She then saw that it would not have worked in any case.
The room looked much different now with the early morning light filtering through the windows than it had the previous evening.
Gone were the women in barely present dresses. None of the men were stripped to bare chests. The candles were out, there were only ashes in the fireplace. The look of the room was dingier, the wood paneling worn, broken off in places and soot soaked. The red draperies were a poor sort of chintz, not the silk that she had imagined the previous night. The stale scent of cigars and spilled beer and wine permeated everything. Only the mighty collection of alcohol behind the bar lost nothing of its magisterial dignity in the clearer light of day.
“My bride!” Wickham snickered.
A half dozen men, most burly, with arms as thick muscled as her thighs stood in the room, two of them by the door blocking any hope that she might have to escape.
One man in a rumpled black shirt and suit with a clerical collar peered at a piece of paper with his spectacles, pulling it close and then drawing back from it. He laughed and swallowed back a swig of alcohol. “George, by George. A real one. Never thought I’d see one of these. You really got it.”
“Of course I did.”
“Heh, heh. A special license — and on such short notice. Fine, intrepid fellow you are, Wickham.”
“Just marry us. Let's do it.”
“Heh, and such a lovely bride.”
The clergyman stuck his face next to Caroline’s and examined her. The scent of brandy and unwashed body odor sickened her.
He then giggled. “Poor girl. She can have no idea what you are like if she agreed to marry you. Eh, girl — you happy to be marrying my old college companion?”
Say it! Tell him that you are being forced to marry him. That it is only the gun that makes you marry.
But Wickham looked wholly unconcerned by anything she might say. He spun the pistol around and around on the bar, making a rough grating sound.
Caroline just mutely drew herself back from the clergyman.
He chuckled. “Well, George, let’s do this — can’t remember it at all, so let me see.” He pulled out from his coat pocket a battered copy of the Common Book of Prayer, bound in red leather and with stained pages that stuck together. “Let’s see — oh yes, you two must uh, stand there next to each other — you have a ring?”
“What?” Wickham said.
“It’s part of the service. You have to give her a ring. See here, it says you have to say, ‘with this ring do I thee wed’.”
“The fuck.”
“It’s in the service.”
“No, I don't have a damned ring. Devil take it, just sign the damned license, and write us into your parish registry, and tell everyone we married.”
The clergyman made a tutting sound. “This is why you would never have managed in the church. It isn’t valid if—”
“I don’t care if it is valid! I just care if the bank will believe it is!”
He tutted again. “You’ll need to find another priest if you don’t use a ring.”
The dingy man laughed, and he pulled a simple steel band off his pinkie finger. “Use this, Wicky. I’ll buy a new one with my share of the bitch’s fortune.”
Wickham took the ring.
“Stand there. Yes right there. And you, Miss — eh what is her name? The whole one. I need to know what to write in the registry.”
“Caroline Bingley,” Caroline replied in a quiet voice.
“Eh, wut?”
“Damn you,” Wickham cried. “It is written on the license!”
