And the exile: he had been at Lambton in the summer, on credit, within a year of saying he could not bear to look at Derbyshire.
That left Denny's loan, and the loan was seed corn, not generosity.
Half a month's pay, lent in public, bought a character witness in every mess in the regiment.
The story had reached this table by the second course.
Pratt had cost him a few shillings. The nieces, a rose garden.
Elizabeth herself, one well-paused history on a village walk.
She had been bought with the rest, and at a discount.
He was on her walk again the next morning.
The first time, two days earlier, had looked like coincidence. The churchyard path crossed the lane to the encampment. An officer might be anywhere of a morning. He had fallen in beside her for a quarter mile of perfectly agreeable nothing. He touched his hat at the stile.
The second morning he had been at the stile already, waiting, and held up an apple as she came.
"For the sexton's pony. I am making friends in the parish wherever they may be had."
"The pony is called Bartholomew, and he bites."
"Then we shall get on famously. I admire a creature that knows its own mind."
The agreeable nothing had run a half mile that morning and required two reminders of an errand to end it.
The third morning she changed her route and took the Oakham side under a sky like wet slate. She found him at the foot of the Mount.
"You have abandoned the churchyard," he said, smiling, falling into step as though the appointment stood.
"I waited a quarter hour among the headstones, very improving to the soul, and then I thought: no, it is a hill morning.
She will want the view today." The smile turned up at her, easy, intimate, pleased with its own cleverness.
"I always know where to find you, Miss Bennet.
Your sister Lydia mentioned your habits.
You are a creature of excellent habits."
Elizabeth went cold.
She stopped walking. It cost more than she expected.
Her body wanted to laugh and keep everything smooth, and she overrode it.
"You will think me uncivil, Mr. Wickham, and I find I cannot help it.
I walk in the mornings to be alone. It is the only hour I have for it, and I am selfish of it.
I would take it kindly if you would leave me my hour. "
She watched for offense, the small male sulk she had soothed in a dozen ballrooms. Instead the smile deepened, and he stepped away with a bow of exactly the right depth.
"Of course. Forgive me. A selfishness of my own, and yours is the prior claim. The mornings are yours. I would not poach them for the world." A beat, the head tilting to its angle. "I shall have to be content with the evenings, where society throws us so often and so kindly in one another's way."
He went down the lane swinging his stick, entirely at his ease.
Elizabeth stood at the foot of the Mount, frightened of a man who had said nothing but compliments. There was nothing to report. Told aloud, word for word, the scene was gallantry, and the teller a vain girl boasting of a conquest.
He had told her that her days were mapped and her own house informed on her. He had said it entirely in compliments, and he knew she knew it, and he had bowed.
She walked home fast, by the open road, and did not take the view.
At Longbourn the breakfast room was loud with wedding-clothes talk. Jane glowed over a note from Netherfield, her mother in full flight between lace and lamentation. Elizabeth stopped in the doorway.
Tell Jane, and say what? An officer had been polite to her three mornings running?
Jane would be gently and uselessly distressed.
Jane would tell Bingley, and the thing would become public and shapeless.
Lydia would be in the middle of it, crowing that Wickham liked Lizzy best. And she could not bear to spoil her sister's bright morning with it.
"Lizzy, you look pale," Jane said, glancing up. "Was it a hard walk?"
"Windy," said Elizabeth, and poured the tea.
"It has been windy three mornings running, by your account."
"It is a windy month, Jane. Read your letter."
That night she lay in the dark and stopped dodging it.
Darcy had warned her. He had warned her at his own cost, with nothing to gain, weeks before the first crack showed.
She had answered him with Wickham's own catechism.
A man who warns against him generally has an interest in the books staying shut.
She had said it aloud, at supper, to the one man in Hertfordshire whose books were straight.
She owed him an apology she could not deliver without explaining what had changed. She could explain nothing without sounding mad or jilted or both.
Then came the ball, as it came every night now.
His hand at the small distance above her waist, the heat of it reaching her through the space between them.
His voice dropped below the music. The deer come down to the stream, and no one in the world knows where I am.
The stairs outside the music room door. I would rather hear her wrong notes than any performance in London.
She had carried that sentence for a fortnight the way you carry something fragile through a crowded room, tucked behind her breastbone where the wedding-clothes talk could not chip it. She took it out now in the dark and turned it over, and it was warm. It was still warm.
She pressed her face into the pillow. This was about the investigation and not about the man. The argument failed. She heard it fail, and lost it, and slept.
The ledger was not a ledger. A ledger implied accounts. What he had was a folded sheet in a locked drawer, with mornings marked in his own shorthand.
The sheet held five mornings now. On three of them, Wickham's route from the village had crossed or shadowed the paths Elizabeth Bennet walked: churchyard, churchyard, Oakham.
Today she had come home early by the open road, fast, head down.
Wickham had strolled into the village forty minutes later swinging his stick.
Darcy had watched the whole of it from the Netherfield rise.
He had ridden home with his jaw set and his hands too still on the reins.
He knew the pattern from Ramsgate. The man was at the same work, and Darcy's sworn word kept his mouth shut.
He had gone over his choices again tonight.
He could warn Elizabeth, but his credit with her was spent. The warning would sound like jealousy, would reach Wickham within the day, and would teach him to be careful. Careful was the last thing Darcy wanted him to be.
He could warn her father. With what? A folded sheet of mornings, and a crime he was sworn never to name. Mr. Bennet would laugh and repeat the joke over whist at Lucas Lodge.
Or he could go on as he was, watching a woman's walks in secret, without her knowledge or leave. He charted her habits as thoroughly as her enemy did. He called it protection because of what he carried in his chest.
That last part would not improve with avoiding.
He told himself the watching was for her safety, and it was not only that.
He woke before the light. For one hour from the rise, he might see her come up the churchyard path with her bonnet swinging from her hand.
The hour had become the spine of his day.
A more honest man would have admitted by now that the ledger that was not a ledger had two subjects.
If she knew the whole of it, she would see two men who had mapped her mornings. She would be right. He means you harm and I mean you none was the only defense he had. It was exactly the defense Wickham would offer, in a better voice.
He stayed at the window all the same. Shame had never yet moved him from a window. It only came and stood beside him.
The door opened behind him, and Bingley put his head in, candle in hand.
"There you are. You have taken to standing at dark windows like a heron. The whist table wants a fourth, and Caroline has promised them you play."
"Caroline is generous with my accomplishments."
"She is in a generous mood altogether. She has asked me twice this week whether I do not miss town, and once whether you do.
" Bingley said it cheerfully, a man reporting weather.
"I told her you despise town in December.
Do you despise town in December? One never knows with you until the trunks are packed. "
"Tell the table I am poor company tonight."
"I never tell anyone anything they have not already observed." Bingley grinned and withdrew, and took the light with him.
So Caroline had moved from arguing with him to working around him.
Since the night of the ball there had been no word against the Bennets and no renewed motion for London.
There had been only letters, a great many letters, directed to town.
And now this scheme run through Charles.
A wiser man would find the silence more alarming than the argument had been.
He noted it with the rest, and watched the dark road, and waited.