Chapter 10
Darcy had noticed, at breakfast, that Elizabeth had gone pale over her letters, and had said nothing of it, partly from a sense that it was not his place to inquire into a stranger's correspondence, however much he wished otherwise, and partly because he had learned, this past year, that Elizabeth Bennet was not a woman to be pressed for confidences she had not offered freely, and that the surest way to forfeit her trust was to demand it before she was ready to extend it.
He had spent the better part of the day in a state of low, persistent unease he could not entirely account for, attending to his guests with the correct degree of attention while some quieter part of his mind continued to turn over the picture of her face at the breakfast table, gone suddenly and unaccountably grey.
He had seen her walking with Georgiana that morning, the two of them deep in conversation, and had thought little of it beyond ordinary pleasure at the sight — his sister, who had spent two years guarding herself so carefully against intimacy, walking arm in arm with a new friend in the soft grey light, talking, by the look of it, about something that mattered.
He had not imagined, watching them from the window of his study, that the conversation concerned anything beyond the ordinary business of new friendship.
He understood otherwise only that evening, and by then there was no undoing the day's quiet accumulation of dread that had already, without his fully realizing it, begun to settle over him.
He found a few minutes alone with her before dinner, by accident rather than design — she had come down early to the drawing room, as had become her habit, and he had come down earlier still, and for a moment there was no one else present to make the encounter anything but what it plainly was.
"Miss Bennet. I hope the day has used you more kindly than the morning seemed to."
She looked at him for a moment before answering, as though weighing how much of an answer the question actually wanted. "You are kinder than you need to be, asking it twice in one day without once demanding to know the reason behind the asking."
"I have no right to the reason, unless you wish to give it. I find I would rather ask twice and learn nothing than ask once and have you think I asked merely out of form."
Something in her face eased, fractionally, at that — not relief exactly, but the particular loosening of a person braced for a question she did not wish to answer who finds, instead, only consideration.
"It is a family matter, sir, and not yet settled enough in my own mind to be spoken of usefully to anyone, even those I might wish to tell.
I hope you will not think me ungracious for saying no more than that. "
"I should think you a great deal less yourself if you said more than you were ready to." He paused. "I hope, whatever it is, that it resolves itself kindly."
"So do I," she said, with a brief, unguarded look that told him, more plainly than the words themselves, how little she currently believed it would.
The door opened behind them before either could say anything further, and the moment closed as quickly and naturally as it had opened, leaving Darcy with nothing more than the plain fact of her unhappiness, and no way yet to address it.
Fitzwilliam found him in the study after dinner, when the rest of the party had gone through to the drawing room for music, and shut the door behind himself with a quiet deliberateness that told Darcy, before a word had been spoken, that whatever followed was not going to be pleasant.
"I have learned something today that I think you ought to know, and I have spent the better part of the afternoon deciding whether to tell you at all, which I mention only so that you understand I did not come to this lightly."
"You had better simply say it, Fitzwilliam. You are considerably worse at suspense than you imagine yourself to be."
"Miss Bennet received a letter this morning that distressed her a great deal, and I made it my business, discreetly, to learn what I could of the cause, because I observed Miss Darcy go to some lengths afterward to comfort her, and I did not think the two of them would thank me for asking outright, whatever my curiosity.
" Fitzwilliam crossed to the window, and stood with his back to it, which struck Darcy as a deliberate choice, the posture of a man who wished to deliver difficult news without the added burden of watching its effect too closely.
"I spoke to one of the upstairs maids, who is not in the habit of gossip but is fond of Miss Bennet and concerned for her, and who let slip that the letter concerned Miss Bennet's youngest sister, presently at Brighton, who has formed an attachment to an officer recently arrived in Colonel Forster's regiment. A Mr. Wickham."
Darcy set down the pen he had been holding, very carefully, as though the carefulness of the motion might somehow contain the feeling that had risen in him at the name.
"Say that again."
"I had rather not, if you intend to look at me in that particular way while I do it, but I will, since you have asked.
Wickham is at Brighton, with the militia, and has attached himself to a girl of fifteen who is, by every account I have managed to gather, entirely without the supervision such a situation requires.
Mrs. Forster, I understand, is herself very young and not greatly inclined to exercise the sort of vigilance the case demands. "
Darcy was silent for a long moment, and felt, beneath the silence, the particular sensation of a debt long deferred arriving suddenly and entirely at his door, with interest he had not anticipated and could not now refuse to pay.
"I had the opportunity, two years ago, to expose him," he said at last, more to himself than to Fitzwilliam, though he did not lower his voice particularly to make it so.
"After Ramsgate. I chose to manage the matter privately, for Georgiana's sake — I did not wish her history known, did not wish her exposed to the kind of speculation a public exposure would have invited, and I have never, until this moment, had cause to regret the choice.
I see now that the choice protected my sister at a cost I did not fully calculate at the time, and that the cost has fallen, in the interval, on every family in England with a daughter unfortunate enough to attract his notice. "
"You could not have known it would be Miss Bennet's sister, Darcy. You could not have known it would be anyone in particular."
"I knew it would be someone. That was rather the point of exposing him, had I done it properly, instead of simply removing him from my own family's immediate concern and trusting the world to manage the rest of the danger without my assistance.
" He rose, and crossed to the window himself, and stood for a moment looking out at the dark grounds, the lake invisible now beyond the reach of the house's lit windows, and felt the full, considerable weight of what he had not done, two years past, settle over him with a clarity he had successfully avoided until this precise moment.
"I protected my own family's name, Fitzwilliam, and called it protecting Georgiana, and told myself the two were the same thing. I am no longer certain they were."
Fitzwilliam said nothing for a little while, which was, Darcy thought, rather more comfort than any words his cousin might have offered, and when he did speak again, it was with none of his usual lightness.
"What will you do?"
"I do not yet know the whole of the situation.
I know only that a girl I have never met, sister to a woman whose good opinion I value more than I have valued anyone's in my life, is presently in a position Wickham has every intention of exploiting, exactly as he exploited my own sister two years ago, and that I am, in some considerable measure, responsible for his having had the opportunity to do so a second time.
" He turned from the window. "I will write to Colonel Forster's wife tonight, carefully, in terms that do not expose more than is necessary but that make plain the danger as clearly as I am able.
I will write to my own man of business in London as well, and ask him to make whatever inquiries can be made regarding Wickham's debts and present circumstances, since a man in flight from his creditors is generally a man who can be managed, if one knows precisely what he is fleeing and how badly. "
"And Miss Bennet? Will you tell her what you know?"
Darcy considered this for a long moment.
"Not tonight. I do not yet know enough to tell her anything useful, and I will not add to her distress with half-formed intelligence that may yet prove worse, or better, than either of us presently fears.
When I know something certain, I will tell her myself, and tell her everything — my own history with Wickham included, whatever it costs me to disclose it.
She has earned that much honesty from me, whatever else remains unsettled between us. "
He sat down again at the desk, and drew a fresh sheet of paper toward himself, and Fitzwilliam, recognizing the particular set of his cousin's shoulders as the signal that the conversation had reached its natural end, let himself out quietly, leaving Darcy alone with the single candle and the considerable work of composing a letter that would need to convey urgency without alarm, and concern without indiscretion, to a woman he had never met, on behalf of a family he had every reason, by now, to wish well.
He wrote three drafts before he was satisfied with the fourth, each revision stripping away some phrase that struck him, on rereading, as either too pointed or not pointed enough — he could not say outright what he knew of Wickham's character without exposing Georgiana's history to a stranger's correspondence, and yet he could not soften the warning so far that Mrs. Forster might fail to grasp its seriousness.
He settled, in the end, on a careful account of Wickham's habits with debt and his unreliability in matters of honor, framed as the general report of a man who had known the officer some years and felt obliged, as a neighbour and a gentleman, to pass along what he knew for the protection of a young lady presently under Mrs. Forster's care.
It was not the whole truth. It was, he judged, as much of the truth as could safely travel by post to a stranger, and he sealed it with the particular grim satisfaction of a man who has done an unpleasant duty as well as it could be done, and sent it by express before he allowed himself to consider whether it would arrive in time.
The letter to his man of business he wrote more quickly, and with less care for phrasing, since the matter there was purely practical: a request for whatever intelligence could be gathered, discreetly and at whatever cost was necessary, regarding Mr. George Wickham's present debts, his standing with his creditors, and any information that might prove useful should it become necessary to negotiate with him directly.
He did not, writing this second letter, allow himself to examine too closely what he meant by negotiate, or what he might be required to offer, because he understood already, with the particular clarity that came to him in moments of genuine crisis, that he would offer whatever was required, and think very little of the cost, if it meant securing a fifteen-year-old girl's safety and sparing her family the ruin Wickham was entirely capable of visiting upon them.
He sat for some while after both letters were sealed and sent, in the quiet of his own study, the candle burning low, and allowed himself, for the first time that evening, to think not of Wickham but of Elizabeth — of what she must be feeling tonight, somewhere above him in this same house, carrying a fear she had not yet brought to him, and could not yet know he was already laboring, in his own quiet and imperfect way, to address on her behalf.
He did not wish her gratitude, when the time came to tell her what he had done.
He wished, more than gratitude, simply to be the kind of man capable of doing it without calculation, without keeping account of what it might earn him in her regard, and he found, examining his own motives with the same ruthless honesty he generally reserved for matters of real consequence, that he believed himself, on this single occasion, to have managed it.
He went to bed very late, and did not sleep until later still, and woke the next morning already composing, in his mind, the second letter he knew he would eventually have to write — the one that would tell her everything, in person, with no further delay than honesty required, and no attempt to soften, for his own comfort, an account that did him very little credit in its particulars, however necessary its telling had become.
He thought, drifting at last toward an uneasy sleep, that he had spent a great deal of his life believing himself a careful man — careful of his name, careful of his sister, careful of every obligation a gentleman of his standing owed to those who depended upon him.
He understood now, lying awake with the candle finally extinguished and the house gone quiet around him, that carefulness of that kind could itself become a fault, when it served chiefly to protect the man practicing it, and left others to bear whatever risk his caution had not troubled itself to address.
He did not know yet how Elizabeth would receive what he had to tell her.
He knew only that he intended to tell her the whole of it, and to let her judge him by the truth rather than by whatever careful account he might once have constructed to spare himself her disapproval.