Page 1 of Under Such Circumstances (Desperately Seeking Elizabeth #1)

WHEN MR. GEORGE Wickham discovered that Miss Elizabeth Bennet was about to inherit a not insignificant sum of money, he was immediately struck with what he thought was an idea of sheer genius.

Mr. Wickham fancied himself a careful and intelligent man of means and talent. These means, of course, were all of an intangible nature, means of wit and quick reaction, means of resilience and means of novel thought. They were not, he would be sad to note, means of any financial consequence.

Though Mr. Wickham was not in possession of any great wealth, he could not rightly be considered poor.

He had never known any true hardship in his life, not one week of real and true hunger, not one stretch of time with nowhere to shelter himself from the cold or the wet.

He had been well-fed, well-dressed, and well-looked after for most of his life.

One might, looking objectively at his situation, even consider him rather fortunate, brushed with an extra golden gild of luck compared to many of his fellows.

But Mr. Wickham did not see himself this way, not at all.

No, Mr. Wickham thought of himself as quite, quite put upon, a man who had the worst of luck, who was always stymied in his attempts and who never had anything approaching triumph.

So, obviously, Mr. Wickham spent quite a bit of time feeling sorry for himself.

It was the chief manner in which he spent his time, in fact, except for the times when he would be struck with some idea to further his interests and improve his (obviously wretched) situation.

These ideas were often fanciful and often involved a plan to seduce some winsome woman or other.

He could not admit to himself that part of the reason the schemes seemed so appealing was that they appealed to his baser and instinctive carnal nature.

He wasn’t a bad man, not entirely, but he had the potential to be a bad man, and this was primarily because he had no notion of his own badness.

He thought of himself as noble and persecuted.

He was therefore blind to the notion he could be doing anything ignominious as he plotted out his latest scheme.

He had discovered that Miss Elizabeth was the beneficiary of this money through her sisters, Lydia and Kitty Bennet, who were both young and frivolous sorts of girls who never checked anything that went through their mind.

They said all their thoughts aloud, at least it seemed that way to Wickham.

He had no objection to either of the girls.

They were pleasant to look upon and he did not mind their constant string of inane chatter.

He tuned most of what they said out, and they talked so much, they never noticed if he seemed to be paying any attention.

This, however, had been quite interesting information.

Elizabeth was the sole beneficiary of this inheritance, which had the rest of the family, especially Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth’s mother, up in arms. Of course, neither Lydia nor Kitty was quite pleased about it either.

The money had been left to Elizabeth by an aunt, her father’s sister, who, by all accounts, shouldn’t have had any money to leave to any one.

She had never married and she had made her way as a governess for many years and then settled in the London house of a cousin.

Apparently, she stayed there year round while the cousins went away to their country estate in the summer and fall.

Though the late and elder Miss Bennet had not been strictly employed by this cousin, she did end up taking on a number of the duties of educating the children in the household, much as she might have if she were a governess.

At any rate, Lydia and Kitty professed to have only met the woman a few times, these briefly, at family holidays and the like. However, Elizabeth and Jane, the eldest of the sisters in the family, had sometimes gone in the summers to stay with their aunt, but this had ceased some years ago.

Lydia went on at some length about how it would have made more sense for the money to have been left to Jane, the eldest, or even divided amongst all the girls.

In this, Wickham felt certain she was echoing her mother’s words, especially when Lydia said the the money really ought to have gone to her father, who was his sister’s closest living relative, after all.

In effect, of course, giving an inheritance to an unmarried girl was giving it to her father.

But apparently, Elizabeth was something of their father’s favorite, something both Lydia and Kitty were sour about, and there was no way that her father would take away Elizabeth’s money or redistribute it as he saw fit, no matter how his wife wished him to do so.

The remarkable element of all of this was that Elizabeth was unaware of her inheritance.

This was because Elizabeth was not staying with her family.

She had gone away to Kent for a few months to visit her friend, the lately married Mrs. Charlotte Collins née Lucas.

She was staying very closely to Rosings, an estate that Wickham was quite familiar with, having been brought there, along with the Darcy family, on a number of occasions as a boy.

As the not-quite-appropriate guest of the family, however, he had not been welcomed at dinners and been made to sleep in the servants’ wings and to dine with the servant boys, but he’d had no actual work to do, unlike the servants themselves, so he’d spent all his time at Rosings off exploring the gardens and the woods beyond.

He immediately had what he thought would be a brilliant idea, an idea that sounded like a great deal of fun, and an idea that would mean that he might come into possession of that money himself.

All he needed to do was marry Elizabeth Bennet.

And that should be done easily enough, especially if he ruined her first.