Page 5 of Gentlemen of Honor (Bennet Gang Duology #2)
The Bigger Fool You
Darcy sat behind his desk in his London home, a ledger before him and his mind far away in Hertfordshire. He’d trimmed a pen, meaning to go over some estate numbers, but had yet to dip it into the open ink jar. Before him, a tall rectangle of sunlight inched across the room from left to right, his silhouette cut from the center, as time marched onward, whittling away the morning.
One of his men came in with the mail, bringing letters from his cousins, aunts, and uncle, as well as an official invitation to Bingley’s upcoming ball and a few missives from Darcy’s man of business. He cracked open the latter, hoping something important required his attention. Something dire and pressing enough to take his mind off Elizabeth.
The letter contained nothing of the sort. Not a thing of any note had taken place. Everything in Darcy’s life was in perfect order, as he’d worked hard to make it. As he preferred his life to be.
Neat, correct, and utterly boring.
He tossed the letter aside, dropped his elbows onto his desk, and his face into his hands.
A knock sounded and he raised his head to look past the chair opposite his desk, past the twin couches that faced one another, and to the door. Removing his elbows from the desktop, he called, “Enter.”
The door cracked open and his sister Georgiana peeked into the room. “Are you busy?”
He shook his head. “I am never too busy for you.”
She smiled and slipped into the room, closing the door softly behind her before coming to take the chair across from him. Once seated she looked down, smoothing the fabric of her skirt.
Darcy waited. He’d meant his words, and he hadn’t been working anyhow. There was no reason to press his sister into speaking before she was ready .
Finally, she looked up. “You are not happy.”
He blinked, taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have not been happy since you returned from Hertfordshire. You were happy there. I could tell from your letters, but now you aren’t and it is my fault, and I am sorry.”
“I do not believe my state of mind can be in any way considered your fault.”
“Oh, but it is. I am the one who backed out of my agreement with George.”
George Wickham. The name stirred anger and condemnation in Darcy’s gut. “You had best explain.”
“I saw in the papers, about George,” Georgiana said softly. “They said a Mr. G. Wickham shot a man and posed as an officer, and that he was sentenced to transportation, and I know it is my fault.”
Darcy shook his head. “Again, I fail to see how.” He should have realized Georgiana would discover Wickham’s fate eventually. He should have spoken to her, explained what had happened, before she found out another way and formed errant conclusions, as she so obviously had.
“When he came to me and told me that you had denied him the living Papa left him, which truly was not kind of you, Fitz, though I do understand that you did not believe George would make a good rector.” She paused to add a dire frown to her reprimand. “When he came to me and admitted that he required funds, I offered him all my pin money, but he looked so sad and he said that he needed the sort of funds only my dowry would bring.”
Darcy ground his teeth. He did not care to relive his discovery that his sister had planned to elope with Wickham last summer.
“At first, I said no, because while I do love George, I do not love him in that way, but he pleaded and pleaded, and painted such awful pictures of what would become of him, especially as you had turned against him, and so I said yes, but then, as you know, I went back on my word.” She looked down. “Even though he said we would not have that sort of union, like a man and wife would, and that I could, well, take lovers once I’m older—”
“Lovers?” Darcy blurted out. What sort of things had Wickham been telling her? Georgiana was far too young to know that some women took lovers. Or that men did, for that matter.
She raised worried eyes. “Even with that promise, I thought that someday I might fall in love, or want to have children, and I realized I could not marry George, even to save him, and now he has gone and done something desperate, and it is my fault, and I am sorry. ”
That last bit she hardly got out, her throat closing with tears. Darcy stared across the desk at her, horrified. Georgiana dropped her gaze again, angling her face downward. She pulled free a handkerchief, applying it to her eyes.
Darcy tamped down the need to rail against Wickham, instead ordering his thoughts. “First, I did not deny Wickham that living,” he began with a calm he didn’t quite feel. “He asked me to buy the living from him, and I did so, for the sum of three thousand pounds. I also paid his debts, in Derbyshire and elsewhere. A year after Father’s death, Wickham had three thousand pounds and no debt to his name. Any trouble he was in, he made for himself by squandering that money.”
Georgiana looked up, her eyes damp. “Three thousand pounds? Perhaps that was not enough for him to live on?”
Darcy studied his sister, realizing she did not comprehend the sum. “Most housekeepers are paid forty-five pounds a year.”
“But I spent twenty-five pounds on my wardrobe last autumn,” Georgiana gasped.
“I am aware,” he replied blandly, for he’d been rather surprised at the sum. Not enough so to curtail his sister, for he could certainly afford for her to be lavish in dress, but enough so to make him consider doing so. “So how many times over could you purchase the same amount of clothing with three thousand pounds?”
She stared at him. A line of concentration formed on her brow.
“Once hundred and twenty,” Darcy provided. He would have to ask her companion, Mrs. Annesley, to evaluate the need for a tutor in mathematics. Georgiana would manage a household someday. “However many gowns you purchased, hats, gloves, shoes, cloaks, fans, and whatnot, you could have done so one hundred and twenty times more. Even if two people purchased wardrobes as elaborate as yours, which is by no means necessary, that would be sixty years’ worth of new wardrobes, and Wickham is not married.”
“But clothing is only one expense,” Georgiana countered, though her voice lacked certainty.
Darcy picked back up his pen. It was high time his sister learned to better understand the value of a pound. “This is the cost of lodgings such as Richard would take,” he said, referencing their cousin and her co-guardian. “And remember, he is a colonel and the son of an earl.” Darcy wrote down a number. He went on to add food, a horse stabled and cared for, a valet, and many other expenses a single gentleman might incur.
He finally concluded with, “As you can see, a single gentleman can live quite well on one hundred pounds a year, and as extravagantly as Richard, the son of an earl, on one hundred and fifty. Now, if Wickham had invested the three thousand pounds I gave him, he could have quite reasonably expected an annual income of one hundred and twenty pounds a year.” Darcy looked up from the page to find his sister studying the rows of expenses and numbers. “It takes willful extravagance to squander three thousand pounds in the little time it took Wickham to do so.”
Georgiana frowned. “So he would not have required my dowry if he had behaved in a manner that was at all reasonable?”
“Correct.”
She sat back, thinking.
Darcy cleaned his pen, waiting.
Finally, hesitantly, Georgiana said, “He would simply have spent it all, then?”
“Your dowry is considerable, as is the annual income it provides, but if anyone could spend it and leave you with nothing, Wickham could.”
Georgiana leaned forward, her gaze on his rows of numbers again, then looked up. “Which means that you are not upset that George is bound for a penal colony.”
“I am not. Nor should you be.” In fact, Darcy was pleased with the expulsion of both men, for Mr. Denny had been stripped of his commission and lands and transported as well.
She nodded. “Then why are you out of sorts? You were perfectly happy in Hertfordshire. I know you were. Your letters were filled with references to these Bennets and Oakwoods, and it even sounded as if you did not mind Miss Bingley’s company overmuch.”
“She was distracted with machinations regarding Bingley,” Darcy admitted. Her lack of attention to him had, indeed, been a relief.
“Well?” his sister demanded.
Darcy pulled out a new pen to trim, avoiding his sister’s probing gaze. “I found that I have a philosophical difference of opinion with someone there. That is all.”
“A philosophical difference of opinion?” Incredulousness touched Georgiana’s voice. “That is why you have come back to London, and why you are so…so miserable.”
“I am not miserable.”
His sister eyed him in disbelief.
“And I am hiring you a better mathematics tutor.”
Georgiana scrunched her face into a grimace. “I do not have a mathematics tutor. ”
“Do you not?” Darcy was billed regularly by all manner of instructors for his sister since her removal from school and transfer to his household, where he could best keep track of her. Even though her near elopement with Wickham had taken place while Georgiana was summering in Ramsgate, Darcy no longer felt secure having her out of his or Richard’s sight for overlong.
“I have dance, pianoforte, singing, comportment, Italian, French, painting, and needlework.” She wrinkled her nose at the last.
“What about history and mathematics?”
“I am certain I studied enough of those at school.”
“I am not as certain. I believe I will speak with Mrs. Annesley about how your progress in history and mathematics may be measured.”
Georgiana let out a sigh, coming to her feet. “I should have left you to your misery.”
“I am not miserable,” he reiterated.
“Then I will see you at supper?”
Darcy nodded.
His sister started to turn, but then swung back. “The paper said that George shot a Mr. C.B. Was that…is not Mr. Bingley’s Christian name Charles?”
“It is.”
Georgiana pursed her lips, stood up straighter, and stared at him. She appeared very commanding. More mature than her sixteen years.
Deciding that she would remain thus until he spoke, Darcy admitted, “Yes, Wickham shot Mr. Bingley.”
Her eyes went wide, her hands coming up to cover her mouth, and she was instantly only sixteen again. “Oh.” After a moment, she dropped her hands. “Is Mr. Bingley badly hurt? Is that why you are so glum?”
When had his sister become so tenacious? “He received a wound to his upper arm that was healing well when I departed.”
“But George did shoot him?” Her forehead crinkled. “I do not recall reading of a duel between them.”
“They did not duel.” His voice grim, Darcy admitted, “Wickham hid in a copse and attempted to murder Bingley. He shot twice.” And would have succeeded despite Darcy being on the lookout for just such an attack, if Jane Bennet had not saved him.
Elizabeth had dueled Darcy to give her sister the time she required to save Bingley. If she were not as proficient as she was, Darcy would have cost his friend his life. He winced at the thought .
“That is very terrible behavior,” Georgiana said softly. “I imagine it is a good thing that George will never return to England.”
“It is.”
She nodded and turned away, but halted halfway across the room to turn back again. “You do pay Mrs. Person and Mrs. Reynolds more than forty-five pounds a year, I hope?” she asked, referring to his housekeeper here in Darcy House and his housekeeper in Pemberley.
“Certainly,” he replied, his sister’s concern pulling a smile from him.
Georgiana nodded. “Good,” she said, and turned away once more.
She made it to the door, opening it, before turning back a third time. “Do not think I did not notice that you never explained your melancholy to me.”
He stared at her, having no good reply.
Georgiana shrugged. “Perhaps Richard will pull the truth from you.”
“Richard?”
“He sent word that he will dine with us soon.”
Darcy scowled. It was one thing to put off his increasingly tenacious sister, but quite another to stave off questions from Richard. Once he decided Darcy had a secret, he would be like a terrier after a rat.
Georgiana’s brows rose. “Do not tell me you are unhappy with Richard?”
Easing his frown, Darcy shook his head. “I am simply aggravated that, rather than awaiting an invitation to our home, he informs us of his intention to dine with us.”
“And yet he has done so many times in the past and you often reiterate that he is always welcome.”
Leaving Darcy spluttering for a reply to that, Georgiana slipped from the room and closed the door.
Darcy looked down at his sheet of numbers. He set it aside, the sheet a reminder to look into his sister’s education. Resting his elbows on his desk, he dropped his face to his hands again. Richard. He would want to know what had transpired in Hertfordshire. The details of how the Boney Bandits had evaded Forster and why the unit had returned in disgrace. He even had a right to know, as he’d used his influence to have Forster and his men sent there, at Darcy’s behest.
The day of the duel sped through Darcy’s mind, the memories slowing, as they always did, when he reached the moment he’d sighted a glint of metal on the hillside. The race of his heart. His fear that Bingley would be killed. His bout with Elizabeth.
He still did not know how she’d removed Miss Bennet’s rapier from his hand. A twist. A flick of her wrist. A move he had never encountered before. One that sent the blade shooting upward, to come down within her reach.
Luck? Chance? Something she’d practiced over and over, that worked in particular with her sister’s sword, for he’d definitely felt a wrench, a twist of the pommel.
Nothing more than a parlor trick, really, he decided. One for which he would not fall again.
Not that he would have cause to duel Elizabeth Bennet, or Azile the Boney Bandit, anytime soon.
He shoved to his feet and called for a footman. A ride to clear his head was definitely in order. Anything to distract from the odd feeling that he was no longer whole. That a large portion of his heart had been left behind in Hertfordshire.