Elizabeth hugged him and kissed him, grateful for his weary soul’s sake that Darcy was willing to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Fleet Prison was a brick building of considerable length. Darcy figured it must be at least the distance of four town houses from where his carriage let him out on Ludgate Hill to the entrance. There were no souls begging at the grille, although he would have given them coins as he passed. It was not as though he had no sympathy for debtors, only hostility toward one in particular. The entrance, guarded by a turnkey, was a stone-framed doorway bearing on its jambs the figure 9.
The warden’s deputy offered to escort him to the top gallery on the master’s side where Wickham shared a chamber. Mr Nixon was inclined to chat, despite the four flights to climb. It was difficult to hear him over the noise of other visitors and prisoners passing by.
“Mr Wickham? He is insolvent and will have to swear in court that he is not worth five pounds and cannot subsist without charity. You had best see him now before he goes to the other building. They are not allowed visitors in the common side.”
“I read in the papers that there is a gaol fever there.”
“Yes, typhus, but not likely to spread, not since there is ventilation now and they are not allowed to associate with master’s-side prisoners. You need not fear for your friend at present. At least, no more sothan is typical in the Fleet. Fifty years ago, six prisoners died every week. Now it is only two a month, unless there is an outbreak, of course.”
Darcy knew of the rapid pulse, loss of strength, headache, and chills that began a death from typhus; then a few days later the delirium, red bleary eyes, the mulberry rash, the involuntary dark evacuations, and finally a haemorrhage and death.
With that hope in mind, Darcy asked Mr Nixon what the apartments in the other building were like.
“Mr Wickham will be put into a common room with seven or eight other prisoners, for which he will pay nothing. There are four floors in that building. On each floor is a room about twenty-five feet square, with a fireplace. Currently, there are thirty prisoners. Any more, and Mr Wickham would have to sleep on a table in the taproom. It will fall to less than half that number before the fever is done, but it always fills again.”
This master’s side was an area where, for a fee, a prisoner had more freedom, more privacy, and better conditions, but Darcy found even this a noisome place. If not for the sake of appeasing Elizabeth, who seemed to fear that he was about to descend into an unyielding temper with a vengeful spirit, he would have turned back. Even the staircase reeked with tobacco smoke, and he heard the oaths of card players and the complaints of the ill.
“You are nearly there. Just down the gallery.” The deputy must have taken his look of distaste as a complaint of being tired. “Mr Wickham is at the end. There are over two hundred prisoners at present for one hundred and nine rooms. Still, better accommodations here than the alternative.”
On each of five storeys, a long narrow passage, not seven feet wide, extended from one end to the other, with countless doors opening into single rooms. Darcy was surprised to find the master’s side intolerably dirty. These galleries were ill-lit, having only a window at each end. The commotion of prisoners and visitors passing to and from the rooms, and the banging of doors, had an effect on his nerves.
If these are the conditions of the master’s side, what squalor and suffering is there in the other building?
Darcy looked down the passage to Wickham’s chamber, and saw a woman leave it. When she passed them to go to the stairs, she was fastening one side of the bib-front to her gown.
Mr Nixon gave a long-suffering sigh. “The state of morals within the prison are bad, arising partly from the free admission of women when the gates are open. I shall leave you here?” Darcy nodded, and knocked and entered before he changed his mind.
George Wickham looked up from buttoning his trousers, too surprised to speak. Darcy tilted his head toward the door where the prostitute had left and said, “They say the Fleet is the largest brothel in the metropolis. You should do well here.”
Wickham’s bewildered expression darkened so quickly it was almost comical. He slowly passed the room’s two beds and table and chairs to stare into Darcy’s face. “Have you come to triumph over me? Your cousin may have been the one in the court, but I know this was all your doing.”
A part of him wanted to grin and admit to his satisfaction that it was his doing that Wickham was confined to this place. But that was what Wickham wanted, and Darcy was finished with satisfying Wickham in anything.
“Perhaps you ought not to have left debts with every shopkeeper, moneylender, and banker in Ramsgate, London, and Brighton.” Darcy thought of his father’s steady admiration for Wickham, and it saddened him to think of what his father had wasted. “Gambling has been the ruin of many men, the loss of their honour, even the cause of suicide. It has been a curse on your life.”
“No Darcy, you are the curse!” Wickham cried. “What would your father say if he were alive to see what you have sunk me to?”
“He asked me to promote your advancement in the best manner that your chosen profession might allow me to. I can do nothing for a gamester who borrows as you do. No practice is more dangerous than borrowing money. Even when money could be had, you never thought of repayment in time.”
He shrugged carelessly. “It comes easily, and I spend freely.”
“And your debt accumulated like a snowball in rolling!”
“I am a successful gamester!” Wickham rejoined. When Darcy tooka pointed look at their surroundings, he added, “Until I was temporarily overtaken by the reverse.”
“And in the hopes of retrieving past misfortunes, you went from bad to worse. You have learnt nothing.”
Wickham’s eyes flashed, and Darcy prepared himself to fend off the expected blow, but instead Wickham ground his teeth and took a step back. “Well, you have triumphed over me. By some means, in all of England, you found me. If this was what you wanted, so be it. I am now in the Fleet and cannot pay the quarterly chamber rent.”
“Because you spent everything you had on cards and prostitutes, and you have not a single friend to help you?” Darcy wanted—needed—to hear Wickham admit his own culpability.
He had grown up in the same park as Wickham, he knew him, and Darcy saw in his eyes what it cost Wickham to admit it. “Yes. I have not a friend in the world and have spent my last shilling on card games and whores in the fortnight I have been in here.”
Darcy gave him a slight bow. “That is all I needed to know. Good day.”
