CHAPTER 24
Darcy’s first letter came four days after his departure, and told her almost nothing.
My dearest Elizabeth,
I arrived at Rosings to find my aunt in a temper and my cousin Anne nowhere to be found.
I will not distress you with conjecture until I have fact enough to stand upon it.
I write only to keep my promise, and to assure you that whatever awaits me here, it does not diminish by one particle what awaits me at Longbourn once it is settled. Colonel Fitzwilliam will join me soon.
Yours, in every sense that matters,
F. Darcy
Elizabeth read his letter three times over breakfast, and found herself no easier for the reading. Nowhere to be found. She turned the phrase over and was entirely perplexed at what had happened to her penmate and his cousin.
His second letter, a week later, told her a great deal more, and none of it easy.
Elizabeth,
I have the beginning of the truth now, though I confess I would rather have gone on longer in ignorance of it, for it is uglier than even my low opinion of Wickham had prepared me to credit.
Anne is not lost, nor abducted, nor any of the frightened things Lady Catherine's household first supposed. She is fled, by her own choice, or what she believed to be her own choice, to Scotland, in the company of George Wickham, whom she means, or meant, to marry.
I will spare you the whole of how I came to piece this together, save to say it involved rather more of Mrs. Jenkinson's tearful confidences than either of us would find comfortable in the retelling.
Wickham quit Brighton in some haste this spring; debts, and rather worse than debts, for I am given to understand he has also absented himself from his regiment in a manner his commanding officers are unlikely to view charitably, should he ever be fool enough to show his face to them again.
He required money, and a country to spend it in that did not include England, and he required, above all, someone foolish enough or lonely enough to provide both.
My cousin Anne, kept close at Rosings her whole life under my aunt's particular species of care, proved, I am sorry to say, exactly foolish and exactly lonely enough.
There is worse yet, and I will tell it to you plainly, for I think you would rather have the truth entire than have it doled out to spare my own comfort in the telling.
Your correspondence with Anne, Elizabeth, the letters you exchanged so innocently these past months, at her own eager instigation, were not, I now believe, so innocent in their origin as either of us supposed.
Wickham encouraged the friendship, or encouraged Anne to encourage it, precisely because he understood that when Anne disappeared, the household's first and most urgent inquiry would turn toward you, and toward whatever you might know of her recent correspondence and confidences, drawing every eye toward Hertfordshire and away from the border, and buying him the days he needed to get her safely, or unsafely, wed before anyone thought to look the right direction.
I do not yet know how much of this Anne understood of her own part in it. I mean to find out, though I confess I do not relish the finding.
Do not distress yourself on my account, Elizabeth. I am in no danger here, whatever danger attended us both on the island. But I would be lying to you if I said this did not want a great deal more untangling than I had hoped, nor that it will keep me longer from you than either of us would wish.
Yours always,
F. Darcy
Elizabeth set the letter down with unsteady hands, and she sat a long while by the window of her own small room, turning over every letter Anne had ever sent her; the eager questions about her situation at Longbourn, the wistful inquiries after her sister’s temper and habits, the small confidences that had seemed, at the time, only the ordinary loneliness of a sheltered woman reaching toward a friendship she had little other opportunity to form.
She had thought herself flattered by Anne's confidence.
She had not once thought herself used by it.
She wrote back to Darcy that same evening, and did not trouble to disguise how the news had shaken her, for she had come to understand that Darcy did not want, from her, the comfort of a performance.
It was, however, his third letter, that took longer in coming, and when it arrived, it carried a story that struck her with more force even than Wickham's had.
Elizabeth,
The architecture of the whole scheme is uncovered now, and I find myself obliged to own that Wickham, for all his considerable talent at ruin, did not devise the worst of it alone.
You will recall the four men at the cottage door, and the voice that named Wickham as their master.
I had believed, all these weeks, that Wickham himself had arranged that ambush; I had supposed it a piece of spite aimed at me directly, in revenge for Ramsgate and for every door I have closed against him since.
I was wrong, or rather, I was only half right.
Wickham provided the grievance. The scheme itself, and the men who executed it, belonged to another hand entirely, a man named Thomas Renfrew, formerly steward of Rosings, dismissed by my urging from my aunt's service some two years past for reasons of dishonesty I need not detail, save to say they involved rents collected and never properly accounted for.
Renfrew has borne my family a grudge since my recommending he be dismissed, of which my aunt agreed, and Wickham, it seems, encountered him some months back, in what circumstance I have not yet fully traced, though I suspect a shared talent for finding the lowest company in any town they enter, and the two of them discovered, between them, a scheme that answered both their purposes at once.
Renfrew has remained in the area around Rosings, and he apparently watched our morning walks and listened to, what seems to be, whispers from the servants.
He felt confident that Anne's invitation to you would draw my notice, and very possibly my presence, to wherever you had gone; he reasoned, correctly as it happened, that a man in love does not stay long at a distance from the object of it if that object is thought to be in any danger.
He proposed to Wickham that if Wickham could arrange matters so that I should be drawn within reach, your presence in Anne's company being the surest lure he could devise, Renfrew's men might take me for ransom, the proceeds to be divided between them.
Wickham gained, by this arrangement, not only Anne's fortune through the marriage he intended, but a share of whatever my family paid to see me safely returned; a double injury aimed, quite deliberately, at the Darcy name, in payment for every obstacle I have placed between him and Georgiana these three years past.
I will own to you, Elizabeth, that when I understood the whole of it, that our time on that island, everything we found there, grew out of a scheme aimed not at chance but at design, engineered by men who counted upon my affection for you as the very mechanism of my own undoing, I was for some hours very poor company indeed, and glad that only Colonel Fitzwilliam was present to witness it.
But I have had time now to turn the matter over, and I find I cannot regret what grew from ground so poorly planted.
Wickham and Renfrew meant to use my love for you as a weapon against me.
They did not reckon on what that love would become in the surviving of it.
I will not grant them the satisfaction of believing they spoiled anything they touched.
Renfrew is taken, and will answer for it before a magistrate.
Wickham has fled north, we believe, though whether toward Anne still or away from the wreckage of his own scheme, I cannot yet say.
Anne herself is safe, returned to Rosings, and considerably humbled by the discovering of how thoroughly she was used by a man she believed loved her.
My aunt's fury, I need hardly tell you, has found several new objects to attach itself to, none of them, for once, entirely undeserved.
I had hoped to be with you again within the fortnight.
I find the settling of magistrates and the recovering of Anne's composure and my aunt's temper, in roughly that order of difficulty, wants rather longer than I first supposed.
I will not keep you waiting one day longer than the business absolutely requires, Elizabeth.
I have wasted enough of my life being cautious where you are concerned.
I do not intend to waste any more of it now.
Yours entirely,
F. Darcy
Elizabeth read this letter alone, by candlelight.
She found, when she had finished it, that she was crying, not from grief, though grief had a part in it, for the ugliness of what had been done to them both, and to Anne, who had only wanted, it seemed, someone to love her as thoroughly as she was capable of loving in return.
But chiefly she cried from something nearer relief; that the shapeless dread she had carried since arriving on the Isle of Mann and finding herself alone, the sense of some malice not yet fully understood, had resolved at last into a thing with a name and a face, small and mean and finished, rather than the vast unaccountable danger it had felt like in the not-knowing.
She replied to Darcy that night, and did not attempt to disguise her tears in the ink, for she had learned, this past season, that he did not require her composure nearly so much as her honesty.
***
It was nearly six weeks before he came again to Longbourn; they were weeks in which Mrs. Bennet's nerves oscillated between the ecstasy of an engagement and the fresh agony of its prolonged absence, and in which Elizabeth found herself, more than once, walking out alone toward Oakham Mount simply to be somewhere the noise of the house could not follow her.
But he did come, at last, on a bright morning in early autumn, riding into the yard at Longbourn with a dispatch that made his purpose plain before he had even dismounted; for tucked within his coat, produced with a formality that could not entirely disguise how little patience remained beneath it, was a special license, procured at no small trouble and no small expense, that required no banns, no further waiting, no further delay of any kind that either of them could any longer be persuaded to tolerate.
She had heard the commotion in the front yard; hooves upon the gravel, and Hill's voice raised in some flurry of instruction, and beneath it all a low murmur of horses being seen to that spoke of a visitor arrived in some haste.
Elizabeth set down her needlework and went to the window first, some old instinct from the cottage door still quick in her even now, before she permitted herself to hope for what she found instead; Darcy, dismounted, travel-worn and windblown from the road, already crossing the yard toward the house with a purpose in his stride.
She was out the door before Hill could so much as announce him, joy overtaking every scrap of the composure she generally prided herself upon keeping.
"Mr. Darcy!" She explained joyously, and came to a halt before him, a little breathless, searching his face for some sign of what six weeks and a hundred miles had cost him. "You did not write to say you were coming!"
He smiled, looking down at her blushing face, "I did not know it myself until I had already left Kent.
I found I had run out of patience for writing ahead, and preferred to simply arrive.
" A ghost of that dry humor moved over his face, though something graver sat beneath it still.
"Forgive me. I ought to ask first how you do, and how your family does, before I say anything further. "
"You may dispense with the proper order, sir. I have grown rather fond of you managing things out of it."
His smile widened, as his face visibility eased, and he took her hands.
"I find," he said, "that I have had quite enough of Kent, and rather more than enough of being parted from you by matters that had nothing whatsoever to do with us, and everything to do with men who ought never to have been permitted to touch either of our lives at all. "
"Then I take it, sir," she drew in a breath, feeling a flutter of excitement she made no great effort to disguise,"that we are not to have a long engagement after all."
Darcy lifted his eyebrows slightly, in that teasing way she had come to know and love, so unlike the grave, guarded man who had once so awkwardly proposed to her at Hunsford that she could hardly credit them the same person.
"I have brought a license expressly to prevent it.
I find myself entirely out of patience for waiting upon banns, and upon anything at all that stands between this morning and the moment I may call you my wife.
" He looked at her, and whatever careful reserve he had once worn like armor against the world was, in that moment, entirely and visibly absent.
"Will you marry me tomorrow, Elizabeth? I have waited a great deal longer than I intended to ask you so plainly, and I find I have no wish to wait one day more than this business has already stolen from us. "
Elizabeth, standing in the autumn sunlight with a license in his hand and six weeks of letters pressed close in memory, found she had no wish to make him wait either, "Tomorrow," she agreed.
"I begin to think, Mr. Darcy, that we have both had quite enough of waiting to last the whole of our lives together. "
For a moment he did not answer at all. Whatever he had meant to say seemed to have deserted him entirely, and he stood there in the yard, license still in hand, looking at her with an expression she thought she should remember all her life, not triumph, not even relief exactly, but something quieter and far more undone than either.
"Tomorrow," was all he managed at last, though inwardly he thought only at last, at last, after everything, she is not lost to me.
And then, finding no better answer than the one his whole bearing had already given, he only smiled, the rare, unguarded smile she had come to treasure above any of his more practiced civilities, and drew her hand to his lips, and said nothing further at all, for there was, at last, nothing further that wanted saying.