Agilely dodging a fast moving carriage, the two men crossed the road that encircled the park and ducking under an arch, entered at a nearby gate. Taking to one of the paved walkways, they strolled in a more leisurely fashion beneath a row of young oaks.
Darcy fell silent. He could never walk in their shade without remembering one very lonely summer in his childhood when he had spent weeks watching from an upstairs window as the trees were planted by a gang of workmen. Through the long hours of daylight, they had been his only companions.
“If Georgie is so well recovered, what has brought about your sudden urge to find and punish Wickham?” asked Richard.
After a lengthy pause, Darcy said, “The man is pure evil, Fitz. I can’t believe that we didn’t see it when we were growing up. I used to admire him, you know. He was just that bit older and he always seemed so smooth, so sure of himself. It was only when he started taking an interest in women that I began to see him for the callous opportunist that he is. And then he went after Georgie! I was beside myself; but for her sake, I was willing to let it go – to hush it up. That’s how it was until I came across this family of young women a few weeks ago while I was visiting Bingley’s new estate in Hertfordshire.’
“A neighbour of theirs told me that more than a year before Wickham approached Georgie, he had seduced and eloped with their fourteen year old sister and, when he had his fill of her, abandoned her to die of a miscarriage in the back alleys of the East End. The family has been ruined. The scandal has ensured that there is very little chance of any of the daughters marrying - outside of one sister who will sacrifice herself for the others and wed the heir to her father’s estate. With one blow, Wickham has destroyed seven lives - and these are just the ones we know of. A fourteen year old, Fitz! A child really… not even as old as Georgie. It’s depraved! What is wrong with the man?”
The Colonel shook his head but he was not really shocked. In his time in the army he had seen more wickedness and depravity than Darcy could ever imagine. Still, Wickham was a bad man and if his cousin was putting up the money, he was happy to help root him out.
“Well, we have him now. As they seemed to have connections to each other in the past, I put a twenty four hour watch on Mrs. Young’s boarding house. It took a while, but we spotted him there five days ago and I have been waiting for you to come back before we make a move. He is not going anywhere as far as I can see. He frequents The Duck and Dog - a local drinking hole - and has built up a nice little income from gambling. He won’t abandon it that easily; not unless someone catches him marking cards.”
The two men rounded a corner. To one side of them a colourfully dressed group of young children disported themselves in the sunlight on an open patch of lawn. Boys and girls were equally abandoned: running, shrieking, tumbling and kicking their legs in the air. But to one side, a little boy stood alone watching in silence. Just behind him, on the benches under the trees, a line of governesses sat like so many stiff, black crows, keeping an eye on their young charges. The scene took Darcy straight back to his childhood.
He turned to his cousin. “I’m happy to go ahead as soon as you are ready. I’d like to be there for the arrest,” he said deliberately. “How will the charges against him be handled?”
“As far as the army is concerned, he will be court martialled for desertion almost immediately. He could be imprisoned but it is more likely that he will be sentenced to lashes – probably several hundred. But then there is the robbery that you mentioned. If we can find any of the articles that he is supposed to have stolen in his possession, then the military will hand him over to be tried in a civil court - after the military sentence has been carried out of course. It’s likely that he will face a sentence of transportation and hard labour in the colonies for the theft. Of course, if we could prove rape and abduction…”
Darcy shook his head. “No. I don’t want to go down that road. I don’t want to do any more damage to this family than has already been done. And then a charge of rape might provoke him to say something in open court. The risk to Georgie is too great.”
“I agree with that. I think the sooner we move against him, the better. He is no fool and every day that he passes under surveillance increases the risk of us arousing his suspicions - in which case he might very well bolt.”
“I’m completely in your hands, Fitz.”
Behind them a small grove of trees obscured the playing field and the children’s voices began to fade. Ahead the path continued its long curve, gradually leading back to the same gate at which the cousins had entered. They shook hands under the arch, Fitzwilliam walking away with an added urgency to his step.
____________________________
At seven o’clock the following evening (an hour before Wickham would normally depart for his evening entertainment) Colonel Fitzwilliam banged on the battered front door to number thirty two, Postilion Road. He was not alone, for standing on the steps behind him were four burly soldiers and his cousin, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
The door was opened by a maid whose eyes appeared to be reddened and swollen from crying. Glimpsing the uniformed men, she made a frenzied attempt to resist their entry, throwing herself against the door to slam it on them; but Fitzwilliam’s left boot was just too quick for her.
“Who’s there, Rosie?” a female voice called from a room off the entrance hall.
Fitz shouted back, “It’s Colonel Fitzwilliam. You will remember me, Mrs Young, as one of the guardians of a young lady to whom you were recently a paid companion – that is, until you were dismissed without character.” With that he stepped aside and let his soldiers storm past the maid and up the narrow stairway leading to the upper floors.
Mrs. Young appeared in the doorway. Darcy barely recognised the respectable, middle-aged woman he had hired on his aunt’s recommendation a little more than a year ago. Now, all he felt was distaste, for in the past seven months the woman before him had become raddled and hollow-eyed. She had made an attempt to appear more youthful by dying her hair a coarse, wiry yellow and she was wearing a tight, low-cut bodice, above which her sagging bosom wobbled pathetically.
“If you’re here for Wickham, you are welcome to him,” she sneered, the veins standing like blue cords in her skinny neck. “I’ve just discovered the rat in bed with my maid. The little fool’s with child, of course.” She laughed cynically.
Suddenly, shouting and a series of loud thuds could be heard from the floor above. Darcy and Fitzwilliam moved to the foot of the stairs and stood looking up. They didn’t have long to wait. A minute or two later Wickham appeared on the landing. Even though his hands were bound and he was under guard, he stood there like some hero of old, defiantly youthful, fair-haired and handsome. Two thin lines of blood trickled from his nose and split upper lip. He stopped struggling and looked down at Darcy and grinned.
“I should have guessed it would be you, Darcy. I suppose the old hag sold me out,” he jeered, jerking his head in the direction of Mrs. Young.
She darted in front of Fitzwilliam. “I wish I had, you bastard. It would have been the only time that I ever made money off your stinking carcass,” she hurled back, coming to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, her hands on her hips. “And now they’re going to hang you and what will happen about all the money you owe me? I’m not a bloody charity!”
“Whistle for it, Sweetheart,” said Wickham, his teeth showing through his split lip in a grotesque smile, as he descended the last set of stairs.
At the bottom he turned his back on her, stood still and looked at Darcy. “I suppose you’ve come to see me get my just desserts?”
“I have. I wanted you to know why you are being arrested. This is nothing personal. Cast your mind back to a certain young girl whom you abducted from her home in Hertfordshire and left to die alone here in the slums of London a little more than two years ago. It is for her sake that I seek to remove you from society.”
“You see,” Wickham sneered, “this is exactly why we could
never be true friends. You were always too sanctimonious, Darcy. You see life from atop your white charger and think that you look down on me in the muck. But you know nothing. I have lived - even if I do hang for it. When have you ever done anything that wasn’t sanctioned by that group of old wrecks that you call relatives? In a few years they will all be dead and you, who have meekly kept to their rules, will live out your remaining years a frustrated, lonely man.”
There was a brief silence before Darcy shook his head, as if to clear it. Then he said in a menacing undertone, “What I do with the rest of my life is my business, Wickham. You won’t be here to see it, so don’t concern yourself. What I do know is that you are no swashbuckling hero. You scorn me for living by rules, but your so-called ‘passion’ is driven by cruelty; not desire as you would have the rest of us believe. I have often wondered why you had to be so needlessly vindictive, so pitiless in your treatment of the women that you cast off. Why you spurned and debased them, even before you left them to starve or turn to prostitution? It can only be because you dislike women. Yet that hate does not cause you to avoid their kind, but rather to seek out the youngest and most vulnerable from their ranks with the objective of hurting and humiliating them. I would call you a vulture, but you aren’t even worthy of that label. I can only think that you must be one of those deviant people one sometimes hears about: the sort who can only find his own pleasure when he inflicts pain on others.”
The brazen smile that had been on Wickham’s face froze. Then he saw Fitzwilliam leave the conversation he had been having with two soldiers, and all pretence at amusement fled: for the soldiers had just come down from his room and had handed something to Fitzwilliam, who now walked over to where he and Darcy stood.
“I have here a certain article that was reported as one of many items stolen in a robbery that took place a few years back in the village of Meryton. You will remember it well, Wickham, as you were serving there at the time. The articles in question disappeared on the very day that you quitted the district,” he said, swinging an engraved gold fob watch back and forth on its chain in front of Wickham’s nose. “You know what this means of course. Very foolish of you, Wickham. Why did you hang onto it?”
From the kitchen door came a series of agonised cries. “Oh, Wickham!” Rosie fell against the door frame, weeping into her plump elbow. “Now they’ll hang you for sure. I’ll be left all alone to look after our baby …”
Next to them, Mrs. Young laughed, a spiteful look distorting her face. “Cheer up, Wickham. Look at it this way: you might swing, but at least you’ll know that you are leaving an heir to your vast fortune behind you. I hope to God that it’s a boy! We women have suffered enough.”
She turned to Darcy and Fitzwilliam. “I must thank you for coming, Gentlemen. You saved me the trouble of throwing him out on the street,” she said, as she opened the door to let them all out into the night.
The soldiers crossed the road to a waiting cart and, as Darcy and Fitzwilliam watched, Wickham was bundled into the back under guard. As it pulled away the cart jerked, sending him sprawling across its width to where his head hit the wooden boards on other side with a sickening thud. He lay there as the guards sat observing him impassively.
Standing at his carriage on the other side of the road, Darcy turned his head and called to his driver. “Grosvenor Square please, Thomas.”
A heavy silence reigned in the carriage as it pulled out of the pool of light cast by the streetlamp and rolled on into the darkness. Eventually Richard spoke up.
“So was it everything that you imagined? Do you feel a sense of satisfaction, having put him away?”
Darcy considered his cousin’s words and then said slowly, “It was justice, but to tell the truth Fitz, I can’t glory in it: the waters are too muddied. We both grew up with him. Before he arrived at Pemberley I was alone and I will always remember what an inventive playmate he was - when he was around.”
Darcy smiled nostalgically. “He used to like to lord it over me; but against that, he entertained us for hours with those stories that he thought up. Do you remember when we played that game Pirates of the High Seas in the large oak behind the folly? It was my first summer with the two of you and something I will never forget. He was the captain and you were first mate. I - as I remember - was just a lowly deck hand. He had a way of putting me in my place even then.’
“When I look back, he was an entertaining companion; but I couldn’t, in all conscience, leave him to continue unchecked, Fitz. He has become very dangerous. Oh, not to the likes of you or me; but consider what he has done to Georgiana, to so many other women he has encountered. He preys on the weak. I had a duty to stop him.”
What Darcy didn’t say was, that when he had finally come face to face with Wickham, he had been buoyed by the thought of his duty to his sister and women in general; but somehow it was the idea that he was delivering a blow for Elizabeth Bennet that had given him the most satisfaction.
Chapter 16
“Virtue consists, not in abstaining
from vice, but in not desiring it.”
George Bernard Shaw
The next day, Richard sent a messenger over to tell Darcy that he had reserved a box for that evening at the Royal Opera House where a production of the ballet, Flore et Zéphire, was drawing large audiences. On receiving it, Darcy was inclined to suspect that his cousin had an interest in someone in the corps de ballet; however he was willing to be proved wrong and it certainly couldn’t hurt to watch a display of shapely legs as the dancers pirouetted and leapt their way across the stage.
His suspicions were confirmed when Richard arrived curiously early at the house on Grosvenor Square. Darcy had been upstairs changing and so kept him waiting for ten minutes. As he came down the stairs in evening dress, Richard stood before him just inside the open doorway, shifting about impatiently. Obviously, the sooner they left the better, thought Darcy.
“Now, don’t you scrub up well, Darce?” Richard boomed jovially, looking over his cousin’s pristine black tails, snowy white cravat and discrete diamond pin. “You will have the ladies drooling all over you.”
“I’ll be no competition for you in that dress uniform,” responded Darcy, raising his hand to his eyes as he pretended to be blinded by the gold braiding that glittered on Richard’s uniform in the late afternoon sun.
His cousin grinned. “Well, let’s be on our way,” he said, adjusting the sash across his chest as he took the steps down to the pavement at a fast trot.
“So, Fitz,” said Darcy settling himself opposite his cousin in the waiting carriage. “What’s her name?”
Richard’s mouth turned down on the one side in a sheepish smile. “Never thought I could put one over on you anyway. It’s Celeste.”
“And how long have you had her in keeping?”
“Steady on, Darce. We aren’t quite there yet. Early days.”
“Ah! That explains the eagerness.”
“She is bringing along a pretty little friend who has just joined the corps, so you won’t have to play gooseberry, if that’s worrying you.”
“I had no intention of it,” said Darcy, who was not entirely sure that this was welcome news.
After a torturously slow drive during which Richard seemed incapable of coherent conversation, the two men disembarked at the Bow Street entrance to the opera house at precisely six o’clock and climbing the stairs, passed through the forest of fluted columns into the entrance. There they had to force their way through a tightly packed crowd to the grand staircase. In keeping with the exterior, it also featured fluted pillars, interspersed with marble statues. Upstairs in the saloon, Darcy stopped for a minute and allowed the crowds to jostle him as he examined a newly installed and finely detailed bust of Shakespeare which stood resplendent in its own marble alcove. He looked up to find himself alone and spotting the retreating back of his cousin, followed him into their box, shaking his head at Richard’s ill-concealed eagerness.
To most
London gentlemen it was a known fact that after the evening performances, prostitution was commonplace in the saloons, side-galleries and boxes of most of the theatres of Covent Garden. Darcy (who was no different from anyone else) found himself unconsciously succumbing to habit as he made note of the fact that the door to their box locked from the inside and that two couches had been placed conveniently out of the direct light and towards the rear. While Richard obviously had seduction in mind and had chosen a sumptuous box in which to do it, management had thought of everything else, down to the requisite bottle of French champagne. It certainly wouldn’t be their fault if a young blood looking for action went elsewhere for his evening’s entertainment.
Darcy gravitated towards the balcony. Looking out onto the pit, the theatre seemed ablaze with light coming from the newly installed gas lamps and chandeliers. Voices from the audience below rose in a cacophony of sound and sometimes even drowned out the sound of the orchestra tuning their instruments. Darcy ignored this assault on his senses and took a seat, leaning his elbow on the balustrade and setting his back against a pillar. From this position - if he kept looking steadily out towards the stage - he could avoid all attempts to engage his attention by the occupants of other boxes.
It had been a while since he had been to the theatre and despite himself Darcy felt the old anticipation stirring. He looked at his watch. Almost six thirty. And now the crowd began to still. The orchestra struck up and the curtain slowly rose on a misty, pastoral scene.
The story, set on Mount Olympus, told of a love triangle between the North Wind, the West Wind and Flora, a nymph who personified flowers and springtime. Although the plot was sketchy at best, it provided an excuse for scantily clad dancers in simple white draperies to balance nimbly on their toes and leap across the stage in a display of airy elegance. At moments when it was least expected, a dancer would soar above the others on invisible wires in a manner so graceful that the crowd below gasped and called for more.
The Golden Apples of the Sun Page 12
