They made eyes at each other over the breakfast table. They went on walks on the grounds of Pemberley and they would start out walking with two feet between each other and drift closer and closer. When they thought no one was looking their hands would brush and their bodies would grow close and he would put his arm around her, and she would gaze up at him with this look on her face of sheer happiness, and I wondered what it was that I had done.
I took Richard aside. “You should go,” I said.
“Go?” he said, stunned. “I certainly cannotgo, Will.”
“You will find some other woman to tup back in London. You cannot be here when her husband returns.”
“Yes, but her husband won’t mind,” he said.
“We do not know that,” I said. “She concocted this idea all on her own, and he may not be the least bit pleased. It was Bingley who offered me free access to his wife, not Bennet. And Bennet does not like me, you know, he does not like me at all.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, he has some idea that I am not right for his sister, I suppose,” I said. “But I don’t like him either.”
“You don’t?”
“No, he corrupted poor Elizabeth—”
“Your wife? He corrupted her?”
“Yes, she never would have gone off with Mr. Wickham if she had not been under the influence of her brother. She wished to have some sort of love affair like her brother’s, and this is why she did it.”
Richard did not say anything.
“You don’t agree?”
“Well, what was Georgiana’s excuse, then?”
“Oh, Georgiana did not run off with Mr. Wickham. She did not go in a carriage bound for Scotland with the man.”
“No, but she was willing to marry him, Will,” said Richard. “I think you must take into consideration that it’s possible that women just found him attractive. He was a devil of a man, and I am not sorry he’s gone, but he was easy to look at. Women liked looking at him.”
I gaped at him.
“This is a revelation to you, that women find men attractive?” said Richard. “Or is it simply that you cannot bear that your wife might have ever wanted someone who wasn’t you?”
I flinched.
He sighed. “Will, you have so many advantages. You don’t even understand what it is to be a man who looks the way youdo, who has so much money, and who is so…” He shrugged. “You have no notion what it is to be me, you see.”
“You are the son of an earl. You hardly suffer.”
He pointed at his face. “I am not what anyone would term handsome, Darcy.”
“That does not matter, though—”
“Eventually, it does not matter,” he said. “Eventually, other things are more important. But if you are someone like Mr. Wickham, it’s an advantage you can use to get whatever you want. And with you, it takes so long to get beneath to the real you, the part that isn’t just rules and stiffness and fear of being wrong, that you are quite lucky to look the way you are. If you didn’t, you would not have been able to get by with your disposition. You would have had to cultivate one like mine.”
“I have no control over my disposition,” I said.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “I think you should reconsider your anger towards Bennet, that’s all.”
I sighed. “Perhaps.”
He furrowed his brow. “And when is he coming back?”
“In a week,” I said.
