“At the least you should not help me.”
“What else would I do? Mr. Darcy, you have a quite odd notion of the whole situation. I assure you that there is one man upon whom I place the blame for my husband’s death, and it is not you.”
“You blame my father for not having seen to it that his godson was educated better?”
Mrs. Wickham stared at Darcy for half a minute, and then she burst into full-throated laughter. She pressed her hand against her mouth, and continued to giggle saying, “Oh, I must be quiet, I would not wake the children.”
“I did not mean to joke,” Darcy said, unable to keep from smiling also. There was something about this woman that exuded cheerfulness, despite the way that she had clearly been deeply shaken by the news of her husband’s death. “But I can see the absurdity.”
She half snickered. “I do believe I have put more blame onmyselfthan on you over the past hours, even though I had not seen him for the best part of two years.”
“How could you blame yourself!”
“I was, as Mrs. Younge reminded me, the shrew who drove him away, and who taught him that he was worth nothing if he had no money.”
She fed him another spoonful of the broth. Darcy had already begun to despise the thin flavor. “How did you meet Mrs. Younge?”
“She was present at the lodgings that your sister directed me to, I believe crying about Mr. Wickham’s passing—Mr. Darcy, you are quite determined to take blame upon yourself. But if we go in the direction of blaming those who influenced persons who would later make terrible errors, we should then place all the blame at the feet of Adam and Eve.Theywill bear up under it, I wager.”
“My father,” Darcy said quietly. “On the day he died, among the last things he said, he told me to take care of Wickham.”
“Poor man,” Mrs. Wickham said. “He had every advantage, and many virtues, yet his weaknesses were such as to destroy the whole.”
“How did you come to marry Mr. Wickham?” Darcy asked.
It did not surprise Darcy that this woman had entranced Mr. Wickham sufficiently to have him marry her. From the age of the children, it must not have been long after he had given Wickham three thousand pounds in exchange for Wickham renouncing his right to the living at Kympton.
“He had a friend who’d taken a position as the law clerk to my uncle, Mr. Phillips. At this time Wickham was flush with money. He’d just received a substantial inheritance, I believe, from your father. He said he meant to study the law, and he spent as though he had a far greater income than he could claim. I met him at a card party which my aunt held...”
Mrs. Wickham fell silent.
Darcy waited for her to continue.
“I have often wished to reach back in time and shake that young girl. Maybe throttle her. Not quite sixteen yet. Too young to be in society. I thought I was entirely clever. I believe the same age as your sister?”
“Yes, but she has only recently reached fifteen.”
“Even younger.” Mrs. Wickham sighed. “The rot was always in his character, but I like to believe that he was not yet so vicious, so unprincipled, so wrong when we married. But the rot was there.”
“He led a dissolute life in university,” Mr. Darcy replied. “I hid it from my father so that it would not pain him to know about the misdeeds of his favorite during his illness.”
“It is impossiblenowto say that you have been kinder to him than he deserved, but perhapsthenyou were—an animal magnetism existed between us. I liked his look. Many women do, but he also liked mine. He talked so easily. And while there was not a great deal of substance to what he said, there always was a great deal of charm.”
“Mr. Wickham could always make my father laugh and smile, even as he was dying.”
“That to a point!” Mrs. Wickham exclaimed. “He made me laugh. And I have always dearly loved to laugh. He made my heart race. He made me wish to kiss him. I thought that was all that was required in a partner.”
“What happened then?”
“He asked me to marry him. I had of course expected that.Iwas in love, and I perceived that he was in love. And he knew, I think, that under no circumstances would I have permitted him any significant liberties without the bond of holy matrimony—I did not. Even on the road to Scotland,” Mrs. Wickham smiled wistfully, “I insisted he sleep on the floor.”
“You were wiser in this than my sister,” Darcy somberly replied. “I found them together in the bed. Upstairs. I wonder if Georgiana is sleeping in it now. I wonder how she thinks about it.”
“And so, it is clear why you challenged him. But you had no thought of letting him marry her?” When Darcy did not reply immediately, she added, “You thought then that he was a widower.”
Darcy remembered that horrible moment. Mrs. Younge trying to keep him from looking for Georgiana. He’d sensed something was deeply wrongfrom the way that the servants behaved. Up the stairs to the bedrooms. The sound of the bed being shaken and a man’s groans of release.
He’d hurled the door open.
