CHAPTER FIFTEEN
She sent a note to the Lambton inn the following morning, concise and entirely without visible alarm, requesting that Mr. Wickham meet with her at a particular location on the Pemberley lane at three o'clock, and making clear, in terms pleasant enough to seem innocuous to any observer but specific enough to be unmistakable to him, that the meeting was in his financial interest to attend.
It was, she reflected, setting out for the appointed lane at twenty to three with a calm she had largely manufactured and somewhat impressed herself with, the kind of note she would never have imagined herself writing six months ago, when Mr. Wickham had been merely a charming face in a Hertfordshire village and she had taken considerable, credulous pleasure in his company.
She thought of herself then, pleased with his flattery and his easy warmth, entirely willing to believe the worst of Darcy on no better evidence than Wickham's word, and felt a complicated mixture of irritation and compassion for that earlier version of herself.
She had not been foolish, exactly. She had been a clever woman whose cleverness had been skillfully redirected, which was, she was beginning to understand, rather more dangerous than simple foolishness, because a fool could at least learn from the mistake without the additional humiliation of understanding precisely how they had been managed.
Wickham arrived at three o'clock exactly, which she had expected, because he was the kind of man who understood that punctuality communicated a certain confidence, and he came in his red coat and his easy smile, looking exactly as she remembered him from Hertfordshire, the particular, studied warmth of a man who had learned very early that charm was his most reliable asset and had never seen any reason to develop another.
"Miss Bennet." His smile, when he recognized her, shifted slightly, recalibrating, and she saw in that shift the moment he decided she was manageable. "What an unexpected pleasure. I had not known you were in Derbyshire."
"I imagine there are a number of things about my current situation you did not know, Mr. Wickham, when you decided to send Miss Darcy that note, or you might have chosen a different strategy.
" She did not offer him her hand. "Shall we walk?
I have perhaps twenty minutes, and I would prefer to resolve this efficiently. "
His smile settled into something more careful, still charming on the surface but sharpened beneath it, the expression of a man deciding how much to admit. "I have no idea what you imagine you are resolving, Miss Bennet. I wrote to renew an old acquaintance, nothing more."
"You wrote to establish the terms of a private arrangement, and I am here to tell you that the terms are not favorable.
" She kept her voice entirely pleasant, her manner as though she were discussing the weather, because she had learned from watching him in Hertfordshire that any visible alarm would simply give him more to work with.
"Here is what I know, Mr. Wickham, so that we need not waste time in careful pretense.
I know what happened at Ramsgate. I know it was not chance but design, and that Mrs. Younge was your instrument, and that your interest was never in Miss Darcy herself but in her fortune and in the injury to her brother.
I know this because Miss Darcy has trusted me with the particulars, which I take as evidence that your plan to keep her silent through shame has already partially failed. "
Something moved behind his eyes, a flicker of reassessment. "Georgiana told you."
"She told me everything." Elizabeth paused to let that land fully.
"I also know, because it is difficult to reconcile accounts without encountering the debts attached to them, and Pemberley's accounts are my current professional concern, that you left Ramsgate owing money to at least four separate creditors, one of whom I believe is presently a solicitor in Bath whose address I happen to have noted down, and that your current situation in the regiment is not, from a financial perspective, particularly secure. "
"You have done rather more reading than could have been strictly necessary for a bookkeeping task," he said, the charm thinned now to something cooler and more alert.
"I am thorough by nature. It is one of my better qualities.
" She met his gaze directly, without flinching, and saw there the particular surprise of a man who had expected either deference or distress and received neither.
"I am not going to pay you, Mr. Wickham.
I want to be entirely clear on that point, because I think your note to Miss Darcy was intended to open a negotiation, and I would prefer to close it before it begins.
You will not be paid, because paying you would simply establish that the threat is worth making, and I find I have neither the patience nor the inclination to fund an indefinite series of demands. "
"Then I suppose," he said, with the particular lightness of a man whose charm has failed him and who is retreating to insolence, "that certain stories about a certain young lady's behavior at Ramsgate might find their way to ears that would receive them with considerable interest."
"They might," Elizabeth agreed. "And if they did, the story that followed them, from my own account, from Miss Darcy's own account, and from the documented record of Mrs. Younge's involvement, which I am quite prepared to set out in letter form for any solicitor or magistrate who wished to see it, would be a great deal less flattering to you than to the young lady you imagine you are threatening.
" She turned slightly on the lane, as though admiring the view, keeping her voice entirely conversational.
"I have also been in recent correspondence with Mr. Bingley, who I believe you know, and who has some information regarding your debts in Hertfordshire that certain of your commanding officers might find professionally inconvenient to learn. "
Silence. A long one.
"You would not," he said, finally, and there was something in his voice now that was neither charm nor calculation, only the raw tone of a man who had miscalculated badly and knew it.
"I would find it extremely disagreeable," Elizabeth said honestly, "because it would cause pain to several people who do not deserve it, and I would prefer not to cause pain if it can be avoided.
But I would do it, Mr. Wickham, without hesitation, if the alternative was allowing you to spend the next six months holding Miss Darcy's private distress over her head for your own profit.
" She paused. "She was fifteen. And she was grieving her father.
And you knew both of those things and used them rather than feeling the smallest scruple about it.
I find I have no patience to spare for the comfort of a man who chooses his targets that carefully. "
Wickham looked at her for a long moment, something working behind his face that she could not entirely read, not shame exactly, though perhaps something in the vicinity of it, the particular discomfort of a man who has spent his entire life managing how others see him and has encountered, for once, a person entirely uninterested in his management.
"What do you want," he said.
"I want you to leave the neighborhood. I want no further correspondence with Miss Darcy, no further approach of any kind, and I want the knowledge that if any story from Ramsgate ever does circulate, I will know precisely who told it, and I will act accordingly.
" She turned back to face him. "In exchange, I will not contact your creditors, or your commanding officer, and I will not mention to Mr. Darcy that you are currently quartered in Lambton, which I believe is information he would receive with considerably less restraint than I have shown this afternoon. "
Another silence. The afternoon light moved through the trees along the lane, entirely indifferent to the small, ugly business being transacted beneath it.
"You are not at all what I thought you were," Wickham said finally, and she could not tell whether he meant it as a compliment or a complaint.
"No," Elizabeth agreed, "I rarely am." She smoothed her skirts and turned back toward the house. "Good afternoon, Mr. Wickham. I shall look forward to seeing the regiment reported elsewhere in the county within the fortnight."
She walked back to Pemberley without looking behind her, her spine straight and her pace unhurried, and it was not until she reached the private garden at the east side of the house and found a bench in the afternoon sun, entirely out of sight of every window, that she allowed herself to sit down rather heavily and notice that her hands were trembling, a delayed response to an hour's worth of pure, sustained nerve, and breathed, carefully, until they stopped.
She had not told him. She had not told Mr. Darcy.
She sat with that a moment, examining it, turning it over with the same honesty she was beginning to apply, somewhat reluctantly, to all the things she had previously preferred to leave unexamined.
The choice had been right, she still believed that.
Wickham's leverage had depended on Darcy's fury being its own kind of weapon, and she had taken the weapon apart before it could be used.
But there was a secondary reason she had not told him, one she was less comfortable with, one she admitted to herself only now in the privacy of the garden with no one to observe her doing it.
She had not told him because she had needed, badly and urgently, to prove to herself that she could handle it alone, that whatever was happening between them in music rooms and on tenant lanes, she was not yet a woman who ran to him with her difficulties, who traded her own competence for the comfort of being rescued.
She did not know, sitting in the garden with her hands finally steady, whether that was independence or simply a different kind of armor, the last one she had left, and she was not yet brave enough to look at it long enough to find out which.