XXXIII Five Minutes
XXXIII
Five Minutes
He gave her five minutes and used them badly — standing at the window, the sea indifferent below him, nothing resolved. She had come up the stairs to his door and knocked and asked. He had said yes. That was all he had.
He went down through the hidden passage and found the door already standing open to him.
He came into the thick dark of the drawn drapes — denser than their usual dark, the afternoon light shut entirely out.
Before he had crossed the room, he heard her — the uneven breath, the rawness of it.
She had been crying since she beat on his door, and had not stopped.
He crossed to her chair, crouched at her side, and found her hands in the dark. “What happened?”
“It is Lydia.” Her voice was not steady, and she was not trying to make it so. “Mr Wickham has gone. He took the settlement — five thousand pounds that was meant to keep her safe — and he left her. Just left her!”
“Took the settlement?” He blinked. He could not, at first, understand it. “The settlement was on her. He could not have touched it. Not the way it was structured. It was hers to keep.”
“And she is a sixteen-year-old girl who was persuaded by her husband that he was acting in her interests. He told her he was going to invest it for her, and he took it and now it is gone!” She was trembling, he could feel it through her hands.
“There was nothing in that marriage that was not mercenary from the beginning. I feared… No! I knew that. I knew it, and I told myself it might be otherwise, and I even argued with you about it, that she might be happy and he might be honourable, because I could not bear it being otherwise, and I was wrong.”
Darcy swallowed against the rage boiling in his throat.
Five thousand pounds. His five thousand pounds.
He had written the sum at a desk in the mural chamber and thought it sufficient — enough to make her secure, enough that a decent man might overlook the connexions, the family, the mother.
He had not thought what that sum looked like to a man like Wickham.
Not a provision. A prize.
“Oh, Elizabeth,” he whispered. “I am… I am grieved to hear it.” He reached into his coat, found his handkerchief, and put it into her hands.
“You said it.” Her voice broke on it. “When I told you she had married Wickham, you said she seemed very young to marry on so short an acquaintance. I was furious with you. I thought you were sitting in judgement and I was wrong about that, too. I was wrong about everything, and now she is sixteen years old, alone in some lodging house somewhere, and I am three hundred miles away, and there is nothing — there is nothing I can do for her!”
The breath went out of her, and she crumbled into sobs. Hot tears splashed over his hands, and he had to take the handkerchief from her to soothe more from her cheeks. She shook her head, pulling impatiently away from him.
“And it is not only Lydia. Jane — Oh, Jane deserves none of this! She will be tormenting herself, I know she will. She will think it is all her fault and… and Kitty — I have told you very little of Kitty, but she always follows Lydia, and now she will follow her to ruin. Mary will be mortally ill — oh, I can hear her now. My mother will have taken to her room, but she has not Hill to comfort her, nor Papa to tease her into the sort of irritation from which she can exert herself to recover, so she will be entirely wretched. Whatever little standing my family had — losing Longbourn was bad enough, but an abandoned wife, a girl of sixteen left destitute by her husband— Who will have them now? That is what I keep… I cannot stop thinking about who will have them now?”
“I fancy…” he touched the handkerchief again to her eyes, her nose, then let her take it for herself. “From what you have said of your… your elder sister, at least, any man of sense should count himself fortunate.”
“Oh, one would think that! You have not seen Jane. She is by far the prettiest you ever… but it is her goodness… yes, she has a goodness I shall never have and will never deserve, and yet when she loved a man, fully gave her heart away and expected as good a heart in return, he was persuaded to leave her and never come back. And all this before our family—”
Heat scalded his neck. Bingley. She had to be talking about Bingley, a man he could have sworn the lady was indifferent to. Jane Bennet had truly loved Bingley? Then his wrong was even greater than he realised. Good Lord. What more harm could he do to this family?
“I should have told her!” Elizabeth’s voice was now muffled behind the handkerchief. “I could have…”
He captured her free hand between both of his. “Elizabeth. You cannot blame yourself for any of this.”
She sniffed, and her hand tightened in his.
“You said it. When I told you she was married, you saw the danger, and I would not hear it.” Her whole body shook on a sob.
“And I ought to have! There was someone else who tried to warn me about Wickham once. Months before… almost a year ago. I did not believe him. I had reasons I thought were good reasons, and I chose them over what he told me, and I have been thinking about that all afternoon. If I had listened! If I had said something to Lydia then, or warned my sisters before I left them all. If I had done anything other than keep my own counsel because I was too far away and too—” Her voice gave out entirely for a moment.
“But he was right, and you were right. I cannot tell you who it was. It does not matter now.”
He knew who it was.
He had made the settlement. He had paid Wickham at Ramsgate and thought himself finished with the man.
He had convinced Bingley that his was a passing attachment, and he chose a wife somewhere else.
And Darcy had settled five thousand pounds on a girl…
a child… with too little protection. Somewhere in the aftermath of those decisions was Lydia Bennet, sixteen years old, in a lodging house, alone.
He could follow every step of that line from his own hand to hers.
He moved closer still, until he was leaning over her knees, and some of her hair spilled over her brow and brushed his. “Elizabeth.” He waited until he had her attention, what there was of it. “You are not to blame for what George Wickham is.”
He heard himself, the way his throat could barely pronounce the name, and knew he had said more than he should. She was not in a condition to notice it. He hoped she was not in a condition to notice it.
She cried until the crying exhausted itself — not better, not resolved, only empty.
“I cannot think what is to be done for her.” Her voice was scraped thin.
“She has no money. She has no husband. She is alone in some lodging house, and Jane’s letter says my uncle is at odd ends to bring her home, but the rest of our sisters will be disgraced if she does come.
And Jane will ruin herself to try to help our sister, I know she will.
She will pull from the money you… the settlement she was given, and it will all be spent by Mama and Lydia, and Jane will be left with nothing again.
A girl run off and then left — decent men will steer clear of all of them!
My own marriage, contracted the way it was, in such haste, in Scotland, gives no impression that I am able to judge. What becomes of them now?”
He could not answer it honestly because the honest answer was that he did not know — did not know what Wickham had done with the money, where Lydia was, what could be salvaged. But there was one thing he could offer.
“I may have resources,” he said carefully, “that are not apparent to you. I cannot promise anything tonight. But do not assume nothing can be done.”
She was quiet. He had said more than was wise and less than was true, which was all he had.
“You… you would do that?”
“If it is possible. Yes.”
“She is not wicked. She is foolish, and she was sixteen, and she wanted to be married young, and she fell for a handsome officer, and none of those are wicked things. They are foolish things that I have done nothing useful to prevent. I should have written to her more. I thought I was too far away and too uncertain to be of any use.”
“You were not her keeper.”
“No. But I was her sister, and I might have… She married someone she thought loved her. She was convinced of it — utterly convinced, the way you can only be at sixteen when you have no evidence of the contrary. She trusted him entirely, and it was a lie from the first word of it. She will spend the rest of her life knowing that.”
“She was deceived,” he said. “That is not the same as trust being wrong.”
“I know,” she said. “I know that. Or I think… I think I understand. I feel what it is to give yourself to someone and find out afterward that the whole of it was — that they were never — that you—”
She stopped and pulled his hand closer.
“Elizabeth, if this is about—”
“I trusted you,” she said. “I had nothing to go on. A proxy and a settlement and a solicitor I had met once. There was no reason to trust you except that I knew what I was escaping. What was worse than the dark, and I have not regretted it. But I do not know you. Not fully. I know what you have given me, and I do not know what lies under it, and there are things you will not tell me, and tonight of all nights I—”
“There are people who would suffer were I to speak plainly about certain things. You are among them. It is the only protection I have left to give any of you.”
“You are running,” she said. “From the law, or from someone who has authority in law. That is what this is.”
His heart gave one ugly lurch. His tongue almost stuck to his throat. “I…”
“I am not asking you to confirm it. But I need to ask you one thing, and I need you to answer it honestly.” Her hands tightened on his. “Did you harm someone? Have I any reason to be afraid of you?”
“No.”
One word. He had never meant anything more completely in his life.