Chapter 16
He told Georgiana before he left, because he had promised Elizabeth he would tell her, and because he had promised himself, this past week, that he would no longer manage the people he loved by withholding from them whatever truths concerned them most directly.
She received the news more steadily than he had feared, and rather less steadily than he had hoped, which he supposed was the most honest outcome either of them could have expected.
She went very pale at the mention of Wickham's name, and was silent for a long moment, and then asked, in a voice that had gone carefully flat in the particular way he recognized from her worst days at Ramsgate, whether the girl in question knew what sort of man she had attached herself to.
"I do not believe she does. I do not think anyone in her family understood, until very recently, the full extent of what he is capable of."
"Then you must tell her — not Lydia, I mean, though her as well in whatever manner proves possible, but Miss Bennet's family generally.
You must not let this happen to them the way it nearly happened to me, managed quietly and never properly explained, so that the danger simply moves on to find some other girl who has not been warned. "
"That is precisely my intention, Georgiana. I am going to Brighton to end it properly this time, in whatever manner the situation requires, and I do not intend to manage this quietly merely for the comfort of avoiding an unpleasant scene."
She looked at him then with an expression he had not entirely expected.
Not relief exactly, though there was relief in it, but something closer to pride, the particular quiet pride of a sister watching a brother do, at last, the thing she had perhaps wished, without ever quite saying so, that he had done the first time.
"I am glad. I have sometimes wondered whether you carried more guilt over Ramsgate than you ever let me see. I think this may help with that, whatever else it costs you to do it."
He had not expected his sister to offer him absolution before he had even earned it, and found, traveling south through the long day that followed, that the small unburdening of that conversation stayed with him rather longer than he had anticipated, a quiet steadiness beneath the considerably less steady work that lay ahead.
The journey itself gave him a great deal of time for thought, which he had not entirely wanted, and used regardless, turning over what he intended to say and discarding, by degrees, each version that struck him on reflection as too elaborate, too rehearsed, too much in the manner of the man he had once been, who constructed speeches as though eloquence alone might substitute for the will to act.
He arrived, somewhere past the second change of horses, at a simpler resolution: he would state what he knew, plainly, and what he required, equally plainly, and would not trouble himself overmuch with the elegance of the delivery, since elegance had never once, in his dealings with Wickham, accomplished anything that plain statement could not accomplish rather more efficiently.
He reached Brighton late the following evening, dust-stained and travel-worn, and made his inquiries with the particular efficient discretion of a man who had learned, over the years, precisely how to locate information without advertising his interest in possessing it.
A word to the innkeeper, a small consideration offered to a groom who proved unexpectedly well informed about the comings and goings of the regiment's officers, and he had Wickham's direction within the hour of his arrival, along with the considerably more useful intelligence that the gentleman's credit in the town had grown thin enough that several local tradesmen had begun, in the groom's words, to make rather pointed inquiries of their own.
He found Wickham at last in lodgings near the camp, in rooms a great deal shabbier than the man's manner had ever suggested he was accustomed to, and presented himself at the door without warning, on the theory — which proved entirely correct — that Wickham would be considerably less composed confronted without preparation than he would manage to appear given even a few minutes' notice.
Wickham's face, opening the door himself, ran through a rapid succession of expressions — surprise, swiftly suppressed; calculation, somewhat less swiftly suppressed; and finally something that settled, with visible effort, into the easy, practiced charm Darcy had watched him deploy successfully on nearly everyone of their joint acquaintance for the better part of twenty years.
"Darcy. This is unexpected. To what do I owe the considerable honour of a visit so far from Derbyshire?"
"You know precisely why I have come, Wickham. I think we may dispense with the performance, on this single occasion, and speak plainly to each other for once in our long acquaintance."
Something flickered across Wickham's face, not quite alarm, but its near relation, and he stepped back from the door with a gesture that might have passed, in poorer light, for hospitality.
"You had better come in, then, if we are to speak plainly.
I find plain speaking goes rather better with the door shut, particularly in lodgings as thin-walled as these. "
Darcy went in, and found the room exactly as shabby as the building's exterior had suggested, and did not trouble to disguise his assessment of it, which he saw land precisely as he had intended it to.
"Miss Lydia Bennet," he said, without preamble.
"You will end whatever understanding presently exists between you, and you will do it today, and you will conduct yourself, for the remainder of your time in this town, with such scrupulous correctness that not a single further word of comment attaches itself to her name on your account. "
"I am not certain I follow your meaning, Darcy. Miss Bennet and I are merely—"
"I have not come to discuss the nature of your present arrangement with Miss Bennet, Wickham.
I have come to end it. I am aware of your debts.
I am aware of their extent, and of the particular urgency with which several of your creditors are presently pursuing satisfaction, and I am aware, as I think you are also aware, that an unsanctioned elopement with a girl of fifteen, however briefly entertained, would expose you to consequences considerably more severe than mere social censure, should her family elect to pursue the matter with the full force the law permits them. "
Wickham's composure, which had held through the first part of this speech with admirable steadiness, began, at the mention of the law, to show its first genuine crack.
"You always did enjoy a threat dressed up as a legal observation, Darcy."
"It is not a threat. It is a statement of fact, which you are welcome to verify through whatever channels you trust, though I think you will find, on reflection, that you already know the particulars rather better than I do, since you are the one whose conduct has occasioned them.
" Darcy did not raise his voice through any part of this exchange, finding, as he had always found in dealings with this particular man, that restraint unsettled Wickham rather more thoroughly than anger ever could.
Wickham had spent a lifetime managing men who shouted, and had never quite learned what to do with a man who simply stated terms and waited.
"And if I decline to end the arrangement so conveniently, on your say-so?"
"Then I will pursue every avenue presently available to me, beginning with a full and detailed account of your conduct at Ramsgate two years ago, delivered to Colonel Forster and to every officer of his regiment with whom I have the slightest acquaintance, continuing through a complete disclosure of your present debts to every creditor presently extending you credit, and concluding, if it proves necessary, with whatever legal remedy Miss Bennet's family chooses to pursue, which I will fund and support with whatever resources the matter requires.
You have managed, until now, to outrun the consequences of your conduct by relying on the discretion of people you have wronged, who have generally preferred silence to public exposure.
I am no longer interested in extending you that particular courtesy. "
Wickham was silent for a long moment, and Darcy watched him calculate: the familiar machinery of a man who had spent his whole life reading what other people wanted and giving it to them, turning now to the considerably less comfortable work of reading what he himself stood to lose.
"What is it you actually want, Darcy? You did not travel the better part of two days merely to deliver threats you could have sent by letter."
"I want your word, given before witnesses if you require the formality, that you will end the connection today, and that you will conduct yourself, going forward, in a manner that gives me no further cause to involve myself in your affairs.
In exchange, I will say nothing further of Ramsgate, nor of the present matter, to anyone beyond the small number of people who already know of it, and I will consider the debt between us — whatever debt you imagine yourself owed, for whatever slight you have spent twenty years nursing against me — fully and finally discharged. "
"You make it sound very simple."
"It is simple, Wickham. You have merely made it complicated, on every occasion of our acquaintance, by believing yourself entitled to outcomes you have never once earned.
" Darcy said this without heat, which seemed to land rather more heavily than heat would have managed.
"I am offering you the same courtesy I have always offered you, against my own better judgment and at considerable cost to people who deserved better protection than I provided.
I am offering it to you one final time. I would advise you to accept it. "
Wickham looked at him for a long moment, and Darcy watched something settle in his face.
Not contrition, which Darcy had never expected and did not now receive, but the particular pragmatic calculation of a man who has run the figures and found the present offer considerably more favorable than any alternative presently available to him.
"You always were a tedious man to argue with, Darcy. Very well. I shall end it today, and I shall conduct myself, for the remainder of my time in this regiment, with whatever degree of correctness satisfies you. I trust this concludes our business."
"It concludes it, provided you keep your word. I will not trouble you with reminders of the consequences, should you fail to do so. I think you understand them well enough already."
He left within the hour, and rode some distance before stopping for the night.
Lying awake afterward in an indifferent inn some miles outside Brighton, he turned over the whole exchange with a feeling he had not expected to have: not triumph, precisely, though there was satisfaction in having finally done what ought to have been done two years before, but something quieter than triumph, the particular tired peace of a man who has discharged a long-overdue obligation and is, for the first time in longer than he cared to calculate, entirely free of its weight.
He wrote to Elizabeth before he slept, briefly, because he had promised her word directly and intended to keep the promise without delay.
He kept the letter short, telling himself that the truth, plainly stated, would be sufficient — that she had asked him to trust her with the particulars eventually, not immediately, and that a few days' patience cost her considerably less than it would cost him to compose, exhausted and travel-worn, an account equal to what she actually deserved.
He sealed it before he could examine the reasoning any further, and lay for some while afterward in the dark, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of an inn he had no particular wish to remember, and did not let himself wonder, until he was very nearly asleep, whether brevity and the old habit of managing her comfort for her were, this once, exactly the same thing wearing a more convenient name.