Page 89 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

The library door opened. Elizabeth came in, and shut it behind her, and came across the room, and stood beside her husband at the fireplace. She did not say anything. She only put her hand through his arm, and stood there, and looked at George Wickham.

Darcy felt her hand on his arm, and the quiet thing in his chest that had no name grew very still and very steady.

"My wife," he said, "is going to hear this too. Everything. We decided so this morning. Whatever I say to you, George, I say in front of her."

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Elizabeth had not been sure, until she came through the library door, that she wanted to be there. She had lain in the big sunlit bed after he got up, listening to him shave next door, and thought about George Wickham at the ice-house grille with straw in his hair, saying I was fond of her once, when she was small, and she had not been sure she could bear to see his face again.

But Fitzwilliam had asked her. He had come back to the bed, half-shaved, with the soap still on one side of his jaw, and sat down on the edge of it, and said, I would like you to be there. Not to protect me. Only so that there is nothing I do in that room that you have not seen. And she had understood what he meant, and said yes.

So she stood beside him at the fireplace, with her hand through his arm, and watched him make his offer.

He did it very quietly. He did not threaten. He did not raise his voice once. He stood in his father's library with the late sun coming in at the tall windows and laid it out as calmly as he had laid out the evidence, like a man reading terms of sale.

"A full confession," he said. "In your own hand. Everything, from the first letter to the last. Who paid you, and how much, and when. What she told you to do, and what she told you to write. The wager, the paragraphs, the forgery in the Park. Ramsgate, and how she came to know of it, and what she paid you to make of it. And last night." His voice did not change. "Signed, and witnessed by Mr Fenwick. And anything you have that came from her hand. Anything at all."

"And in return?" said Wickham.

"In return, I will not bring any charge against you in the civil courts. Not for last night. Not for Ramsgate. Not for the libels, or the forgery, or the debts. My sister will not be made to stand up in a court of law and tell the world what you did to her." A pause. "And I will write to my cousin's general at Horse Guards, tonight, and ask that you not be tried for desertion. There is a regiment of foot under orders for New South Wales. It sails from Portsmouth in June. They are short of men. If you enlist as a private soldier, and go with it, and never set foot in England again, I believe it can be arranged."

Wickham stared at him.

"New South Wales," he said slowly. "Botany Bay."

"Sydney Cove. It is not the same thing. You will be a soldier, not a convict. You will be paid. After your enlistment is up, you may do as you please. There is land there for any man who will work it." Darcy's jaw tightened. "It is sixteen thousand miles from my wife and my sister. That is the whole of its recommendation."

There was a very long silence.

Elizabeth watched Wickham's face. She watched him weigh it: the gallows against the other side of the world. She watched him look for a way out, the way he had looked for one on the path by the ice house, turning from the water to the wood to the path, and find none. She saw the moment he understood that there was none. His shoulders came down. He looked, suddenly, very tired.

"You could hang me," he said, to Darcy. "You could simply let them. Nobody would blame you."

"No," said Darcy. "Nobody would."

"Then why?"

Darcy did not answer at once. He looked down at the hearthrug, the worn old Turkey carpet in front of the fire, and Elizabeth felt his arm go very still under her hand.

"Because my father loved you," he said at last, very low. "God knows why. He loved you until the day he died. I have spent ten years despising him for it. I find I do not want to spend the rest of my life despising myself." He lifted his head. "And because my wife asked me, in this house, not to go out on a heath at dawn and throw my life away on you. I am not going to hand it to a hangman instead."

Wickham looked at him. Then, slowly, he turned his head and looked at Elizabeth.

She did not look away.

"Mrs Darcy," he said. A ghost of the old smile. "May I ask you something? Since it seems we are to be honest, at the last."

"You may ask."

"At your aunt's card party. In Meryton. When I told you about the living. Did you believe me? For one moment?"

Elizabeth thought about it honestly. She thought about Mrs Phillips's hot scarlet parlour, and the handsome officer with the soft sad eyes who had sat down beside her at the lottery table, and how easy he had been to talk to, and how delightful. And how, all the while he talked, she had been thinking about a muddy lane, and a scratch on a glove.

"No," she said. "Not for one moment."

Wickham laughed. It was short and tired and rueful, and there was no malice in it at all.

"No," he said. "I did not think so." He looked down at his bound hands. "I have been trying to decide ever since what it was I did wrong. I think it was only that I came too late. You had already met him." He was quiet for a moment. Then he lifted his head, and his face had closed again, and he was himself.