Chapter Five
Longbourn, when they returned, was in its usual state of noisy welcome, Mrs. Bennet already halfway to a full accounting of the neighborhood's news before Elizabeth had removed her bonnet.
"You will never guess," her mother said, "who has taken a commission with the militia. A Mr. Wickham, they say, wonderfully handsome, and already the talk of every unmarried girl in Meryton."
"I am glad someone has given them something new to discuss," Elizabeth said, "besides Mr. Darcy's opinion of my face."
"Oh, that." Mrs. Bennet waved a hand, though her eyes still had the particular gleam that meant the subject had not truly been abandoned, only shelved for later use. "Everyone still speaks of it, you know. Mrs. Long says it is the rudest thing she has heard in ten years."
"Mamma."
"I only repeat what is said, Lizzy. I do not invent it."
Elizabeth said nothing further. There was no arguing with a fire that fed itself.
She met Mr. Wickham three days later, on the road into Meryton, and understood at once why half the neighborhood had already surrendered its good sense to him.
He was handsome in the easy, unstudied way that made a woman feel complimented simply by being looked at, and he had a talent for conversation that made even the weather sound like a confidence shared between old friends.
They had walked perhaps a quarter mile together, Kitty and Lydia trailing ahead in pursuit of ribbon and gossip, when he asked, with careful casualness, how long Mr. Darcy had been staying in the neighborhood.
"About a month," Elizabeth said. "You are acquainted with him?"
Something moved behind Wickham's eyes, quick and controlled. "I have been connected with his family since I was a child. Though I would not call the connection a happy one, on my side."
"I confess I am not surprised to hear it." She kept her voice light, though something in her had gone very still and attentive. "He does not strike me as a man who wears friendship comfortably."
"No." Wickham's mouth curved, careful and sad, the expression of a man choosing his words with the precision of long practice.
"He wears pride comfortably enough. I have watched him do it my whole life.
May I ask what he has done to earn your disapproval, Miss Bennet?
For I think I see it in your face, and I confess it interests me. "
She should not have told him. She knew it even as the words began forming, knew that a man she had met a quarter hour ago had no right to the wound she had shown almost no one.
But there was something in the way he asked, patient and unhurried, that made confession feel less like weakness and more like relief.
"He said, at the Meryton assembly, that I was not handsome enough to tempt him to dance."
Wickham stopped walking. "He said that. Within your hearing?"
"I believe he did not know I could hear."
"That," Wickham said, slowly, "does not surprise me in the least. Darcy has never troubled himself to consider who might be listening. He assumes the world exists to be ignored by him, unless it is useful."
"You speak of him with a great deal of feeling, for a man you claim to have no wish to discuss."
"Forgive me. I do not enjoy dwelling on old injuries.
But yours is fresh, and I find I cannot hear it repeated without some heat.
" He glanced at her, something searching in the look.
"It was cruelly said, Miss Bennet. Whatever else may be true of Mr. Darcy, he does not lack the wit to know exactly how much a remark like that will wound, before he makes it. "
She did not answer immediately. Something in his phrasing snagged, small and strange, though she could not have said why. Wickham smiled again, easy and warm, and the moment passed before she could examine it.
"I am sorry to have raised so uncomfortable a subject," he said. "Tell me instead about Meryton. I understand there is to be a ball at Netherfield before long, and I confess I have not danced properly in months."
She let him change the subject. She told herself, walking the rest of the way into Meryton with Wickham's easy conversation filling the silence, that she had simply confided in a sympathetic stranger, nothing more.
She did not examine why the confiding had felt so necessary, or why some small, watchful part of her had noted, and not yet forgotten, the precision with which he had known exactly what to say to make her trust him.