“George! Listen to me.” She tried to jerk her arm away from him, but he was stronger. “Lord! I can’t go with you.”
He sneered at her.
She really was just like a virgin in this matter. All smiles, touches, bumps and eagerness. Then once they were together in the bed, “No, no, no. I can’t.”
Wickham felt himself go hard. She’d be hesitant like that also when they reached the inn tonight, and he finally took her. He hadn’t had a woman for three weeks, and he hadn’t had a virgin for more than a year.
“George.” She writhed and wriggled harder. Pulling and shoving at him to try to get away when he pulled her next to the carriage.
“If you did not want to come with me, why did you come at all?”
“I couldn’t just leave you standing here, when I’d promised to meet.” She gasped. “That would have been awful, as though you were a joke. You aren’t, but—”
“Get in.”
She shook her head.
He pushed her up to the carriage.
But the girl refused to move.
Lydia was a tall, vigorous young woman, used to running, dancing, archery, and occasionally wrestling with the other girls from her school when they annoyed her. She angrily pushed Wickham away from her, and writhed her way out of his grasp.
After backing away several steps while staring at him, she angrily shouted, “I’d have not come, if I’d known you’d be a brute, George.”
“Fuck you, bitch.”
Wickham leapt on her. He grabbed the arm of her dress, and she desperately shoved and punched and kneed him. She tried to hit him with her head.
Wickham however was a man well used to dealing with the ineffectual struggles of women, and he knew that in general, once the matter was settled and beyond recovery, they were as eager as he to hide what happened from the world.
After two minutes of effort he had Lydia tangled together in his arms in a way where she could no longer strike effectively at him with any part of her body. He then dragged her towards the carriage, preparing to shove her up into the cart.
“I’ll scream,” she said.
“You won’t,” he replied with certainty. “It would ruin your reputation as thoroughly as mine.”
She screamed, and he punched her in the face to cut off the sound.
“Damn, damn girl! What is wrong with you?”
She cracked him in the head with her head again, and in the daze she leaped out of his grip, and began to scamper away.
Wickham was beginning to hate Lydia Bennet more than he’d ever hated any other woman, and he’d hated many women.
He barely managed to grab her by her boots and pull her to the ground.
She instantly flipped back over, and pulled in a breath, preparing to kick him in the face and scream bloody murder once more.
And he pulled his revolver from his coat pocket.
Miss Lydia Bennet was not in fact immune to fear.
She went white and stared at the metal weapon, her eyes wide and wobbly.
“George, you—”
“Get in the carriage.”
