We could not talk much on the ride, obviously, not on horseback, but I did tell Richard the content of my conversation with Elizabeth, and he said, “Yes, but we know she would deny it, Will. We have been over this.”
I tried to explain that it was different, and he said that I knew she was capable of it, that he knew it, too, and that there was a reason I had been jealous of her.
“This is not the way you presented it before,” I said to him stonily.
“Well, I would never have acted on it, but she acted as though she would have,” he said. “She is a loose sort of woman, and I think that is why I was drawn to her at all.”
“Drawn to her,” I repeated. “This is not what you said before.”
“God in heaven, Will, let us ride,” he said.
So, we rode.
I assumed that Wickham would not be with the regiment anymore, for he must be certain I would be seeking him. After all, if a man claims to have had another man’s wife, he is asking for some kind of retaliation. Wickham, having heard my cousin’sthreat, would have disappeared, hopped a ship across the seas to India or America or some such far destination.
But no, he was there.
Perhaps I only wanted him to have gone.
Perhaps I did not wish to kill a man.
I never had, though I supposed that Richard had done it in the war.
I had ordered it done, though, watched it done, though not in this same way, I supposed, because it had not been at all personal in those situations, only the sort of thing that had to be done.
At the tender age of eight years old, my father first made me accompany him to a hanging, and he had a peculiar way of doing these things, keeping them quite private, not making much of a spectacle of it.
People came to my father to settle scores, to mete out justice, that sort of thing. The tenants who lived on our lands looked to him as the man who would make things right for them. That was what being a landlord was, it was to have responsibility to those who worked the land that you owned, that was what my father told me.
Now, if it were a trifle of some kind, two tenants fighting over whether someone else had stolen the other’s pigs or some such, my father might direct them to the courts and say to them that they must sue each other and have some judge arbitrate the matter, that it was too petty for him to concern himself with.
But in cases like horse thieves or clear violence done to children or women, my father would often simply string the man up. He would do it without fanfare, and there would be no gathered crowd to watch it. It would be quick, clean, and grim.
It was one of these hangings to which I was first brought as an eight-year-old boy, and my father explained to me how it must be done. “It is on your word, Fitzwilliam, do youunderstand? And you take it on your shoulders, even if it is the work of more than just you to hang the noose and throw it over the tree bough and fit it around the man’s neck. It is not nothing to take a man’s life, but one man’s life balanced against the lives of all the people on your own land? You choose them. You protect them.”
So, in this way, I had killed men.
Not often. Twice. One man had stolen horses from my stables, wounding several of my servants in the meantime. Another had been caught doing awful things to a crippled boy, one of the sons of a tenant. The child was touched in the head, and I suppose the man thought he could get away with it for that reason, because the child did not speak.
This was different, though.
I tried to tell myself it was the same, that it was a kind of justice, and that I was doing it for others, for the people who Wickham had trespassed against, that I must prevent him from further trespass in the future, but…
I knew it was because I hated him for what he had done to me. I knew it was vengeance, not justice, and I knew that vengeance and justice lived close together, bedfellows perhaps, but they were not the same thing. Justice was purer and what I sought to do was less clean.
However, I could not see anything for it.
I could not allow Wickham to do this sort of thing to me with no consequence. He had within himself the means to ruin my sister, and he could go about spreading rumors of himself and Elizabeth, regardless of their truth. If he had gotten a child on my wife, then…
I could not let these sorts of insults go unpunished.
It was not what a man did.
Richard and I watched him in the encampment with the regiment.
“If we are witnessed,” he said, “we shall have to publicly challenge him, and he doesn’t deserve it that way.”
“No,” I said. “Furthermore, it would only cast aspersions, and I will not have that. He does not get to trespass against me further, nor against the women in my life further.”
