Under Such Circumstances, page 5
Elizabeth went still. He had done it on purpose?
“No, that is not the way at all,” said Mr. Wickham. “My leg did seem very hurt, but then I put some weight upon it—”
“There is no way to mistake a broken leg for what appears to be absolutely no injury at all,” said Mr. Darcy. They were walking on a trail now, and it had forced them to walk single file. She was following Mr. Wickham, who was leading the way, and Mr. Darcy was bringing up the rear, so she heard his voice at her back. “Also, you are forgetting that I just fell off that bridge into that gully, and it would be quite difficult to break one’s leg in that fall. It looks far worse than it actually is.”
Mr. Wickham turned to shoot him a nasty look. “I tell you, I was in a great deal of pain.”
“Which all conveniently faded the minute you and Miss Bennet were alone,” said Mr. Darcy. “What did you do to her?”
Elizabeth started to shake.
Wickham sounded quite pleased with himself. “She’s mine now. No other man would want something I’ve staked my claim on in such a way.”
Mr. Darcy’s voice was very quiet. “You couldn’t have been alone for longer than half an hour. You can’t have…” He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.
She turned back to look at him.
“What happened?” he said.
She shook him off, feeling like she might start crying.
Mr. Darcy went around her on the path and slammed a hand into the back of Wickham’s head.
“Ouch!” cried Wickham, turning round to face him.
The rain was coming down in sheets now, and they were all soaked. Mr. Darcy had rain dripping off his nose, off his chin. Wickham shoved a lock of his own wet hair out of his face.
“You blackguard,” said Mr. Darcy. “If you forced yourself on her, it’s a hanging offense—”
“She was quite willing,” said Mr. Wickham.
Mr. Darcy punched Mr. Wickham.
Well, he tried.
Mr. Wickham ducked at the last second and barreled into Mr. Darcy’s chest, driving himself head first into the other man.
They both stumbled backwards into the trunk of a tree.
Mr. Darcy was wheezing because Wickham had thrust his head forcefully into his chest, and he flailed against the tree trunk for a moment as Wickham straightened.
Wickham, expression venomous, punched Darcy.
Darcy’s nose exploded in a gush of red that mingled with the rain on his face. He grunted.
He punched Wickham back, two punches in the middle of his stomach.
And then Elizabeth rushed forward and said, “Stop it. You have to stop it.”
Darcy looked at her, distracted.
And Wickham used that moment to hit Darcy in the face again.
Darcy let out another grunt and he went after Wickham, who danced away, saying, “You remember how this went when we were boys, don’t you, Fitzie?”
“Yes, I remember you always wished me to play at being your whipping boy,” growled Darcy, seizing Wickham from behind, wrapping an arm around his neck.
Wickham drove his elbow into Darcy.
Darcy gasped and loosened his grip.
Wickham freed himself and hit Darcy in the face again.
“Stop it!” cried Elizabeth, who was beginning to realize that Mr. Wickham was probably going to beat Mr. Darcy because he was… well, look at him. He slept every night in a tent in the militia, and Mr. Darcy slept in a cushy bed in an estate. Mr. Wickham was the son of a servant, and Mr. Darcy owned estates. If it came down to brute strength, she wasn’t sure that Mr. Darcy had a real hope of besting the other man. “Stop it right now!”
Both men turned to her, their faces wet with rain (and with blood in Darcy’s case.) They stopped.
“Well?” said Mr. Darcy. “Were you willing, Miss Bennet?”
“Stop interrogating my future wife,” said Mr. Wickham, slinging an arm around her, and pulling her in against his chest.
She could not breathe, but she went very still against him, and she didn’t fight.
“Tell him, Miss Bennet, tell him you liked it.”
She heard her voice, thin and blank, like it was someone else’s voice. “I liked it.”
Wickham kept his body draped suffocatingly over hers, and he pulled her down the path. “There, you see? She’s mine now. She didn’t want you, anyway.”
Behind them, Mr. Darcy huffed, and then he didn’t say anything else at all.
They all trooped through the rain until they came to a ramshackle building. It had moss growing on the roof, and the little porch on the front was collapsed in places.
Inside, the floor was dirt, but the roof kept the rain out, mostly, except for in a few places where it leaked. There was even a little fireplace. It was all one room and there was what remained of a bed in the back corner. The mattress had been burrowed into by mice, however, and the moldy straw was overflowing all over the dirt floor.
Mr. Wickham still had his arm around her.
She was discovering that she did not like the way he smelled.
But he did not let go of her, and he whispered things in her ear, things only she could hear. “You are going to be my wife. You haven’t a choice now. I spilled my seed with you, you know.”
Oh. That was what it was, then? The positively foul sticky liquid? That was a man’s seed?
“You could be carrying my child,” he whispered.
She went utterly still in shock and horror. No, no, no, that could not be right, could it? How did that make a child in her? Did it seep in through her skin? She had wiped it all off, she thought. She began to examine her hand now, looking for any trace of him left there, but it had all been washed away in the rain by now.
“So,” he breathed, “you see, it’s no good for you to claim I forced you, do you see that? You’re ruined either way.”
“What are you whispering about over there?” came Mr. Darcy’s voice from the other side of the room.
“Just little sweet nothings between sweethearts,” said Mr. Wickham.
No good for her to claim he forced her?
Had he forced her, then?
She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t liked it, but she also hadn’t stopped doing the things he wanted her to do. She’d kept at him, rubbing his stiff part up and down, of her own accord, even though she hadn’t really liked it. So, she wasn’t sure.
He probably thought she was doing it willingly.
She couldn’t even be sure why she hadn’t stopped. Maybe some part of her had wanted to do it?
She didn’t think so, but then… well, people were always tempted by this sin, and maybe that was why it felt the way it did, the confusing way. Because it was sin, so she didn’t like it, but she also hadn’t been able to stop, or hadn’t known she could, or…
She was doing the same thing now, though, wasn’t she, letting Mr. Wickham put his arm around her, letting him keep her here against him.
Abruptly, she extricated herself from the man, moving away. “Mr. Darcy, someone should see to your face,” she said. “You are bleeding. Have you a handkerchief?”
“You don’t need to see to him,” said Wickham, annoyed.
“Well, you are the one who made him bleed,” said Elizabeth. “And I don’t see why, really, sweetheart.” She put a lot of emphasis on the word.
“Because he was accusing me of being a rapist,” said Mr. Wickham. “And this is the way with him, as I have already told you. He lies about me. He makes it out as if I’ve done the absolute worst things.”
“Have you told me that?” Elizabeth was going through the gloomy shack to Mr. Darcy, who was standing stiffly and not really looking at either of them.
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Wickham, “when I told you of how he claimed I could not be a parson because I had no sense of righteousness.”
“I don’t think you said that to me,” said Elizabeth. “You said that he would not allow you to have that position because he was jealous that his father loved you so, and he did it to be mean-spirited.”
“Well, that was the root of it,” said Wickham, “that was the root of his making up tales about me, saying that I was the least pious man he’d ever met.”
Elizabeth’s nostrils flared. So, then, here it was. He was a liar, her Mr. Wickham. A liar, a cheat, a schemer, and he had made her put her hand into his trousers—she was sure of that, anyway. She might have kept touching him after he made her touch him, she had to admit that. She didn’t know if she’d been forced, but she’d been—at the very least—coerced. “A handkerchief, Mr. Darcy?”
“You’re wearing my jacket,” he said, his voice very, very deep.
She smiled. “Ah, well, so I am.” She reached inside the pockets and she came out with an envelope. She tucked it back away. “Apologies. I didn’t mean to find your private correspondence.”
“Actually, that’s yours,” said Mr. Darcy.
She fixed him with a look. “Why do you have a letter for me in the pocket of your jacket?”
He sighed heavily. “Oh, dash it all, it’s a very long story, Miss Bennet.” He pointed. “Why don’t you get my handkerchief from that pocket, and then you can peruse the letter yourself.”
“Did you read this?”
“No,” he said, affronted. “You can see for yourself the seal isn’t broken. I would not do such a thing.”
She gave him his handkerchief.
He dabbed gingerly at his bloody nose.
She pulled the letter out, and immediately, a drop of water fell onto it. The roof of this shack leaked. The ink ran. She jerked backward and managed to open it.
It was barely readable, however, ink running every which way. It was dark in the shack, light only coming through one window, and the light outside was not bright due to the storm. “It’s from my father,” she said. “My Aunt Bennet has died. How terribly sad. There’s…” She furrowed her brow. “No, I can’t make that out.” She went over nearer to the window, which had no glass in it anymore.
Rain blew in, peppering the paper with wetness and she jerked back again.
Oh, dear, the letter was entirely ruined. She couldn’t read a thing. She let out a little cry.
“I’m desperately sorry,” said Mr. Darcy. “I should never have had that letter.”
“Well, I got the part about my aunt dying. Certainly that’s why he wrote.” She folded the letter up again. She had nowhere else to put it, so she put it back in Mr. Darcy’s pocket. It was all very strange, however. It was unlike her father to write those sorts of letters. Even though it was his sister who had died, it would have fallen to either her mother or even one of her sisters to pass along that sort of family information.
Her father was unlikely to send her letters at all, really. If he did, they would often be short and as like to be a long and witty summary of the latest book he had read as to have any personal information.
She might have puzzled over this more if she hadn’t been struck again by what Mr. Wickham had whispered to her, that she might be gone with his child.
That crashed through her again, like a thunderclap.
She wanted to sob.
CHAPTER SIX
MR. DARCY COULD not believe that he had been so soundly beaten by Wickham. Certainly, Wickham had been unsportsmanlike about it, striking when Darcy was distracted, things of that nature, but… it was mortifying.
He was trying to ascertain what, exactly, had happened to Miss Bennet here, but he had to admit that he’d had little success with this sort of thing. When he’d tried to speak to Georgiana about it, she’d had very little to say about it either, and he’d wavered between fearing the worst and then being certain that nothing at all had happened to Georgiana, that Wickham had not so much as kissed her.
This was difficult to say, of course.
He’d tried to question her, but she only collapsed into tears, begging him not to be cross with her, not to hate her, not to disown her, and he had said that he would not, of course he would not. She was his only living family. She was his dear, precious sister. He would never abandon her, no matter what she had done.
He would have had Mrs. Younge question her, but that was impossible, for she had been duplicitous and had been part of the entire scheme.
So, he got various answers from Georgiana.
Had Wickham touched her?
No, of course not, she claimed. But in the next breath, she would say that he had assured her she was quite ruined and she knew it must be true.
Eventually, he’d just left it. She begged him to do so, saying she didn’t wish to speak of it, that she wanted to pretend it had never happened.
And he waited breathlessly for news of his own very young sister’s bleeding, which came, only two weeks hence, and he…
Tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, not at all. She was all right. She could forget it had happened. He would not force her to endure the touch of a man ever if she had been ravaged. It did not matter.
Except he knew it did.
He and his cousin Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam were both guardians of Georgiana, and he and Richard discussed it. Richard was of the opinion that they should simply do away with Wickham.
Darcy had pragmatically offered a duel instead.
Richard had said that you did not duel men like Wickham, because they weren’t gentlemen.
But Darcy knew things that Richard didn’t know. He’d been told on his deathbed that the elder Wickham, Mr. Samuel Wickham, the steward of Pemberley, was—in fact—his grandfather’s by-blow, and Wickham was his cousin.
Perhaps it made the idea of Wickham wanting to marry into the Darcy family, marrying Georgiana, make a certain sort of sense… except Wickham didn’t know. The elder Wickham, the steward, said that it would do the boy no good to know, that he would only make him more entitled than he already was.
Wickham’s father actually disapproved of the things that Darcy’s father had done for his son—or maybe it made him feel inadequate? Darcy could not say, but the elder Wickham did not think it made any sense to give his son ideas. He was not ever going to be a gentleman, and he should make his peace with it, that was the way of thinking to Wickham’s father.
Darcy’s father, however, had said to his son that blood was blood.
And Darcy himself knew it was more than that. It wasn’t simply that the Wickhams were tied to them by blood, it was a responsibility, and it was the weight of an inherited sin. They could not help but bear it, either him or his father. Though neither of them had done the deed, they bore the guilt in some ephemeral way.
Anyway, a duel, Darcy said, even though Richard said it was not the way.
If a gentleman had besmirched his sister’s honor, he would challenge him to a duel, said Darcy.
And Richard countered that no he would not, because it would only serve to ensconce the damage to his sister, destroying her reputation forever. Certainly, if the besmirchment had been public and everyone had seen, Darcy would demand satisfaction.
But if Wickham had been a gentleman, and it had been secret, as this had been, Richard pointed out that Darcy would have made Georgiana marry him.
Darcy knew it was true, with a sort of sinking sensation deep in his gut.
This is how you know he doesn’t deserve the dignity of a duel, Richard pronounced. Because you have never considered having them marry.
No, that wasn’t it at all. Darcy would never force Georgiana to marry a man who had done her violence, no matter how respectable that man was, no matter the damage to the family’s good name. No.
Anyway, then he did nothing at all.
Just let it all go. He didn’t seek Wickham out. He didn’t demand any kind of satisfaction nor did he attempt any kind of punitive measures.
Left him free, to hurt poor innocents like Miss Bennet, he thought, and he was ashamed of himself.
Well, he’d have to remedy the situation now, he realized, and he didn’t know quite how. It likely depended on Elizabeth herself. She had said she wanted it, whatever Wickham had done to her, and it wasn’t out of the range of reasonableness to think he had taken her virtue. They had been out of sight when Darcy broke that bridge, off in the woods there. She didn’t look as if her clothes had been removed, but maybe all Wickham did was lift her skirts.
Lord, don’t think about that in any detail, he scolded himself. The idea of Wickham doing that to the poor woman, picturing it, it was likely to make him gag.
Yesterday, he had thought this woman was going to be his wife.
He fixed her with a look. All right, here was the truth of it. She was not fifteen, not like his very young and very innocent sister had been. Elizabeth Bennet was twenty years of age, self-possessed, sharp-tongued, capable of taking him apart where he stood, capable of destroying him coldly.
He was not saying it was entirely her own fault if Wickham had ruined her, of course. Wickham had the lion’s share of the blame. But she should have put up a fight or something, he thought, looking her over. She should have at least attempted to stop him. Maybe she would not have been able to do so, but she should have tried.
Yes, easy for you to say, he thought, countering himself. You are not a full four inches shorter than him, slighter in frame, and you are not a woman.
She might have felt it was foolish to fight him. She might have given in because she thought it was safer to go along with him.
None of this mattered, he didn’t suppose.
Wickham was dangerous to women. This was clear. He must be stopped.
After the rain stopped, when they got back across the bridge, he would challenge Wickham to a duel. He wouldn’t do it over Miss Bennet. He had no right to do so, no reason to be connected to her or to protect her honor. He would not do it over Georgiana either.
He would need to manufacture some slight against his honor, and it shouldn’t be difficult. Duels were sometimes fought over trifles, some real or imagined insult. Wickham would likely provide it himself if Darcy simply waited.
Once the rain stopped.
Except the rain did not stop.
The rain went on and on, and the thunder crashed and the lightning split the sky and the rain poured down on them, pounding on the roof like an incessant drum beat, and he began to think that the gully was going to fill with rainwater if this kept up and it might take a day or two to go down, and it would make it materially more difficult to cross.
