Page 111 of Hard Home

Darcy said the rest of it.

He said it plainly and completely and took eleven minutes about it: Tarrant and the rolls, and the four hundred and eleven entries and the county that was not among them; the wards that had never wanted mending in four hundred years; the deed that was not a deed, with no grantor and no consideration and the verbkeepnine times in eleven lines; the condition,so long as there shall not fail a man of my blood upon this ground; and a man of two-and-fifty with five daughters and no son who had been ill twice that year.

And what a keeping is, and what it is paid for with.

Wickham heard the whole of it without moving.

When it was finished he got up and went to the window and stood with his back to the room for a considerable time, and when he spoke his voice had none of the pleasantness in it at all, and Darcy realized that he had not heard the man's actual voice since they were about nineteen.

"I have been eleven years at this," said Wickham.

"I know."

"Eleven years, and I have been careful, and I have been patient, and I have taken small ones — do not make a face, you have known since Ramsgate, it is a little late to be delicate — I have taken small ones because small ones are what there is. A hundred acres in Shropshire. A fish-pond in Bedfordshire. Old blood gone thin in a family that does not know it has any, and a girl who is grateful for a conversation, and afterwards nobody is any the wiser and I am a very little better off than I was.

"And then in November I walked into a market town in Hertfordshire, and there were five of them."

He turned round.

"Five girls of four hundred years in the male line, unbroken, in a county where nothing has ever needed mending, and not one soul in that town — not the mother, not the aunts, not the officers, not the girls themselves — had the first notion what they were sitting on. I thought I had walked into the only piece of luck of my whole life."

"Yes," said Darcy.

"And then I got out onto that ground in April with the youngest one, because she was the youngest and the least spent and the easiest, and I put my hand down on it." Wickham's mouth moved. "And there is nothing there, Darcy. Not thin. Not old.Nothing.It is like putting your hand on a well.

"I went five times. Five. Because I could not make myself believe it, and because every time I went I told myself that I was mistaken and that it was only poor ground, and I stood there in the dark in a wet field in Hertfordshire in the middle of the night arguing with myself like a man at a card table.

"And on the eleventh of August I had her say her name on a down above Brighton — alittlething, a scrap, a promise a child would make — and something on the other side of it moved forty-two yards.

"Do you know what I have been doing since Sunday? I have been sitting in a room in Wapping with a candle, at two in the morning, trying to work out what happens to the man who opens it."

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"Then do not open it," said Darcy.

"And do what?" Wickham came back and stood behind the chair, gripping the back of it. "I am thirty years old. I have a lieutenancy I cannot afford and eight hundred pounds of debt in two counties and a name that is no good in Brighton after Monday. This is the whole of my profession. I have no other.

"And I will tell you the truth, since we are being remarkable this afternoon: I cannot stop. I have thought about that too. I have sat in that room and thought,go to Newcastle, take the shilling, be a real officer, marry a shopkeeper's daughter and be dull.And I cannot do it, and it is not the money, and it is not even the wanting. It is that if I stop I shall have to sit down and be a man who was walked out to a boundary three times as a child and sent back."

There was a silence.

"Your father," said Darcy, "took you out three times."

"Four," said Wickham. "The fourth was in the November and he never told anybody, and I have never told anybody, and I have no notion why I have told you now."

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"I am going to make you an offer," said Darcy.

"You are going to buy her."

"I am going to make you an offer, and you will hear the whole of it before you begin being clever, because it is not what you think and I have been four days getting to it."

He put his hands flat on the table.

"You may have the western ground."

Wickham did not move.