Page 59 of Such Low Connections

“You must have travelled a long way, good sir,” observed the landlady of the staging inn who brought over his plate and tankard herself, her approach likely prompted both by curiosity and instinct to pay respect to a man whose clothes and manner marked him as a fine gentleman.

“I have,” Darcy agreed, after thanking her, “and have further yet to go this morning.”

He hoped this small conversational offering would be the end of it, but the hope was in vain.

“Going anywhere nice?” the woman fished. “You seem to be in rather a hurry. Tom is readying one of our very best horses for you now.”

Wearily, Darcy shook his head.

“Urgent business,” he told her shortly and passed over a silver coin intended both to pay for his food and buy the landlady’s silence.

“Nice” was the last word Darcy would use for where he must go and what he must do. His blood throbbed murderously in his veins.

God help George Wickham when Darcy found him!

∞∞∞

“You! What in God’s name… Hey, you can’t do that!”

The following morning, at a shabby little apartment near Drury Lane, George Wickham was taken off-guard after having unwarily answered to the early knocking on the front door. He tried at first to protest Darcy’s wordless determination to enter the premises and then to physically resist. Darcy, however, seized the door and threw it open, sending Wickham staggering backwards into the cheap bolthole.

“How dare you?” Darcy raged, striding into the sitting room that functioned also as a hallway and slamming the door behind him. “Can you really have so little shame? Truly you are a disgrace to the name of man.”

Wickham backed away, unshaven, dishevelled and looking and smelling as though he was recovering from a recent surfeit of wine.

“This wasn’t planned, Darcy. I had to get away from the regiment for a time, and Lydia wanted to come with me…But how did you even find us?”

“Mrs Younge’s loyalty is ever for sale to the highest bidder. You should know that well enough, Wickham,” Darcy growled, already in ill-temper after his visit to Georgiana’s former governess, a thoroughly immoral woman he would have preferred never to set eyes on again, never mind give her money. “Once I tracked her down, I found you within the hour.”

“Well, she shouldn’t have told you, and it’s none of your business,” asserted Wickham, recovering some of his usual swagger. “You’re not my father, nor even my brother, and you’ve made it very clear that I am not your responsibility. Why can’t you let us alone?”

“Let you alone? To despoil a young woman who is barely more than a child and ruin her life for your own selfish gratification?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Darcy, would you listen to yourself? You sound like you’re preaching from the pulpit. It’s too early in the day, and my head is splitting. Anyway, why should you care? I haven’t done you any harm, have I?”

At these inflammatory words, Darcy saw red. Hadn’t done him any harm? Before he knew what he was about, his fist had struck Wickham a strong right hook and sent him sprawling to the rather threadbare carpet before the empty hearth.

“Harm!?” Darcy shouted at him. “Do not talk to me of harm, Wickham. My reputation has been blackened and bandied about in the gutter press for months because of you. What do you call that, if not harm, you scoundrel?”

As Wickham attempted to scrabble away, Darcy caught him up by his open collar and struck him another blow, this time an open-handed slap of contempt. The man was too dissipated by drink and generally out of condition to even attempt to fight. How on earth he managed to get by in the militia was baffling.

“Those rumours have nothing to do with me,” Wickham groaned, blood running from his nose as he tried to twist away from Darcy. “I freely admit to running away with Lydia Bennet — though she was at least as keen for this adventure as I.”

“That girl is sixteen years old!” Darcy growled, with another slap to emphasise this point. “You are entirely responsible for her seduction, and you know it. You’re a rake and a rogue as well as a thief and a treacherous snake. When did you steal the register from St. Martin’s?”

“What register?” Wickham coughed, provoking Darcy’s ire further.

“The old marriage register from the church of St. Martin near Pemberley, of course. Do not pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about! It was you behind everything from the start, wasn’t it? The smearing of my name, the planting of stories in the press…”

“Have you gone mad?” Wickham panted. “Believe what you like, but I swear I had nothing to do with the gossip that has been following you. I’ve even done my best to dismiss the rumours whenever I heard them. I felt I owed the old man that much.”

Darcy struck him yet again for this casually disrespectful reference to the father who had raised both of them, and then let Wickham fall to the ground.

“Why should I believe you?” he demanded. “You’ve spent your entire life lying and flouting every moral principle. Your word is worthless.”

“Whatever you have to say of my general morals is probably true, but I loved your father like a son. I will not hear his name traduced, even now.”

“Hah!” Darcy laughed scornfully. “You don’t know the meaning of love or filial piety. I can’t think of anyone but you who had sufficient opportunity and poor character to steal my father’s correspondence and share its contents with the gutter press.”