Elizabeth spent the journey wondering about what Lydia’s elopement with Wickham would mean to her and her family. She knew from Darcy’s letter that Wickham was untrustworthy. It was unlikely he would marry a woman with no fortune, and marriage was the only respectable end to this. If Lydia and Wickham didn’t marry, she and her sisters would be tainted by the scandal.
She was grateful Darcy treated her so well. The acrimony of her refusal to his marriage proposal gave him every reason to confine his behavior to a polite greeting, if that. Yet, she realized, not wanting to read too much into his behavior, it wasn’t Darcy who invited her and her family to Pemberley, but his wife. Darcy did treat her aunt and uncle well, better than she expected him to treat anyone in trade. He was friendly and open with them.
She didn’t flatter herself that her reproofs caused him to change his behavior. Perhaps it was because he was in his home, but she rather thought it was marriage that changed him. Married life clearly suited Mr. Darcy.
What was it about the men whose proposals she rejected? Was she some sort of gateway to finding the correct woman? Mr. Collins proposed to Charlotte a scant three days after he proposed to her. How long did Darcy wait? Was it three days or was it longer?
Darcy waved goodbye to Elizabeth and the Gardiners, who left as soon as it was light. He wondered what befell Lydia, not that he cared about her, but Elizabeth was in distress. He wanted to help her, but he had no right. He gave up any hope of helping her when he married Anne. Watching their carriage dwindle down the drive, he was struck by how right it had seemed to have Elizabeth in Pemberley, and how despairingly empty his home already felt without her.
Manfully, he strived to press such thoughts from his head. It wasn’t Anne’s fault that he didn’t love her. It also wasn’t her fault that her health was poor. He went into the marriage knowing the truth of both those things. Anne lived up to her part of the bargain. She was his wife, and they sometimes shared a bed. She listened to what he said and commented on it. Yet, she almost never ventured an opinion or initiated a topic of conversation, leaving their discourse discouragingly barren.
Darcy turned on his heels and strode inside, putting more force into his steps than strictly necessary. That he ached for Elizabeth, he couldn’t deny. As he walked, he didn’t see the familiar halls of Pemberley, his mind replaying her every expression, the sound of her laughter in his home, the effortless grace of her form. Seeing her again opened a wound that he thought was healing.
To his surprise, Anne, not customarily such an early riser, was already at the table when he reached the dining room, though Georgiana was still absent. Not meeting Anne’s eyes, he seated himself across from her. He’d promised her respect when he proposed to her, and pining over another woman was not respectful. He was unsettled by his reaction to Elizabeth. It left him feeling unreasonably disloyal.
“Fitzwilliam, I would like to speak to you privately,” Anne said in her quiet voice, interrupting his thoughts.
“We are private here,” he said. There were no servants in the room.
“Don’t be naïve. Servant listen.”
He was about to deny this, but how would he know? Anne sent a maid for her shawl, which he placed about her, marshaling himself into feeling tenderness at the sight of her overly pale and frail form. He escorted her into the garden, a place he knew she had little interest in. She clung to his arm as they walked. Glancing down, he couldn’t help but notice the similarities between Anne’s hand and an illustration of the bones of the human hand he saw once at university. Darcy tried to suppress a shudder, an uncharacteristic flight of fancy briefly invoking the notion that death walked at his side.
“I see I’m not the only one who finds the morning air too chill,” Anne said, smiling up at him.
Darcy smiled back, disgusted with himself. Anne was a sweet person and dear to him. He had no right to harbor such unseemly comparisons in his mind. Solicitously, he escorted her to a bench in the garden, chosen because they could see if anyone was near. She settled herself and he took his place beside her. It was cool in the shade shrouding the bench, as she said, but Darcy found the morning air invigorating, not chilly.
“When you were sending off Mrs. Gardiner and Miss Bennet yesterday, I read the letters she received from her sister.” Her tone perfectly matter of fact.
Darcy stiffened, all thoughts of his wife being either frail or dear expelled from his mind. He said angrily, “That was entirely improper!”
“I don’t care,” she said, her tone infuriatingly devoid of defensiveness or remorse. “I spent years knowing only what people told me. I finally learned to bribe the servants to bring me information. That’s how I know about Wickham and your sister.”
“How… How do you know?”
“You wrote a letter the night you proposed. You rang for candles and the maid who brought them took the letter to me while you were eating. You hadn’t sealed it yet. Don’t worry about the maid, she can’t read. But I read the letter, which was why I was sitting outside waiting for you.”
Darcy remembered delaying sealing the letter. He’d wanted to read it one more time to see if it said what he wanted it to say. But the content of the letter was less important than what he was finding out about the woman he married, the cousin he knew all of his life. Now, he wondered if he knew her at all. He was disgusted with her and with himself. Did he tie himself to someone with no sense of propriety? He should have known anyone Lady Catherine raised would not be bothered by the rules that applied to decent people.
Still, that wasn’t the worst of it, he realized. She lay in wait for him. Her seemingly innocent questions, her apparent sympathy for his distraught state, were all a trap. He’d been lured into proposing to her. The image of her hand on his arm returned, only this time it took on the aspects of a grasping claw, vicelike.
And he had proposed, and now Anne was his wife. As unscrupulous as her methods were, he had no recourse now. He glanced sidelong at her, not trusting himself to look her full in the face without betraying disgust. She looked as demure and frail as ever. He took a deep breath, trying to master himself to civility. As her husband, he owed her that level of consideration. Yet, he couldn’t sit there, seeming to condone her prying and manipulation by listening to her. He stood up and started for the house.
Anne’s voice followed him. “Elizabeth’s sister eloped with Wickham. It now appears as if he won’t marry her.”
Darcy stopped and turned to look at her. Her calm visage indicated she felt none of the horror of her disclosures. Perhaps she no longer had the capacity to be shocked, after years of prying into people’s most private revelations. Or perhaps, in her sheltered life, she didn’t realize the full import of that elopement.
“We can do something,” she said, finally conveying an emotion; entreaty. “You can do something. You can use the money you received from my dowry to buy the marriage. I know you would never forgive yourself if Miss Bennet were hurt and you could have done something.”
Anne was asking him to help Elizabeth? After enlightening him on the extent of her immorality, she showed unusual generosity. When he married her, he thought her of a tranquil and consistent nature. He searched her eyes, wondering, and dreading, what revelation would come next.
“I know how it looks to you,” her voice quiet now, and sad, “but my mother never told me anything. I learned from the servants and only because I paid them. Mrs. Jenkinson was my mother’s spy and agent. She never said anything to me in private that she couldn’t say in front of my mother. I have no intention of being in the dark about what is going on around me. In London, you spoke to me of helping your sister become more sociable and enter into society, and yet you wouldn’t tell me this important fact about her. I’m not going to be a good wife for you if I’m kept in the dark.”
He saw her point but it was a thin excuse for her manipulation and spying. “You didn’t need to know about Georgiana and Wickham in order to facilitate her coming out.”
“I did,” she said. “I knew little of Georgiana. She rarely ever spoke to me or in my presence. How was I to judge her character and provide suitable guidance without knowing her history?”
He frowned at her, unconvinced.
“What if, deeming her as meek and well behaved as she takes pains to appear, I was too lax in protecting her? Wickham isn’t the only man who would prey on your sister. What I do is for all of our good.”
Darcy continued to scowl, but her words, spinning fine filaments of reason through his head, did hold a certain amount of sense.
“I did give you your chance to be forthright with me. I asked you to tell me more about her. You talked about her music and her shyness, but never about who she is. If I spy on you, it is only because, by omission, you lie to me. That is no way to conduct this union, or to fulfill your promise of respecting me.”
Darcy stared at her, aghast. He wasn’t sure which was more disturbing, how much sense her argument appeared to make, on the surface, or how clear it was that she believed herself in the right. He hadn’t trusted Anne enough to tell her a secret which was more Georgiana’s than his.
Oddly, when he wrote the letter to Elizabeth, he trusted her more than he trusted Anne. He shook his head. He shouldn’t be thinking about Elizabeth. Not right now and not that way.
He allowed anger to touch him, focusing his mind on the situation at hand. The truth was, he’d valued Georgiana’s secret more than he respected Anne’s ability to either keep his sister’s secret or employ the information wisely. At the time, he’d felt bad about it, realizing it was unfair to Anne.
Now, he felt as if he made the right decision, even if Anne was already privy to the information. Looking down at her, huddled in her shawl on the shade-enshrouded bench, her normally self-effacing aspect transformed by conceit, Darcy realized he didn’t know anything about her. She said little in private or in company. He put up with her reclusiveness in company, preferring it to a loquacious wife. He didn’t mind her silences in private, finding them soothing. He realized now that what he’d thought of as companionable silences were just silences.
He’d always faced the danger that he would marry someone who pretended to be one thing and turned out to be another. He recognized that from the time he entered society. No, he realized, it was before that time. At Cambridge, he received invitations from fellow students who were more popular than he was. When he visited their homes, a sister or a cousin was almost always thrown at him. Once, one of them entered his bedchamber. He thrust her into the hallway bodily, locking the door behind her.
For years, women simpered and agreed with everything he said. He took to saying little, unless he knew the people very well. No, that wasn’t a fair analysis, he thought. He was determined, after the berating Elizabeth gave him, to be honest with himself. Like his sister, he was uncomfortable in company. She hid it by visible shyness and he hid it by arrogance, but the root was the same.
Anne’s eyes were still on him. Her chin tilted up, showing her arrogance and a stubbornness he never suspected. Why hadn’t he tried to get to know her before he proposed? Three answers instantly came to his mind. The first was that he was in too much despair to care and the second was that he thought he did know her. The third, the one that galled him, was that her manipulation of him had been artful; leading him, lamb-like, to the moment he dropped to one knee before her.
Darcy knew his wife was waiting for him to say something. He could see in her eyes that she was prepared to argue with him until he spoke words of acceptance for her machinations. Turning on his heels, he walked away.
Chapter 4
Elizabeth and the Gardiners travelled as expeditiously as possible, but as quickly as they progressed, it wasn’t fast enough for Elizabeth. She stared out the window of the carriage each day, straining to glimpse the road ahead, willing the horses to go faster. She tried to comfort herself by the speed they did achieve, considering that Jane would not be wearied by long expectations, but that was scant. Sleeping one night on the road, they made it back to Hertfordshire very rapidly, reaching Longbourn by dinnertime the following day.
Elizabeth was glad that Mr. Darcy didn’t know about Lydia’s elopement. She sorely wished she could erase the knowledge from her own mind as well. The idea of her sister with the vile Wickham was enough to enrage and nauseate her. It would be too much for Elizabeth to bear for Darcy to know the shame of Lydia’s behavior. It would be even more shameful for him to know that she eloped with Wickham.
Even though his marriage to Anne de Bourgh put him forever out of her reach, she didn’t want him to think ill of her. She regretted her behavior when he proposed even more than before. Not only because seeing him again made her further question the solidity of her rejection, a painful process initiated by his letter, but because of the unfairness of her false accusations.
Added to his subsequent affable behavior at Pemberley, she was beginning to feel rather a fool, something Elizabeth was not accustomed to feeling before she set eyes on Mr. Darcy. He was all a host should be and very solicitous of his wife. Although she suspected she would still find fault with his public behavior, his behavior was exemplary in private.
More than a week after Elizabeth arrived in Longbourn, interminable days filled with her mother’s and sisters’ weeping, when all hope of finding the errant couple was nearly lost, a letter was sent to Longbourn signed by Lydia Wickham. She told them they were married in Scotland and Wickham would take a position as ensign in a northern regiment after resigning from the militia. Arrangements were made to cover his debts in Brighton and Meryton. The letter requested permission to visit Longbourn before they settled into their new home.
Their mother immediately recovered from the malaise she’d fallen into, refreshed with life, joy and approbation for Lydia’s behavior. Mary and Kitty joined their mother’s celebratory fervor. Jane was moderately pleased and optimistic about the couple’s future. Elizabeth could not celebrate, since she was too baffled as to how this marriage happened. Wickham left Meryton and Brighton with many debts and suddenly he could cover them and find enough money to buy the rank of ensign? The money could not have come from the Gardiners, since they were still searching for Lydia and Wickham when the letter was received. Looking to her father, she saw a frown of puzzlement on his face, the two of them the only members of the household sensible enough for confusion.
With only questions to guide him, Elizabeth’s father readily agreed to host Mr. and Mrs. Wickham at Longbourn. Elizabeth joined the other women in readying the household and in the anticipatory discomfort of waiting, though she did not join them in their frivolous happiness. She was pleased that such a potentially disastrous situation was amicably resolved, but saw no reason to forgive Lydia for her recklessness.
When Mr. and Mrs. Wickham arrived, Elizabeth’s tall little sister and her ensign made a striking couple. If knowledge of their past behavior marred that image, their current behavior was enough to stoke Elizabeth’s ire. Lydia was still Lydia. She demanded congratulations from everyone and planned to visit the entire village to show off her ring. There wasn’t the slightest amount of shame from the couple either about the elopement or about keeping the Bennets in the dark regarding the safety of their daughter.
This vexing absence of empathy was most apparent in Lydia’s lack of hesitancy in enlightening them about what happened. “It was such a lark, running away without anyone suspecting. But poor Wickham ran out of money in London and we had to stay in a small room at a tiny inn. It was cozy, but we couldn’t afford to go anywhere. Then Mr. Darcy found us.”
“Mr. Darcy!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“Yes. It was all because of you,” Lydia said.
“Me?”
“It seems his wife is fond of you. She told her husband that she was never as entertained as when you visited Rosings. She wanted you to be happy. She saw how upset you were and told her husband to do something.”
Elizabeth looked from Lydia to Wickham in
astonishment. Surely, this only confirmed that Anne Darcy had no notion of the proposal her husband made so shortly before marrying her. Elizabeth felt oddly guilty, that a woman she’d nearly superseded showed her so much kindness. She also wondered how Mr. and Mrs. Darcy found out about what happened. It was no secret in Meryton, but Elizabeth doubted that the Darcy’s had corresponded with anyone who lived near Meryton.
“Yes, it’s true,” Wickham said.
“But I don’t think I exchanged a dozen words with her at Rosings, and most of those were greetings or farewells,” Elizabeth protested.
“Darcy told us she admired how you stood up to Lady Catherine,” Wickham said. “I was stunned myself, and a little amused to see how Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley was ordered around by his wife. We stayed two nights there on our way to Gretna Green. He may have thought he had a meek bride, but she was in charge. She negotiated everything.”
Wickham’s smugly amused tone sealed Elizabeth’s abhorrence of him. She wondered how Mr. Darcy stood it. Letting Wickham sleep under his roof and paying for Wickham to have a good life must have been very difficult. Elizabeth couldn’t understand this at all. She had a horrified thought. Was Georgiana forced to witness this? But Lydia’s thoughtless prattle soon informed her that Georgiana wasn’t at Pemberley. Elizabeth could legitimately ask after her when Lydia brought the subject up. Wickham told them she was visiting relatives. There was no shame in his voice, nor was there a hint that Georgiana meant anything special to him.
It was, she realized, yet another thing Anne must not know the truth of: Wickham and Georgiana. Had she, she could not possibly have asked Darcy to do as he had. Even blind to the pain she surely caused her husband, the notion of Anne Darcy ordering Mr. Darcy around was hard to fathom. Elizabeth didn’t think anyone could order him around, or that Anne was the type to. Wickham, most likely, was once again taking liberties with the truth.
The Second Mrs. Darcy: A Pride & Prejudice Variation Novella Page 3
