Page 38 of The Marriage Articles

“The man your mother wrote of, whose name you spoke at dinner. It may be another person bearing the same appellation, and I would not rashly assume otherwise. Yet I fear it is very likely the man himself. His name is George Wickham. My father was his godfather, and loved him, and paid for his education as he paid for his own son. At my father’s death, he left him a valuable living in the Church, to be his when he should be ordained.” He kept his eyes on her. “Wickham had no intention of being ordained. He had no intention of anything but pleasure. He came to me within the year and offered to resign all claim to the living in exchange for three thousand pounds in ready money. I was glad to pay it, for the living was in my gift, and I did not wish him in any pulpit of my father’s.”

Elizabeth’s mouth had tightened.

“He took the money. He ran through it in less than three years, on gaming and on debts of the sort a gentleman does not name in company. Then he came back to me and asked for the living after all, on the grounds that the arrangement had been a mistake. I refused him.”

She sat back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap.

“A year ago Georgiana was fifteen, and she was taken from school to Ramsgate, in the care of a companion I chose badly. Wickham discovered where she was. He had known her since she was a child, and he called on the companion, who was pleased to see him, and he paid court to a girl of fifteen and her fortune of thirty thousand pounds.”

Elizabeth had gone very still.

“He persuaded her that she was in love. He persuaded her that the only honourable course was an elopement, privately arranged, with the companion’s connivance.” Darcy heard how level his voice had become and wondered that it cost him so much to keep it there. “I arrived at Ramsgate the day before they were to leave. I had come on a visit, unannounced. Georgiana told me everything. Her terror was too great for any concealment.”

The fire shifted in the grate. A log settled, and a small spray of sparks went up the chimney.

“What did you do?” Elizabeth said. It was almost a whisper.

“I sent the companion away the same evening. I wrote to Wickham, and he left the town before morning, because he knew better than to meet me. Georgiana I brought home.” He stopped. “She believed for a long time that it was her fault. That is what he left behind him. A girl who thinks her own heart is evidence against her character.”

For a while Elizabeth said nothing at all. She had turned her face away from him, towards the fire, and he could see her jaw working. Her fingers were tight together in her lap.

“That man,” she said at last, and the two words had more contempt in them than any speech he had ever heard her make. “That man... A girl of fifteen. He counted on her silence, did he not? Men like that always count on silence. It is their whole capital.”

“Yes.”

“Then I will speak to Georgiana tomorrow, if she is well enough.”

The fire crackled. Neither of them spoke for a moment. He watched the flame. She was quiet a brief space longer. Then she said, very evenly, “That man is in Hertfordshire. He is with the militia regiment quartered at Meryton, and the officers are dined and danced at every house in the county, my aunt Phillips’s foremost. He is charming, as you say. My youngest sisters are fifteen and seventeen and have no more discretion than the red coats dancing about them.”

“Leave him to me,” he said.

There was a small silence before him, of a different quality from the last. Elizabeth was watching him with a steady, searching gravity, her thoughts plainly outrunning her speech.

“What do you intend to do?” she said.

“I hold his debts. Not all of them, but enough. My solicitor has been buying them up quietly since last year, against the day he became a nuisance I could no longer watch from a distance. My solicitor will go to him with a choice. He may sell his commission, take ship for the Continent or anywhere else that is not England, and on proof of his going, his debts are cleared. Or he may stay, and be called in, and learn what the inside of a debtor’s prison looks like from a bunk.” He heard the hardness in his own voice and did not soften it. “I will not have him within reach of Meryton.”

Elizabeth had risen from her chair while he spoke. She stood with her hands folded and her face turned up to him.

“It is a good plan,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Elizabeth turned a page of her book and did not read it. The library at Darcy House was warm past what the morning required, a fire lit against the chill of the season and daylight coming through the tall windows in pale slabs.

Georgiana stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame. She did not come in. Her face had that particular stillness Elizabeth had seen at dinner, when a name was spoken that should not have been.

“Come in,” Elizabeth said, and her voice came out warm and unhurried, which pleased her, because she had not been sure it would. “You will let all the heat out into the hall, and the fire has done too much work this morning to be wasted.” She patted the seat beside her on the sofa. “Sit by me. The book is dull and I should be glad of an excuse to abandon it.”

Georgiana crossed the room, each step careful and slow. She sat at the far end of the sofa, and then, after a moment, shifted a little nearer, and she did not look at Elizabeth. Her hands lay in her lap and were very tightly folded.

“Has my brother told you?” Georgiana said to her own hands.

“He has.”

“All of it?”

“All of it,” Elizabeth said. “And if you are sitting there wondering whether I think the worse of you for it, you may stop. The blame was placed where it belongs, and it does not belong on you.”