“He is a very capable man.” Caroline sighed a bit longingly. “I was never so frightened as I was the moment before he kicked the door in.”
Elizabeth shuddered. Mr. Wickham’s body, the bullet hole in his head.
“I suppose…” Caroline said. “I am glad he is dead, but I cannot help but feel sorry for Mr. Wickham.”
“You have sympathy for him! He tried to force you to marry him.”
Caroline raised one eyebrow in a way that made Elizabeth laugh.
“I would not say I have sympathy for him — he was a violent man. But one must be consistent. I can only judge him for attempting to force me into a marriage to the extent that I also judge myself.”
“I despise consistency, and I despise Mr. Wickham,” Elizabeth said viciously. “He also — oh, but I ought not tell you that. It is not my story to tell, but—”
“Did he once seduce Miss Darcy?”
Elizabeth gasped. “How did you guess — I believe from how the incident was spoken about that her honor is fully intact.”
“Poor Georgiana!” Caroline replied. “Mrs. Younge told me some things that led me to guess that something of the sort had happened.”
“Poor Mr. Darcy, he had been so close to Wickham as a child. Caroline, promise me that we’ll never do anything that will irrevocably separate us from each other.”
Caroline took Elizabeth’s hand. “Never. I have made all the truly serious ill decisions that I mean to make in my life.”
“You saved Lydia. That will count for a great deal with everyone,” Elizabeth said.
“I do not expect — I may have a heroic reputation in addition to a scandalous one, but the scandalous one shall remain — but must everyone know about poor Lydia? She is much too young for her reputation to be damaged seriously already.”
Elizabeth grimaced but shrugged. “If she is a sensible, restrained, and even quiet girl for the next five years, I am sure no one will remember this story as anything but youthful high spirits.”
“OurLydie a sensible girl?” Caroline laughed. “Little chance of that. But perhaps in five years, if she does not do anything else particularly stupid, it will not weigh on her. But five years is a terrible long time. But I am very glad Lydia escaped without a loss to anything but her reputation.”
“Did you,” Elizabeth asked cautiously, feeling an anxiety in her gut. “Did you suffer any loss besides the… uh…”
Her friend looked at her in a funny way, and then she let out a gust of air. “That! No, no. No — of course I might say nothing had happened no matter what the truth was… except no. Not to you. I would never hide such an event from you. I feared it, but he did not try to take me. The woman who imprisoned me, Mrs. Younge. She had a fear of Mr. Darcy’s name, and Wickham simply mentioning that I had once had an interaction with him was enough for her to insist that he not touch me while I was within her establishment.”
Elizabeth let out a breath, her stomach unclenching. “Oh, my poor Caroline.”
“I pressed myself into the corner the whole night, terrified to hear him clomping up the steps anyway.” She stared at her hands. “An awful night.”
It seemed to Elizabeth there was nothing to say in reply to that, so they sat holding hands together, until both fell asleep for a short nap on the couch before they were awoken for dinner.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was a familiar room that Caroline woke up in the next morning.
As her father’s business had been centered in Manchester, he had never owned a townhouse in London, and generally when business brought him to the capital he had stayed with the brother-in-law of his partner.
Then later when she had attended school with Elizabeth — at an establishment which, as the advertisements proclaimed it to be, was within easy reach of the metropolis — the two of them had frequently spent weekends, shorter holidays or the first few days of the longer holidays with the Gardiners.
Except in cases where they were entertaining other people and Elizabeth and Caroline were forced to share a room, this room in the Gracechurch Street house had been hers.
The reddish light of dawn beamed through the London fog and her window, and Caroline let out a long breath.
Nightmares all night, of course. But somehow they had not bothered her. Again and again that gun had been pointed at her, and she’d been unable to do anything. And each time, as Wickham went to pull the trigger he’d been shot, and Colonel Fitzwilliam was there.
Lord! Caroline hoped she would not go as soft in the head as she had with Mr. Darcy over him. He didn’t even like her. Or maybe he did.
But she owed him a great deal, and she would not forget that debt ever.
