The following day passed in a restless haze. Darcy barely touched his luncheon and could not bear to read. The sound of the grandfather clock ticking down the hallway only heightened his irritation.
Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived late in the afternoon, greeted Bingley in high spirits, and clapped Darcy on the shoulder with a warm, “Glad to be back in this madhouse.”
Darcy offered a wan smile and a half-hearted greeting.
Dinner passed with little conversation. Darcy could scarcely recall what he ate. He nodded at all the proper intervals, said all the right things, but felt as though he moved through fog. When Fitzwilliam suggested a game of billiards afterward, Darcy agreed out of habit, not enthusiasm.
They played in the old room with its dark paneled walls and faint smell of smoke and chalk. Fitzwilliam won the first game easily, offering jests about Darcy’s concentration.
Darcy forced a weak chuckle. Then another.
By the third game, the colonel had stopped joking. He sank the final ball, leaned against the table, and picked up his brandy.
“Well,” he said after a long drink, “you are either nursing a wounded heart or plotting a duel. Which is it?”
Darcy sighed. He rubbed his hand over his face. “Neither. Or both.”
Fitzwilliam raised a brow.
Darcy stared down into his glass. “We quarreled. Elizabeth and I.”
“A lovers’ spat?”
“A complete disaster.”
The colonel crossed his arms. “Tell me everything.”
Chapter 26
Darcy did not immediately answer his cousin. He took a deep breath, still staring into the dying flames. “Elizabeth has rejected my courtship.”
Fitzwilliam did not speak. After a moment, he simply nodded for Darcy to go on.
“We argued,” Darcy muttered. “It was about… a great many things. I said something foolish—no, not foolish. I said what I believed. About sodomy. About perversion. She asked me if I truly believed it, and I said I did.”
Fitzwilliam’s brows flew high on his forehead. “What does an unmarried gentlewoman know about such things?”
Darcy shrugged. “I wondered the same thing. But then she told me she could not enter a courtship with me. She said she could not bind herself to someone who might one day forbid her from seeing her family. I thought it merely a matter of principle—an abstract fear. But then she said… she knows why I cast Wickham off. She knows the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That Wickham is… is…. well, that he appreciates the company of womanandmen.”
Coughing on his brandy, Fitzwilliam sputtered, “You mean to tell me that George Wickham, the pretty boy who could charm any girl out of her skirts, the one who persuaded Georgiana to elope with him… is amolly?”
“Yes,” Darcy said tightly.
“How long have you known?”
“Since he tried to kiss me at university.”
Fitzwilliam whistled low. “I had wondered what caused the breach between you two. So you threw him out?”
“On the spot. I told him I never wanted to see him again. That I would not expose him, for my sake as much as his, but that he was never to speak to me or approach me again.”
Silence followed. The fire crackled faintly in the hearth.
“I have loathed him ever since,” Darcy added. “What he did with Georgiana only made it worse.”
