Page 46 of You Willfully Misunderstand Me

Elizabeth nodded in agreement, "Until Kent," she said. He gave her a genteel sort of bow, ever determined to display good manners, then turned to mount his horse and depart. She, however, stood a long while in the quiet passage after he had gone, listening to the house settle around her, and owning that she felt the particular ache of missing a man; it was an entirely new sensation for Elizabeth, and she found it was not one she, on the whole, enjoyed nearly so much as she had enjoyed in disliking him.

CHAPTER 24

Darcy’s first letter came four days after his departure, and told her almost nothing.

My dearest Elizabeth,

I arrived at Rosings to find my aunt in a temper and my cousin Anne nowhere to be found. I will not distress you with conjecture until I have fact enough to stand upon it. I write only to keep my promise, and to assure you that whatever awaits me here, it does not diminish by one particle what awaits me at Longbourn once it is settled. Colonel Fitzwilliam will join me soon.

Yours, in every sense that matters,

F. Darcy

Elizabeth read his letter three times over breakfast, and found herself no easier for the reading.Nowhere to be found.She turned the phrase over and was entirely perplexed at what had happened to her penmate and his cousin.

His second letter, a week later, told her a great deal more, and none of it easy.

Elizabeth,

I have the beginning of the truth now, though I confess I would rather have gone on longer in ignorance of it, for it is uglier than even my low opinion of Wickham had prepared me to credit.

Anne is not lost, nor abducted, nor any of the frightened things Lady Catherine's household first supposed. She is fled, by her own choice, or what she believed to be her own choice, to Scotland, in the company of George Wickham, whom she means, or meant, to marry.

I will spare you the whole of how I came to piece this together, save to say it involved rather more of Mrs. Jenkinson's tearful confidences than either of us would find comfortable in the retelling. Wickham quit Brighton in some haste this spring; debts, and rather worse than debts, for I am given to understand he has also absented himself from his regiment in a manner his commanding officers are unlikely to view charitably, should he ever be fool enough to show his face to them again. He required money, and a country to spend it in that did not include England, and he required, above all, someone foolish enough or lonely enough to provide both. My cousin Anne, kept close at Rosings her whole life under my aunt's particular species of care, proved, I am sorry to say, exactly foolish and exactly lonely enough.

There is worse yet, and I will tell it to you plainly, for I think you would rather have the truth entire than have it doled out to spare my own comfort in the telling. Your correspondence with Anne, Elizabeth, the letters you exchanged so innocently these past months, at her own eager instigation, were not, I now believe, so innocentin their origin as either of us supposed. Wickham encouraged the friendship, or encouraged Anne to encourage it, precisely because he understood that when Anne disappeared, the household's first and most urgent inquiry would turn toward you, and toward whatever you might know of her recent correspondence and confidences, drawing every eye toward Hertfordshire and away from the border, and buying him the days he needed to get her safely, or unsafely, wed before anyone thought to look the right direction.

I do not yet know how much of this Anne understood of her own part in it. I mean to find out, though I confess I do not relish the finding.

Do not distress yourself on my account, Elizabeth. I am in no danger here, whatever danger attended us both on the island. But I would be lying to you if I said this did not want a great deal more untangling than I had hoped, nor that it will keep me longer from you than either of us would wish.

Yours always,

F. Darcy

Elizabeth set the letter down with unsteady hands, and she sat a long while by the window of her own small room, turning over every letter Anne had ever sent her; the eager questions about her situation at Longbourn, the wistful inquiries after her sister’s temper and habits, the small confidences that had seemed, at the time, only the ordinary loneliness of a sheltered woman reaching toward a friendship she had little other opportunity to form. She had thought herself flattered by Anne's confidence. She had not once thought herselfusedby it.

She wrote back to Darcy that same evening, and did not trouble to disguise how the news had shaken her, for she had come to understand that Darcy did not want, from her, the comfort of a performance.

It was, however, his third letter, that took longer in coming, and when it arrived, it carried a story that struck her with more force even than Wickham's had.

Elizabeth,

The architecture of the whole scheme is uncovered now, and I find myself obliged to own that Wickham, for all his considerable talent at ruin, did not devise the worst of it alone.

You will recall the four men at the cottage door, and the voice that named Wickham as their master. I had believed, all these weeks, that Wickham himself had arranged that ambush; I had supposed it a piece of spite aimed at me directly, in revenge for Ramsgate and for every door I have closed against him since. I was wrong, or rather, I was only half right. Wickham provided the grievance. The scheme itself, and the men who executed it, belonged to another hand entirely, a man named Thomas Renfrew, formerly steward of Rosings, dismissed by my urging from my aunt's service some two years past for reasons of dishonesty I need not detail, save to say they involved rents collected and never properly accounted for.

Renfrew has borne my family a grudge since my recommending he be dismissed, of which my aunt agreed, and Wickham, it seems, encountered him some months back, in what circumstance I have not yet fullytraced, though I suspect a shared talent for finding the lowest company in any town they enter, and the two of them discovered, between them, a scheme that answered both their purposes at once.

Renfrew has remained in the area around Rosings, and he apparently watched our morning walks and listened to, what seems to be, whispers from the servants. He felt confident that Anne's invitation to you would draw my notice, and very possibly my presence, to wherever you had gone; he reasoned, correctly as it happened, that a man in love does not stay long at a distance from the object of it if that object is thought to be in any danger. He proposed to Wickham that if Wickham could arrange matters so that I should be drawn within reach, your presence in Anne's company being the surest lure he could devise, Renfrew's men might take me for ransom, the proceeds to be divided between them. Wickham gained, by this arrangement, not only Anne's fortune through the marriage he intended, but a share of whatever my family paid to see me safely returned; a double injury aimed, quite deliberately, at the Darcy name, in payment for every obstacle I have placed between him and Georgiana these three years past.

I will own to you, Elizabeth, that when I understood the whole of it, that our time on that island, everything we found there, grew out of a scheme aimed not at chance but at design, engineered by men who counted upon my affection for you as the very mechanism of my own undoing, I was for some hours very poor company indeed, and glad that only Colonel Fitzwilliam was present to witness it.

But I have had time now to turn the matter over, and I find I cannot regret what grew from ground so poorly planted. Wickham and Renfrew meant to use my love for you as a weapon against me. They did not reckon on what that love would become in the surviving of it. I will not grant them the satisfaction of believing they spoiled anything they touched.

Renfrew is taken, and will answer for it before a magistrate. Wickham has fled north, we believe, though whether toward Anne still or away from the wreckage of his own scheme, I cannot yet say. Anne herself is safe, returned to Rosings, and considerably humbled by the discovering of how thoroughly she was used by a man she believed loved her. My aunt's fury, I need hardly tell you, has found several new objects to attach itself to, none of them, for once, entirely undeserved.

I had hoped to be with you again within the fortnight. I find the settling of magistrates and the recovering of Anne's composure and my aunt's temper, in roughly that order of difficulty, wants rather longer than I first supposed. I will not keep you waiting one day longer than the business absolutely requires, Elizabeth. I have wasted enough of my life being cautious where you are concerned. I do not intend to waste any more of it now.