Chapter Forty-Six
He would not go back to the room in Wapping, and he would not have the man in a hotel where he was known, and so it was a private parlor at a tavern in Aldgate at four in the afternoon of the Friday, with the window open on a yard and a smell of stables coming up.
Wickham came at ten minutes past.
"Well," he said, from the doorway. "This is very like old times, except that at Ramsgate you did not send a note. I thought you always came in person and stood about looking magnificent."
"Sit down."
"I shall stand a moment; I have been sitting for four days." He shut the door and leaned against it, and put his hands in his pockets, and did not sit down for another twenty minutes. "How is Georgiana?"
Darcy did not answer.
"That is not a taunt," said Wickham. "You will not believe it, and I have given up minding what you believe, but it is not. I ask because I have thought about it, and I should like to know, and there is nobody else in England I can ask."
"She is well."
"Is she."
"She is sixteen and a half, and she is well, and she plays the pianoforte very correctly," said Darcy, "and if you say one more word on that subject I shall get up and go out of this room and you will find out on Monday what happens to a man in your situation with no money and a landlady who is being paid by me. "
Wickham looked at him for a moment with an expression of frank interest.
"You have changed," he said, and sat down.
---
"I will tell you why I am here," said Darcy, "and I will do it in order, and you will not like the middle of it.
"You went out onto that down on Saturday night and you had her say her name aloud with your hands on hers, three times, out of doors, with no roof and no ward and no man in orders and no witnesses.
It was not a binding. It cannot have been.
You know the four conditions as well as I do and you had one.
"And between the Friday and the Sunday the pale ground at Longbourn moved forty-two yards north and west, uphill, toward the town — after standing perfectly still for eleven weeks and four days. It has not moved since."
Wickham's face did not change.
His hand, resting on the arm of the chair, went very slightly white at the knuckles and then let go again, and that was all, and Darcy — who had watched Captain Harding's hands described to him in a letter and had thought at the time that it was a pretty piece of observation by a young woman with nothing to do — sat and looked at it and thought: there it is.
Miss Bennet was quite right. It is always the hands.
"Forty-two yards," said Wickham.
"Yes."
"You have that from somebody who paced it."
"From a girl of nineteen who has paced it every week since April in the same pair of boots."
Wickham laughed — a short, unhappy, entirely genuine laugh — and rubbed his face with his hand.
"Of course," he said. "Of course it is. That is exactly how it would come out, is it not; not from the Board and not from your Society of Antiquaries, but from some plain little creature in a back bedroom with a ruler. God. And which is she — the middle one? The one who sings?"
"Do not talk about her."
"I am not going to talk about her." He put his hands over his eyes for a moment. "Say the rest of it."
---
Darcy said the rest of it.
He said it plainly and completely and took eleven minutes about it: Tarrant and the rolls, and the four hundred and eleven entries and the county that was not among them; the wards that had never wanted mending in four hundred years; the deed that was not a deed, with no grantor and no consideration and the verb keep nine times in eleven lines; the condition, so long as there shall not fail a man of my blood upon this ground; and a man of two-and-fifty with five daughters and no son who had been ill twice that year.
And what a keeping is, and what it is paid for with.
Wickham heard the whole of it without moving.
When it was finished he got up and went to the window and stood with his back to the room for a considerable time, and when he spoke his voice had none of the pleasantness in it at all, and Darcy realized that he had not heard the man's actual voice since they were about nineteen.
"I have been eleven years at this," said Wickham.
"I know."
"Eleven years, and I have been careful, and I have been patient, and I have taken small ones — do not make a face, you have known since Ramsgate, it is a little late to be delicate — I have taken small ones because small ones are what there is.
A hundred acres in Shropshire. A fish-pond in Bedfordshire.
Old blood gone thin in a family that does not know it has any, and a girl who is grateful for a conversation, and afterwards nobody is any the wiser and I am a very little better off than I was.
"And then in November I walked into a market town in Hertfordshire, and there were five of them."
He turned round.
"Five girls of four hundred years in the male line, unbroken, in a county where nothing has ever needed mending, and not one soul in that town — not the mother, not the aunts, not the officers, not the girls themselves — had the first notion what they were sitting on.
I thought I had walked into the only piece of luck of my whole life. "
"Yes," said Darcy.
"And then I got out onto that ground in April with the youngest one, because she was the youngest and the least spent and the easiest, and I put my hand down on it." Wickham's mouth moved. "And there is nothing there, Darcy. Not thin. Not old. Nothing. It is like putting your hand on a well.
"I went five times. Five. Because I could not make myself believe it, and because every time I went I told myself that I was mistaken and that it was only poor ground, and I stood there in the dark in a wet field in Hertfordshire in the middle of the night arguing with myself like a man at a card table.
"And on the eleventh of August I had her say her name on a down above Brighton — a little thing, a scrap, a promise a child would make — and something on the other side of it moved forty-two yards.
"Do you know what I have been doing since Sunday? I have been sitting in a room in Wapping with a candle, at two in the morning, trying to work out what happens to the man who opens it."
---
"Then do not open it," said Darcy.
"And do what?" Wickham came back and stood behind the chair, gripping the back of it.
"I am thirty years old. I have a lieutenancy I cannot afford and eight hundred pounds of debt in two counties and a name that is no good in Brighton after Monday.
This is the whole of my profession. I have no other.
"And I will tell you the truth, since we are being remarkable this afternoon: I cannot stop.
I have thought about that too. I have sat in that room and thought, go to Newcastle, take the shilling, be a real officer, marry a shopkeeper's daughter and be dull.
And I cannot do it, and it is not the money, and it is not even the wanting.
It is that if I stop I shall have to sit down and be a man who was walked out to a boundary three times as a child and sent back. "
There was a silence.
"Your father," said Darcy, "took you out three times."
"Four," said Wickham. "The fourth was in the November and he never told anybody, and I have never told anybody, and I have no notion why I have told you now."
---
"I am going to make you an offer," said Darcy.
"You are going to buy her."
"I am going to make you an offer, and you will hear the whole of it before you begin being clever, because it is not what you think and I have been four days getting to it."
He put his hands flat on the table.
"You may have the western ground."
Wickham did not move.
"The wardenship of the west boundary at Pemberley," said Darcy, "with the bond that goes with it — a thread of the Accord, in the old form, for your life and not to be recalled.
Havell keeps it now and Havell is one-and-fifty and has wanted to go back to Kendal for four years and will be glad of a pension.
The house is the one you know. The salary is a hundred and forty a year and there is coal and a horse.
"That is the thing my father intended you to have. You have said so in every parlor in Hertfordshire and you were right, and I have never once denied it and I do not deny it now."
Wickham's face had gone perfectly white.
"You cannot give it," he said. "The ground would not take me. It would not take me at nine years old and it will not take me now, and your father tried it four times, and that is the entire—"
"The ground will not take you," said Darcy.
"It does not have to. A bond in the old form is not given by the land, it is given by the holder, out of what he has; that is what makes it a bond and not a keeping.
My father knew that perfectly well. It is why he thought he could do it, and he was right, and he died in the January before he did it.
"It comes out of me. Not out of Pemberley — out of my own line, permanently, and it does not come back, and there will be less of it in my children than there would have been.
"I have had four days to think about that and I have finished thinking about it."
---
Wickham sat down in the chair very slowly, like a man who has been on his feet longer than he knew.
"Eighteen years," he said.
"Yes."
"Eighteen years, and I have asked you for it once — once, in the library at Pemberley in the February after he died, and I was twelve years old and I did it very badly and you were four-and-twenty and you said—" he stopped. "Do you remember what you said?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I said that my father had been a very kind man and that kindness was not a title," said Darcy.
"That is right. That is word for word." Wickham nodded slowly. "I have had that sentence in my head for eighteen years, and I have said it to myself in a great many rooms, and it has done me more harm than everything else in my life put together.
"And now I may have it. Now. Because you want something."