Page 198 of A Question of Character

“I have had excellent punishment.”

Despite fear, despite urgency, despite the rawness of every admission between them, Darcy found himself breathing a little more evenly.

They had lost years to pride, waste, silence, and assumption.

They might lose Georgiana to the same if they failed now.

He would not allow it.

“I failed you,” Darcy said, the words nearly stolen by the wind. “Perhaps long before Ramsgate. I saw your faults and chose to see nothing else.”

Wickham rode beside him in silence.

“I can hope,” Darcy continued, “that I have not failed Georgiana past repair.”

Wickham’s answer came low and firm. “Then let us find her.”

Darcy leaned forward over his horse’s neck.

The road darkened ahead.

Somewhere beyond it, his sister waited, deceived or frightened or already repentant, and with her perhaps the last remnants of his old self.

He rode on.

twenty-three

The Measure of a Man

By the evening of the second day, fatigue had reduced the journey to horses, changing roads, hurried questions, and the repeated fear that every delay had carried Georgiana farther beyond their reach.

By then Darcy had ceased to think in hours.

Time had become horses changed at posting inns, names entered into inn books, servants questioned, coins pressed into hands, directions contradicted, and every mile measured against the possibility of arriving too late. Wickham rode beside him with a determination Darcy had not expected and had no leisure to examine. If he tired, he did not complain. If old injuries made the journey awkward, he did not mention them. When Darcy’s temper sharpened from exhaustion, Wickham answered what was necessary and saved his breath for the road.

They had followed the trail northward, though not with the frantic speed of two lovers desperate to outrun pursuit. That, in the end, saved them.

“They are too easy to trace,” Wickham said at the yard of a small posting inn where a sleepy ostler confirmed that a fair gentleman, an older woman, and a young lady with a veil had stopped the previous evening. “He does not know we are so near.”

“Because he believes the letter will delay me.”

“Yes. And because men like Wycombe always think themselves cleverer than the servants they deceive.”

Darcy looked sharply at him.

“You are certain now?”

Wickham’s lips formed a thin line on his face. “Yes.”

He did not elaborate until they had remounted. The road beyond the inn rose through bare-limbed trees and low stone walls, the countryside growing harsher as they pushed north. Autumn wind cut across the fields, carrying the smell of damp earth and smoke from distant cottages.

“I ought to have named him sooner,” Wickham said.

Darcy kept his eyes upon the road. “You said you did not wish to accuse without evidence.”

“I said it because it was partly true.” Wickham leaned low over his horse as they took a long stretch of road. “The other part was cowardice. Wycombe used my name once, made me appear a villain in matters where I was not guilty, and I knew the taste of it. When I began again, I determined I would not do to another man what had been done to me.”

“A generous scruple.”