Page 110 of Hard Home

He did not much want to think about it yet.

He thought instead, deliberately, for the rest of the drive, about a lane in Kent in April, and a woman standing in a lane with a letter in her hand, and how much of it he would have to keep from her afterwards; and concluded that the answer was all of it, and that this was going to be, on the whole, the easiest part of the week.

Chapter Forty-Six

He would not go back to the room in Wapping, and he would not have the man in a hotel where he was known, and so it was a private parlor at a tavern in Aldgate at four in the afternoon of the Friday, with the window open on a yard and a smell of stables coming up.

Wickham came at ten minutes past.

"Well," he said, from the doorway. "This is very like old times, except that at Ramsgate you did not send a note. I thought you always came in person and stood about looking magnificent."

"Sit down."

"I shall stand a moment; I have been sitting for four days." He shut the door and leaned against it, and put his hands in his pockets, and did not sit down for another twenty minutes. "How is Georgiana?"

Darcy did not answer.

"That is not a taunt," said Wickham. "You will not believe it, and I have given up minding what you believe, but it is not. I ask because I have thought about it, and I should like to know, and there is nobody else in England I can ask."

"She is well."

"Is she."

"She is sixteen and a half, and she is well, and she plays the pianoforte very correctly," said Darcy, "and if you say one more word on that subject I shall get up and go out of this room and you will find out on Monday what happens to a man in your situation with no money and a landlady who is being paid by me."

Wickham looked at him for a moment with an expression of frank interest.

"You have changed," he said, and sat down.

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"I will tell you why I am here," said Darcy, "and I will do it in order, and you will not like the middle of it.

"You went out onto that down on Saturday night and you had her say her name aloud with your hands on hers, three times, out of doors, with no roof and no ward and no man in orders and no witnesses. It was not a binding. It cannot have been. You know the four conditions as well as I do and you had one.

"And between the Friday and the Sunday the pale ground at Longbourn moved forty-two yards north and west, uphill, toward the town — after standing perfectly still for eleven weeks and four days. It has not moved since."

Wickham's face did not change.

His hand, resting on the arm of the chair, went very slightly white at the knuckles and then let go again, and that was all, and Darcy — who had watched Captain Harding's hands described to him in a letter and had thought at the time that it was a pretty piece of observation by a young woman with nothing to do — sat and looked at it and thought:there it is. Miss Bennet was quite right. It is always the hands.

"Forty-two yards," said Wickham.

"Yes."

"You have that from somebody who paced it."

"From a girl of nineteen who has paced it every week since April in the same pair of boots."

Wickham laughed — a short, unhappy, entirely genuine laugh — and rubbed his face with his hand.

"Of course," he said. "Of course it is. That is exactly how it would come out, is it not; not from the Board and not from your Society of Antiquaries, but from some plain little creature in a back bedroom with a ruler. God. And which is she — the middle one? The one who sings?"

"Do not talk about her."

"I am not going to talk about her." He put his hands over his eyes for a moment. "Say the rest of it."

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