Page 52 of A Quiet Affection

When she passed the door to the drawing room, Elizabeth heard Wickham’s impassioned groans, and Elizabeth smirked to herself and started to hurry past, thinking that it was quite ridiculous that they were doingthatout of the bedroom. She was astonished that Jane permitted this, whatever Wickham’s desires.

The moaning woman’s voice cried out, “Oh, Wicky.”

Not Jane’s voice.

A white-hot rage towards Wickham suddenly lit in her chest. It was like what she had experienced years before when she imagined that all the world wished her dead.

She wished to murder him.

Wickham moaned in completion while Wickham’s housekeeper let out muffled screams.

Jane was sleeping upstairs!

Thiswas not the ordinary way of gentlemanly behavior.

Elizabeth clenched her jaw tight. She wished to throw the door open and scream at them. Instead, she retreated to her bedroom, past the door through which she could hear Jane’s soft little snores if she concentrated.

Wickham deserved to be stabbed, clawed, butchered.

This was her fault.

Why, why, why had she not told Jane?

And there was nothing to be done.

Jane was married to Wickham.

That had been an irrevocable decision.

The marriage vows declared it: So long as you both shall live.

Divorce was nearly impossible to obtain, and, so far as Elizabeth understood it, could only be based upon the infidelity of the woman, and never that of the man.

She’d done this to Jane.

Elizabeth felt a real horror at herself.

Was it due to jealousy about Fitzwilliam? Had she never forgiven Jane for howotherpeople thought it would have been a good thing for her sister if Elizabeth had died?

She had let her sister marry a man who was not fit to clean the mud off her shoes. A man not fit to empty her chamber pot.

That morning when Sarah came up to dress Elizabeth, she sent her away declaring that she was ill with a headache and could not bear to see anyone.

As Jane and Wickham walked across to have their ordinary breakfast with Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth remained in the bedroom full of misery. She thought about every kindness and consideration that Jane had ever shown her, and every time that she had proven unworthy of it. By the time the clock struck eleven, Elizabeth had even decided that Jane’s constant insistence that she did not mind that Elizabeth would be a great burden had been a mark of wholly undeserved affection and love, rather than an obnoxious undervaluing of Elizabeth’s abilities.

The other half of her mind recounted every act of Wickham’s that suggested duplicity, ill nature, dishonesty, an excess of libidinous feelings, and hypocrisy. There were ample such cases.

After a while Elizabeth heard the front door open below, and she called for Sarah to dress her, and she was informed that Mr. Wickham had returned to the house, and that he was presently in the drawing room.

The drawing room.

The place he had defiled with his mistress.

Elizabeth impatiently let the servant clothe her, and then she hurried down to the drawing room with a full helping of anger in her soul.

As soon as she entered the room, Wickham’s smooth voice said to her, “Dear sister, I am glad to see you are better.”

He hurried over to her and took Elizabeth’s arm in that overly familiar and squeezing manner that he had.