Page 70 of Elizabeth and Caroline
The arrow struck. But she shrugged. “It’s been made plain to me that I never really made matches. That—if I had any influence over anyone—it was a temporary sort of thing, a guiding of impulsiveness in the moment, nothing more. I wasn’t making people fall in love with each other. No one can do that. No one can control another person.”
Mr. Wickham shook his head. “That isn’t true. One certainly can take charge of others. It’s not even difficult.”
“He couldn’t actually take charge of you, could he?” said Elizabeth. “The elder Mr. Darcy, I mean. He made you do things, when he was alive, but when it came down to it, after his death, if you wished to defy his wishes, you could and you did. That’s why you never took the position as the rector, the one he wanted for you. You didn’t take it because you needed to prove to yourself that he didn’t actually control you.”
Mr. Wickham shot up from the bed. “That living was taken from me.”
“Do you believe that lie?” she said. “Have you told it so many times that you have convinced yourself it’s true?”
Mr. Wickham’s nostrils flared. “Fitzwilliam took that from me. He was always jealous of how close I was with his father—”
“I think,” said Elizabeth, “that my husband knew—I don’t know what he knew—but he knew that whatever his father did with you was some kind of mistreatment. I think he felt sorry for you. And I think he felt some kind of latent responsibility. Because that is who my husband is.”
Mr. Wickham grimaced. “No. No, it was not mistreatment. He was a good man. He was good to me.”
“Is that the sort of person you wish to be, George?” Elizabeth made her voice soft. She used his first name. “Do you wish to be the sort of person who uses and abuses people, just like he was? Do you wish to harm girls, who you well know arenotgrown?”
Mr. Wickham bowed his head. He dragged his hand over his neck and the back of his hair, making it stand up. To the floor, he mumbled, “I haven’t touched them. I was going to. I just… Virginia knows what rooms they’re in.” Abruptly, he bolted past them, throwing open the door. He rushed out into the hallway.
Caroline let out a cry as he pushed past her. She turned to go after him, but Elizabeth stopped her.
“Let him go,” she said quietly.
Caroline turned to her, her eyes wide. “Eliza! Do you think he meant…?”
“Let’s go find Mrs. Younge,” said Elizabeth.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“THERE YOU ARE!” said Mr. Simmons as Elizabeth and Caroline were coming down the stairs. “I have been looking all over for you. I told you to stay where you were.” Then, he cringed. “Oh, apologies, ma’am, but if anything happened to you—”
“Mrs. Younge knows where both my sister and Miss Darcy are,” Elizabeth interrupted. “Mr. Wickham has them both here somewhere.”
“Oh, she knows something,” agreed Mr. Simmons. “She is holding tight to her loyalty to that man for some reason or other, however. She will tell me nothing.”
“Allow us to speak to her,” said Elizabeth.
Mrs. Younge swore up and down she had no idea about either of the girls and it wasn’t until she had confirmed that Mr. Wickham wasn’t in his room and that he had taken his horse from the stables and that Elizabeth and Caroline had both indicated to her, again and again, that Mr. Wickham had told them to seek the girls’ location from her, that she finally caved to their requests and took them to two separate rooms and retrieved both Lydia and Georgiana.
Lydia was animated, boisterous, demanding to know what had become of her husband-to-be, and Georgiana was quiet, but through a long and convoluted questioning, much of which took place in the carriage ride back to the Darcy town house, they got the way of what had happened.
Neither of the girls had been aware of the other.
Mr. Wickham had done it all without involving the other girl in the scheme. He had taken Lydia yesterday morning, promised her that they would be going to Gretna Green, and indicating they would stop over for the night in London at the boarding house. He’d deposited her there and then apparently gone directly to seek out Georgiana.
Georgiana had taken some convincing.
He had not seen or spoken to her in over six months, after all. Georgiana explained that he had met her after she was leaving the day school she attended. They had spoken, but she’d ultimately left him to come home.
Then, he’d come back that evening, while Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were at the ball, sneaked into her bedchamber and tried to get her to come. When she had adamantly refused him again and again, he’d said the final thing that had convinced her.
“He said I was already ruined,” said Georgiana. “He said that, if he wished, he could spread the tale far and wide, tell everyone I was already his. He said that when he was done, he would demand that my brother pay him to take me off his hands and end the scandal. And he said that it didn’t matter what I did, that it was already finished. I had no say. After I had agreed and was with him, I began to realize it must not be true, but he has this way about him when he is talking. It becomes ever so hard to think for oneself.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Lydia said quietly. She had taken the news that Mr. Wickham had some other girl in another part of the boarding house rather hard. Her boisterousness now was quite subdued. “He could talk you into doing nearly anything, couldn’t he?”
But he had done nothing to either of the girls, not so much as kissed them, it seemed, and they both agreed this was true.
Elizabeth thought that it had never quite been about that for Mr. Wickham. It had been about the challenge, as he said. He simply wanted to convince the girls to come with him, to see if he could. Once he had them there, both ofthem, he didn’t seem to quite know what to do with them.
