Chapter Sixteen
The regiment's departure from Meryton emptied the town of half its gaiety and all of Lydia's patience within the same week, and Elizabeth found herself watching Wickham's remaining days in the neighborhood with an attention entirely different from any she had paid him before.
She saw him twice more before he left, both times in company, and both times she found herself studying his easy charm the way one studies a painting once told it is a forgery, searching for the seams that had always been there and had simply gone unnoticed.
He was, if anything, more careful with her now than he had been on the road to Meryton, his questions about Mr. Darcy fewer, his sympathy less readily offered.
She wondered if he sensed some change in her without knowing its cause, the way animals sense weather before it arrives.
"You are very quiet tonight, Miss Elizabeth," he said, at the last card party before the regiment's departure, when the conversation had drifted, inevitably, toward Rosings and her recent visit. "I had thought Kent would supply you with a great deal to say of a certain gentleman."
"I find I have said all I mean to say of Mr. Darcy for the present, Mr. Wickham."
Something flickered across his face, quick and searching, though his smile did not waver. "How prudent of you."
She did not tell him anything further, and watched him move on to charm Maria Lucas instead with the same easy warmth he had once spent on her, and felt, for the first time, a kind of pity beneath her wariness.
He would go on doing this, she understood now, wherever he went, borrowing sympathy and spending it as currency, and there would always be someone new who had not yet learned the shape of the coin.
He left with the regiment three days later, his last public act in Meryton the announcement, made with careless good cheer, that he had transferred his attentions to a Miss King, lately come into ten thousand pounds through her grandfather's death.
"A great fool, to leave when she liked him so well," Mrs. Bennet declared, though her outrage was thin and quickly forgotten, Lydia's Brighton scheme already crowding it out of the conversation entirely.
The scheme in question had arrived by way of Mrs. Forster, wife of the regiment's colonel, whose invitation to Lydia to accompany them to Brighton for the summer had thrown Longbourn into a state of noisy, competing excitements.
"Only think, Lizzy," Lydia crowed, flinging herself into a chair with the particular violence she reserved for moments of triumph, "a whole camp full of officers, and I am to go, and Kitty is not, which serves her right for being such a baby about everything."
"I do not think you ought to go," Elizabeth said, and found, to her own surprise, that she meant it with an intensity that startled her.
"Not go! Whyever not?"
"Because you are sixteen, and reckless, and Mrs. Forster is hardly older than you and no fit guardian for anyone, let alone a girl with no more sense than you have shown these last two years."
Lydia's face crumpled into outrage. "That is a horrid thing to say. Papa, tell Lizzy she is horrid."
Mr. Bennet, from behind his newspaper, did not look up.
"Lizzy is very often horrid, Lydia, and very often right besides.
But I see no harm in it. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and she will be of so little consequence there among so many officers that I daresay she will come home rather humbled. "
"Papa," Elizabeth pressed, "I have real concerns."
"You have always had concerns, my dear, since you were in leading strings. If I attended to every one of them I should never leave my library at all." He turned a page, entirely unmoved.
Elizabeth pressed her father further that evening, alone in the library, laying out as plainly as she could the danger of Lydia's unchecked spirits let loose in a garrison town with no one but a giddy young colonel's wife to check them.
He listened, and conceded her point in principle, and did nothing at all to act on it, and Elizabeth left the room with the sinking, familiar frustration of having been heard and entirely ignored in the same conversation.
Lydia left for Brighton a week later, ecstatic, ungovernable, and utterly without the smallest notion that anyone might have reason to fear for her.