Curiosity piqued, I crept down the stairs so I didn’t disturb the scene, like I was a child again and Darcy was waking me up early to show me the baby rabbits hopping around Pemberley’s lawn.
It was indeed Kitty’s excitement that had caught my attention. She was talking animatedly, waving her hands around as she tried to relay a tale to a young woman who hadn’t even taken off her travelling cloak yet.
The new figure could only be the final Bennet sister. She had the same blonde curls peeking out from under a bonnet, but her features seemed more severe than those of the others. Angular cheeks and a sharp chin gave her an air of superiority when her face was at rest. In my surprise, I’d kicked my foot against the base of the door, and the childish gleam in her eyes faded to suspicion as she shifted her gaze from Kitty to me.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Of course Lydia would be here. I had never thought over the matter, but it made just as much sense as Elizabeth, Jane, and Kitty coming home to see their father. And Elizabeth and Jane had both been escorted by their husbands.
The thought of seeing Wickham forced every rule from every etiquette book straight out of my head. Rather than answering Lydia’s question or enquiring about her journey, I turned and ran.
I ignored both the confused voice—Kitty’s voice—calling my name behind me and the twinge in my knee as I fled from the house. If that was where Lydia was, I had to assume that was where Wickham was, too. So I needed to be as far away from it as possible. Even the Bennets’ grounds were too close. I was more than willing to get lost in the woods to avoid the monsters of my past, so I turned into the forest that borderedthe property and weaved between the trees until my chest was heaving and my knee was protesting with enough conviction that I had no choice but to listen.
Stopping myself in my tracks with my hands against a tree trunk, I felt the bark scrape my skin. My blood was rushing in my ears from the shock and the exertion, and I turned to rest my back against the trunk and slide down until I was sitting amid the roots and fallen leaves. I felt the texture of them crunching under my weight but couldn’t focus on sounds enough to hear them. I didn’t hear Kitty, either, not until she was dropping to her knees beside me. It was only when her hands were on my face that I startled, realising she had followed me all the way out here.
“George, please,” she begged. “Talk to me.”
Despite everything, the nickname settled me just a little. I hadn’t heard it in what felt like so long, and it proved Kitty still harboured some degree of fondness for me, even if she tried to convince herself otherwise. She was so earnest, her panic so reminiscent of the night of the ball at Pemberley. It was endearing that her concern for my well-being could overpower her concern of the dangers of getting too close. I dropped my head against her shoulder, my face turned into her neck while I breathed her in.
As I calmed down, Kitty calmed down a little with me. She wrapped an arm around me, keeping me close as she shifted to sit properly beside me.
“Please, tell me what’s going on,” she said, resting her chin on the top of my head.
“I had forgotten…” I tried, but I didn’t know how to put it properly into words.
Understandably, it was not enough to lead Kitty to the intended conclusion. I could hear the confusion in her voice, feel it in the way her fingers tracing circles on my arm stumbled across my skin.
“Forgotten about Lydia?” she asked.
“That she is married to…”
I couldn’t say it. I hadn’t even thought about him so directly in as long as I could manage. Kitty shared no such reluctance.
“Wickham?”
I flinched away from the name, as if it could hurt me, pulling out of Kitty’s arms and hugging my unwounded knee to my chest. Peering at her over my skirts, I watched her raise an eyebrow sceptically. She asked no question out loud, but I could see it in her eyes.
“I never stopped to think that perhaps he might be here,” I tried to explain, assuming she would soon make the necessary connections.
“He never visits. Lydia came alone,” Kitty promised. She reached out and squeezed my fingers at my resulting sigh of relief. “George, I still don’t understand.”
She sounded genuine in her confusion, but I could only presume it was an act of deception to attempt to reassure me not everyone knew the sordid details of my prior associations with Wickham.
“You cannot tell me you didn’t hear,” I said, bitterness seeping into the words.
Darcy had admitted to me that he’d laid the story out for Elizabeth, to explain away Wickham’s lies, and apologised for telling her without any forewarning for me. I understood his reasons so I’d not even stayed upset, but it was clear Elizabeth had told at least her eldest sister. When I’d first met Jane Bingley, then still a Bennet, there had been so much pity in her smile that she couldn’t possibly not have known. I assumed it was common knowledge to the entire Bennet family.
Only Kitty’s confusion continued, too entrenched not to be genuine.
“I assure you,” she said, as cautious as she might be with a wounded animal, “I have heard nothing that would give me any insight into why you ran. Are you hurt? Is it your knee?”
There were two versions of the story. I considered for a moment which version to tell her—the version I’d stuck to from the beginning, the one my brother and Elizabeth knew. Or what had really happened.
The false truth that had been shared amongst my kin made me look foolish. An easily led child, swept up in the affections of a charming older man and cajoled with compliments and flattery into risking her reputation to escape to be married at once. It was not an entirely impossible story—some girls did fall prey to such figures. Lydia Wickham had been one of them. Darcy had not doubted the tale for a moment. He had no reason to, for why would someone construct a fiction that made them appear so tragically misguided? Only when the truth made them appear even worse, of course.
Naive and misled was infinitely preferable to a corrupted temptress, living a life of sin and determined to take others with her in her fall. That was how Wickham had threatened to paint me if I did not do as he instructed. When he found me kissing Helena in a room we thought we’d have privacy in, I’d been given a choice. He would denounce us both as the immoral sinners we were, ruining our reputations and that of our families, or I could marry him.
It was my money he wanted, not me. I was worth both a fortune to him and nothing at all. The idea of marrying him, especially with how he’d looked at me like I was filth, was enough to turn my stomach, but there was no other viable alternative. I would never allow Darcy’s reputation to suffer because of my decisions, something Wickham likely presumed would be the case, but I also couldn’t let Helena’s life end so tragically, either. She was all but promised to a viscount who would be able to provide a comfortable living for her. Wickham’s threats would have seen her likely cast out by her family before that wedding could take place.
