Ann Herendeen

by Pride / Prejudice (v5)

  “Selfish little bitch,” she spat out, unclear even to her own mind, if she meant her sister or herself.

  “Elizabeth!” Jane exclaimed. “I am ashamed of you, more than I am of Lydia. She is merely thoughtless and silly. You are becoming hard. It’s not as if Mr. Darcy was going to ask you to marry him again, whatever Lydia did or did not do.”

  “But he was so different this time. So polite and benevolent. Did I tell you how he conversed with my aunt and uncle? And escorted us all around the park? How he introduced me to his sister?”

  “Yes, Lizzy. You told me at least ten times. I’m sorry, but I don’t find it so very surprising that a gentleman showed good manners, and I honestly don’t comprehend how you can think of yourself at a time like this. Poor Mama is sick with worry and—”

  “And all the burden of her care falls on you,” Elizabeth said. “I know I’m selfish. But when I think of how things might have turned out if only Papa had not let Lydia go to Brighton. We should have told people about Wickham.”

  “How?” Jane said. “Mr. Darcy wouldn’t want his sister to be a subject of gossip.”

  “We could have told the other things, his debts and his gambling, and turning down the living in favor of three thousand pounds to study the law. And then not studying and leaving university. And blaming Mr. Darcy for his own extravagance.”

  “But that is merely spiteful, and allows no chance for his improvement,” Jane said, repeating the arguments they had only half believed in the winter, when little but good was thought of Wickham and it hadn’t mattered. “If his reputation is destroyed ahead of his arrival anywhere, he can never redeem himself or start fresh.”

  “That was our justification then,” Elizabeth said. “But look at what our silence has accomplished. A sister ruined, and no hope now of ever getting decent husbands ourselves. I blamed Charlotte for being cold-blooded and stooping to a kind of prostitution. Now I see why she chose as she did.”

  “Mr. Collins again? Well, he is very happy not to be connected to us now.”

  “Lord, wasn’t that a wonderful letter?” Elizabeth said, momentarily diverted. “Saying it was better for Lydia to have died, and writing all those phrases stolen from fusty old stage plays of a century ago.”

  “Lizzy, I can’t take pleasure in anything to do with this.”

  “Nor can I, truly. Oh, Jane, you should have seen the park. It was ten miles around, and everything landscaped so well it looked entirely natural. Everyone—the maids, the menservants—spoke nothing but praise of Mr. Darcy. Of course he pays them well, but I doubt I would hear such encomiums from Lady Catherine’s people. Mrs. Reynolds, the housekeeper, said she had never had a cross word from Mr. Darcy since he was four years old. Can you imagine?”

  “Why should he speak crossly to the housekeeper? If he was brought up a gentleman, he would learn early to mind his temper.”

  “True,” Elizabeth said, smiling at Jane’s refusal to grant the reformed Mr. Darcy any extraordinary virtue. “But everything spoke of such responsible management. That’s the real proof. A steward or an agent can keep things running after a fashion, but only the master’s touch can maintain a great estate like Pemberley in such excellent order. Mr. Darcy’s father has been dead at least five years, and it’s clear the son’s been handling all the business himself. Yet it’s more than simply doing his duty. The place shows the effects of, I think you’d have to call it love, or genius. It’s not just industry, it’s—”

  “There’s the bell again,” Jane said, sounding almost relieved. “Mama must need something, and Hill is overburdened and can’t go to her every time.”

  “—inspiration,” Elizabeth finished on a whisper. “I’ll go this time.”

  “No, she’s more comfortable with me. You are too sarcastic, like Papa.”

  Elizabeth, alone in fact as she had been alone in thought since the news of Lydia’s folly had forced everyone to put all other consideration aside, was left to her painful ruminations. Visiting Pemberley had been a great mistake. But if she hadn’t seen where he lived, what had formed him, what determined who he was, she could never have made sense of everything else that had come before. Even Wickham. Especially Wickham.

  People would laugh in their knowing way and say she had fallen in love with an estate, with land, with money and everything it bought. They would both despise her for it and sympathize, a common weakness and in many ways an admirable one. If she could get such a wealthy man, why not? Good for her.

  Only now could she see it as it must have been. Growing up heir to all that, such a great fortune, with its consequent responsibilities. For twelve years the only son—the only child. Now along comes a foster brother, the father’s favored godson, only a year or two younger, beautiful and charming. And a liar and a cheat. Elizabeth pictured Wickham, unlike most boys in those most awkward of years—scrawny and spotty, grubby, shifty-eyed, and inarticulate—but only a slightly less dazzling version of his current self. Imagine living with that comparison. Surely young Mr. Darcy had been a worthy heir—well grown, sturdy, clever, honest, and brave. Why should the father prefer the other to his own fine son? Who wouldn’t resent such caprice, just a little? And who wouldn’t take advantage?

  If she, as a woman, had had to fight not to give way to temptation, how much harder must it have been for a young man, a boy, who had no such female dangers as loss of virtue to hold him back. He would see it as the natural rite of youth. At school, at university, in the army, such affairs must occur frequently, and were given little thought. Oh, it was disgraceful, no doubt. Elizabeth could not condone it. Yet all her sympathies lay with Mr. Darcy, although it had been his fault too, a little. Just a little.

  But no, she thought more deeply, that wasn’t it at all. Visiting Pemberley and its village, hearing Mr. Darcy universally praised—proud certainly, but honest and just; while Wickham, it was suggested, in the closemouthed way of country folk unwilling to speak ill of their own to outsiders, had been wayward and prone to debt—she knew it was not Mr. Darcy who had taken advantage. It was Wickham, of course. He would have sold himself like a woman in order to gain—what? Everything. What whores always got. Money. Preferential treatment, escape from punishment, avoidance of work or study. Whatever he needed.

  And Mr. Darcy had taken the bait. He had eaten the apple, as all mankind had done since Adam. Now he had come to expect it, being seduced by the one who submitted for material reward. He had thought of Elizabeth like that, because that’s how it usually was between man and woman. Between most people.

  Whether such an association was wrong or merely the way of the world, it wasn’t hers. That was the root of the original estrangement between them. He had treated her like an inferior, like Wickham. Like a whore, although Mr. Darcy would never think such a word, much less its reality, of her. But that’s what it was. Whether it was two young men in a dalliance based on extortion, or a woman agreeing to marriage without affection, it was the same thing. Favors of the flesh sold, in return for wealth and position. She had been right and would always be right in rejecting such a connection, one based on exploitation, not love.

  But if love was there too, was it still wrong? Learning of Wickham’s bad character had been a shock, one she had resisted. Mr. Darcy’s letter had taught her the truth, but it had been a lesson learned by rote, not comprehended. Only Wickham’s ruin of Lydia had made Elizabeth know him for what he was—rotten, depraved, and weak—and it had killed any desire she had felt for him. It had once burned so hot she had been afraid of being consumed by it, frizzling up like a thread of gossamer drawn into the hearth. She had thought nothing could quench this flame but the satisfaction of the blaze itself, scorching and blistering her flesh, but now…

  Discovering Mr. Darcy’s virtue had been like a bucket of cold water, sluicing off the soot and reducing that Wickham-fire to sodden ashes. But seeing Mr. Darcy as his true self, in this honorable manifestation, was like…like a newly laid fire with dry wood in a clean-swept he
arth…like seeing him that time with Mr. Bingley, naked and aroused. All it needed was kindling. It was the one thing that had been lacking, that had left her unmoved despite his fine person, noble features, and superior mind. Only now that he was worthy did she desire him as a woman with a man. Let silly creatures like Lydia pursue the rakes and libertines. For Elizabeth, goodness was the greatest aphrodisiac of all.

  Alone in her room, she touched herself, as she and Charlotte had once enjoyed, and thought themselves so innocent. She imagined Mr. Darcy touching her, Mr. Darcy making love to her, saying it, the word love while he fondled her, here on her breast and there, below, and entered her body with that enormous, red—

  That was wrong, to think such things of a man who had been spurned. He would never be willing to risk refusal a second time—no man would. A man who had already been humiliated by such a one as George Wickham would be as guarded and suspicious as a knight-at-arms’s proud, fiery steed, stolen by tinkers and used as a carthorse, broken, gelded, and whipped. He had been brought up like a lord and had been treated worse than a beggar or a vagabond.

  The one person who might understand a little of this was his sister. Sweet, shy Georgiana, who seemed as unapproachable as her brother only because she was tall for her age and had her brother’s air of reserve. She had been seduced by Wickham too, although, thank goodness, spared from ruin. But her heart was wounded. Anyone with a heart could sympathize—which left out Miss Bingley.

  But what am I to do now? Is there any way to regain his love? He had admired her once, Elizabeth told herself. He recognized her struggle in maintaining her good character against a family that dragged her down, and he was willing to marry her. Surely, as a man who had lost his heart to the same Wickham, he can find it in himself to sympathize and forgive. Or can he? Does he perhaps think that men are allowed some weakness in this area that women cannot afford? By society’s standards he is right. We are always judged harshly for the failings that are indulged, even encouraged in men. But in his soul, in his own private thoughts—does he truly believe this? Can he not see that in our mistakes of the past we are as alike as any husband and wife can be?

  For they had a greater similarity even than that. Anyone can be beguiled and misled by a pretty face, a handsome form, and accommodating ways. But what of the deepest, most passionate, and essential friendship? There, she thought, we are most alike, and not at all like the common run of people, men or women. Mr. Darcy with Charles Bingley, and Elizabeth with Charlotte Lucas. We both loved our friend above all others and sought to retain their love for ourselves against their own desires and their best advantage. It was selfishness, masked as disinterested love. It was the jealousy of passion, but disguised so deeply within our minds as generosity that we failed to recognize it.

  And now she knew that a second chance of happiness, so rare and delicate a moment as few people were ever granted, had been shattered beyond repair. You had changed, she thought to Mr. Darcy as if he stood before her, looking down on her with that warm, tender smile on his face, the way he looked in the picture in the gallery at Pemberley. You had softened your entire demeanor to prove to me that you had listened to my harsh words. I was trying my best to show that I had changed too, had reconsidered my hasty judgment and was willing to be courted. Must a younger sister’s folly wreck everything? Is there nothing I can do?

  Oh, Fitzwilliam Darcy, what can I do?

  IT WAS AT Cambridge that Fitz began to learn the complex truth of love. At school, the masters withheld the interesting verses, the philosophy and the dialogues. But at university, no man who sought knowledge for its own sake need go away hungry. The Greeks had not one but three words for love: eros, philia, and agape. Desire, friendship, and all-consuming love, that can redeem man by self-sacrifice or destroy him with obsession. They saw the love between a young man, the erastes, and a youth, his eromenos, as the highest expression of earthly love, the only proper one for their citizens, forbidden for slaves. That told you everything right there.

  The Romans were more like us, with the greatest empire the world had known to that time, and the same kind of sophisticated urban society as modern England. For them, the love of man for youth was natural, at worst a minor vice that, unlike with man and female whore, left no bastards to suffer and ruined no woman’s life and reputation.

  It wasn’t all theory; there was flesh and blood to consider and to honor. What a cure for Fitz’s wounded soul to learn that the favor he had once committed every sort of crime short of murder to gain from George Wickham could be an act of love between men who enjoyed it for its own sake; for pleasure, not for gain. Men who wanted him, who apparently found him as beautiful and desirable as he had found George.

  It had started with old Biggs, his Greek tutor. One day over a ferocious session of translation from the Iliad, Biggs had lowered his hand to brush Fitz’s inner thigh and remarked, as if it were a part of the lesson, “There is, sadly, but a surviving fragment or two of a play by Aeschylus, The Myrmidons, in which Achilles mourns Patroclus by praising his beautiful thighs. I can’t imagine his were any finer than yours.”

  Fitz had startled with revulsion—such an old man, with a belly so huge his waistcoat could not completely button—and Biggs had removed his hand and, coughing and stammering, returned to criticizing Fitz’s translation. Poor old sod. Fitz wished now he’d been a little kinder. It wouldn’t have killed him to let the man have a feel. He’d been a good tutor, and fair, never penalized Fitz for his refusal. Unlike some. Lots of fellows grumbled about tutors demanding various favors, although most of the complainers were dull scholars who were simply paying for a year or two so as to make useful connections. If they wouldn’t learn, the only way for them to get through was by submitting. Yet they resented the price.

  But there were others. Intelligent, studious young men like himself, who were interested in academic subjects. Now Fitz discovered Catullus and Horace, Ovid and Virgil and the rest. And especially Plato and the followers of Socrates. Fitz had read some of it at school, but it had been so expurgated that he had never really understood. Even when some of the boys had made jokes, it was just coarse stuff, the same as they said about girls.

  This was different. The love of a man for a youth. The affectionate master and the beloved apprentice; the knowledgeable teacher and the devoted pupil. The mentor guiding his young charge through the perils of those years when one’s body fights to be let loose and the head swims with unattainable desires. “Yes, it’s sexual,” Carew said, flicking over the pages until he found the right passage. “Look here—Socrates is always lusting after Alcibiades.”

  “It’s just talk,” Ford said. “They didn’t do anything.”

  “Why not? It wasn’t like now, with laws and hanging.”

  “It was against the law for slaves.”

  “Precisely my point,” Carew said. “It’s because it was physical and the highest form of love. It was only for citizens, their aristocracy. With slaves, it would merely be the same as with women—exploitation and necessity.”

  “I pity your wife,” Ford said, laughing.

  Fitz had listened in silence, following the conversation, not daring to breathe. They all wanted the same thing, the love of a beautiful youth, or at least of each other. What he had wanted with George, but that had been so ugly. These men claimed it could be beautiful, was beautiful. Pure love.

  “What do you think, Darcy?”

  “I—I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Oh, pull the other one. A big fine fellow like you. Must have had everyone bending over for you, all through school.”

  “No, I—not at all. That is, I had a friend.”

  “Oh, I see. How fortunate. For the friend, I mean.”

  Later, Carew, whose rooms they were in, whispered, “Stay after the others leave.”

  It had taken some doing, as no one appeared to have any urgent reason to return to his own lodgings anytime before dawn, but finally Fitz was alone with Ca
rew. “At last,” Carew said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t stay.”

  Fitz studied Carew’s face. He wasn’t handsome, but he was nice-looking, with smooth dark hair that he wore in the old-fashioned queue that dandies were already beginning to cut short. “Why did you want me to stay?”

  Carew didn’t answer, just rested his hand on Fitz’s thigh, like old Biggs. But it didn’t feel like Biggs. It felt more like George. And when Carew began to unbutton Fitz’s breeches, Fitz didn’t stop him. He didn’t say a word, just tried to keep his breathing even as Carew released Fitz’s by now embarrassingly swollen cock and it leapt like a hooked trout in his loose fist.

  “I’m sorry,” Fitz said.

  Carew snatched his hand away. “For what?”

  “For being so big, and moving like that,” Fitz said. “I can’t help it. When you touch me I—”

  “Oh, good God. You poor thing. I thought you meant you had the pox.”

  Fitz scowled, shaking his head, the shame of it making it impossible to speak.

  “What did that so-called friend do to you?” Carew said. “Never mind. Shall I tell you what I would like to do?” At Fitz’s wary nod, he said, “I should like to kiss it. Has anyone ever done that for you? Yes? Well, I’m glad for your sake, but I bet no one has made as good a job of it as I will.”

  He was right.

  Carew had gone the next term, his debts too high to continue, but there had been others. Fitz had never dreamed that his height and his muscles and most of all his large cock were something that other men might want, might see as attractive, just the way they liked women with shapely tits or a plump, rounded arse.