I clenched my hands into fists.
Her voice was faint, barely audible. She had hunched into herself, making herself very small. “You have to allow me to explain. He is lying.”
“Mmm, yes, you turn my words against me,” I said. “He is a liar, certainly, but you…” I scratched the back of my neck. “You did not bleed.”
She looked at me in fright. “I-I d-do not know w-why that was. I wondered why also. I s-swear to you, F-Fitz—”
“Stop stuttering,” I snapped.
She flinched. She went entirely silent.
“Why are you behaving like this if you are not guilty?” I said. “If you were innocent, would you be this afraid?”
Richard was back in the room. “I think we should kill him, Will.”
I glanced at Richard over my shoulder. “Perhaps.”
Elizabeth looked back and forth between the two of us. “Colonel Fitzwilliam, if I could explain to you, perhaps, because my husband—”
“I think not, madam,” said Richard quietly. “I have to admit, you are likely the most skilled sort of poison temptress I’ve ever met.”
Elizabeth let out a cry of dismay. She turned away from both of us.
“You take her away,” said Richard. “I shall give your regrets to everyone at the ball and smooth it over so no one suspects. Whatever scandal you thought she might have wrought, Will, I don’t have to tell you, this is worse.”
“Quite worse,” I said in a grave voice.
In the carriage, she found her voice, and I did not stop her from speaking.
“I swore to you,” she said, and all the time she spoke, she seized handfuls of the skirt of her dress and ran them between her fingers and then dropped them, “that I would never tell anyone about your sister, not even my sister, not even Jane. And I did not. I have not. I told no one. So when my sister sent me a letter saying that I should speak to you about doing something for poor Mr. Wickham, as she called him, I did not tell her that he had attempted to elope with your sister for her dowry. Indeed, I could not say anything to her about it. So, then she said she had told Mr. Wickham to come and speak to me when he was in London, because he would be making a trip when he had a weekend leave from the regiment, and I did not know what to do.”
“You met with him?”
“I did, but—”
“You had to do that in secret,” I said, “and it cannot have been easy, because we are always in each other’s company,wife.”
“He was simply there,” she said. “Not announced, nothing like that, simply in the room, and he said that if I cried out, he would tell you that I had invited him there, and that you would believe it, because you thought he would want to ravish his wife.”
I eyed her, feeling doubt splinter through me.
“He was awful,” she said. “But I couldn’t… I should have told you. But I thought it was over, because he took money from me. Money you gave me, I am sorry, but it wasn’t much.” She clenched her fists around the fabric of her skirt. “I told him I could not help him, and that you would never give him money, and he said that he could ruin your sister at any time, that he could tell everyone what had happened, and that you would be better to give him money, and I said I could not go to youbecause I was not going to admit to being in his company if he was going to lie to you that we were… that he was…” She let out a huff of frustrated air. “But he saw the invitation for the ball, and then he arrived there and then you were there—”
“Elizabeth,” I said, “you are saying that he sneaked into your bedchamber?”
“No!” She shook her head. “Heavens, not my bedchamber. I know not that he was sneaking about. I think he has a friend amongst your staff, someone who lets him come and go as he pleases.”
More doubt. “You are saying he was awful?”
“Yes,” she said. “Awful.” She chewed on her lip. “Well, perhaps he did not start out that way?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fitzwilliam, the time that I met him, the only time I ever saw him before this, I swear to you, he was very charming. He was very friendly, and I thought he was… he seemed sort of the perfect gentleman in a way, sort of everything that is good and pleasing and handsome and—no, not handsome, God inheaven.” She leaned back into the carriage seat and covered her face with her hands.
I sucked in a long, slow breath. “So, then, you were charmed by him?” My mouth twisted as I said the words.
“He wanted me to speak to you about the rectory position,” she said.
