“I could not,” I said.
“Why did you come back to Hertfordshire?” she said. “Was it truly because you thought you could stop thinking about me if you did?”
“Does your brother faithfully repeat every conversation he has with absolutely everybody back to you?” I was a bit irritated.
She gave me a wan smile. “We are quite close. We have always been so. Until lately, that is. And now I’ve gone and gotten myself ruined and everything is calamity. I am ever so ashamed of myself.”
I knew I had said we were not going to cast blame, and that I had avoided her comment on this in the first place, but I found myself asking her anyway, “Why did you go with Mr. Wickham in the first place?”
“Jealousy, I think,” she said, squaring her shoulders.
“Jealousy?” I was quite confused. That made positively no sense.
“If it had been James, he wouldn’t have been jealous,” she muttered. “James is so very good, you know. He is so honorable and so trusting and so willing to see the good in absolutely everyone, and he thinks that his…” She glanced at the sleeping colonel. “His attraction to men is some flaw that he must compensate for, but he has no flaws. He is my perfect and wonderful elder brother. I have looked up to him my whole life. I thought he and I would spend our lives traveling the world together. We had such plans.”
“You were jealous of your brother,” I said. He had said something similar, in fact.
She nodded, looking miserable. “I wanted a Mr. Bingley of my own, I suppose.” She tilted her head to the side. “Well, I have thought of a solution to all of it, actually, one that will mean that I am able to be with James forever, and one that will save my reputation if done quickly enough.”
“You have?” I was astonished.
“Mr. Bingley can marry me,” she said.
I did not like that idea at all.
“He won’t mind, you see, whatever it was with Mr. Wickham—”
“What was it with Mr. Wickham?” I cut in. “You have said that he did nothing to you.”
“Oh, well, I am quite intact and all of that,” she said. “I had told him, when we left, that I wished to wait until my wedding night, that it was important to me. Even though we were eloping, even though in the eyes of society, it was already done, I said that in the eyes of God, we would not be married until we had stood over the anvil in Scotland, and I wished to wait. He was all solicitude when I said that. He was all solicitude up until the point we were in the carriage together, and then he became… awful.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “He pressed you, then?”
“At first he was nagging me about it, about wishing for more liberties than I wanted to give him. And then he put his hands on me and I struggled and then he hit me, so I hit him back. Then he was quite cross with me.” Her lower lip began to tremble.
“If it bothers you to recount it, you needn’t,” I said.
“I think I must,” she said. “I think I must get it out, say what happened, say what he did.”
I gave her a solemn nod. “All right, then.”
“Well, then, he told me he was not going to marry me at all. He said he was going to… to have me, though, and he would make sure that I was already…” She drew in a breath. “Already soiled, so that I could not protest any further. So, we got to the inn and he dragged me into that taproom and he tore my dress, and he tried to bare my bosom to everyone in there—to all of the travelers—and that is when I got free of him and looked for something, anything, to stop him with.”
“And you hit him with the poker?”
“Not just once. It wentintohim, into his skin, and I pulled it out, and I brought it downagain.” She shuddered and pulled the quilt close. “I am ever so stupid.”
“You’re not, Miss Bennet,” I said. “In all truth, I lay a great deal of the blame at your brother’s feet, for he should not have let you in on so much of his secrets. Your brother, even though you think he is good, is caught up in unnatural—”
“It is not James’s fault!”
I was quiet.
“I am stupid,” she said. “Stupid to trust Mr. Wickham. Stupid not to heed what James said, when he said he was a fortune hunter, and that he had taken advantage of other women. You were the one who told him that, I suppose. You knew Mr. Wickham since you were boys.”
I nodded. “I did. I stayed to try to save you from him, but I seem to have failed at that, rather spectacularly.”
She gave me a sad smile. “Would that I would have listened to you.”
