Page 66 of Knowing Mr. Darcy
George Wickham was definitely not equipped to love her. Wickham was broken inside somewhere. Deep under his layers of defense and idiocy beat the heart of a puppy dog. True, he had done all manner of terrible things to the people he cared about, but he still felt as if his family had rejected him, and he would never get over it.
Wickham’s place in the Darcy household had always been precarious, of course, and Wickham had sensed that.
Something had risen in him, his own perverseness, Anne supposed. She had enough perverseness of her own, so she could spot it in other people. He had needed to test his place in the family, to poke it, to make sure it was real. So, he’d begun doing awful things, and… well, lo and behold, it turned out that the only thing people wanted from him was compliance.
If he did bad things to them, they didn’t want him around.
So, Wickham felt rejected.
In that, they were kindred spirits, she supposed. Neither of them able to do what society demanded of them, both of them cast out and left alone.
He took the pipe from her and puffed it.
“Give that back.” She tried to take it back.
He held it out of her reach and laughed in her face.
Anne folded her arms over her chest and glowered. She was not going to play this game. “Wickham. You sentmethe letter.”
He gave her back the pipe, sullen. “It’s a nasty habit, pipe smoking.”
“And you have a small prick,” she said, settling down on the swing and puffing on the pipe, sullen herself.
“No I don’t,” he said.
She did that sometimes. Saw vulnerable bits of people and clawed at them. Retaliated in a way that was out of proportion.
He sat down on the swing with her. “How many other pricks have you seen besides mine?”
“Hundreds,” she said, which was a lie.
He snorted, believing her. “You’re going to get yourself with child or you’re going to get some sort of disease.”
“George,” she said, blowing smoke in his face again, “whatdo you want?”
“Oh,” he said. “I think there’s a girl here.”
“A girl?”
“Her name is Jane. She’s an angel. I want to marry her, and I thought maybe I could get you to give me some money.”
“What?” She turned on him, utterly confused and disgusted. “You want me to give you money so that you can get married?”
“Well, not for nothing.” He lifted his shoulders. “I’ll do something in return if you but name it. Sometimes, you do just give me money, though. You gave me money for the commission in the regiment.”
She’d felt sorry for him. He had that puppy-dog thing deep in him. It was affecting sometimes. “How much money?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I thought there was some other woman with money. Miss Knave or something.”
“King,” he said. “Miss King. Well, that didn’t work out.”
“Because you did something wrong?”
“I missed her,” said Wickham. “Jane, I mean. And her mother. And her father. And her sisters, too. Especially the young one, Lydia. She’s fun. I like it there with them. It’s agood place. I want to go back.”
“You’re not starving or something, George,” she said. “You have the commission. You have an education. There are a number of things you could do for money besides extorting it from me.”
