Page 11 of Under Such Circumstances (Desperately Seeking Elizabeth #1)

THE RAIN HAD still not stopped, and it was dark outside.

“You’d best come in,” Elizabeth said in a tiny voice from the doorway of the shack.

Mr. Darcy was sitting out there, in the mud, next to Wickham’s body, silent and staring. He started at the sound of her voice and then turned to look at her.

A moment passed.

Then he got to his feet and came into the house.

She had been sitting on the dirt floor. It had gotten too uncomfortable to remain standing. She probably looked a fright.

Mr. Darcy looked worse. He was covered in blood, Mr. Wickham’s blood, because he had tried to revive him at one point, but it had been very clear that Mr. Wickham was very, very dead. He staggered into the dark shack.

She sat back down on the ground.

He sat down too, not next to her but opposite her.

“It may rain all night,” she said.

“It’s looking that way.”

“I wish we had not lost what was left in the picnic basket,” she said.

“I couldn’t eat anyway,” he muttered.

“We likely can’t make our way in the dark,” she said. “I suppose we must stay here.”

“I suppose,” he said.

It was quiet.

“He deserved it, I think, Miss Bennet,” said Mr. Darcy in a low and gravelly voice.

She said nothing.

“What did he do to you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He did… he forced my hand into his…” She hesitated.

“Clothes. He forced my hand under his clothes. I know he made me do that part, but then… the rest of it, maybe… I could have stopped him, and I didn’t, and he said that I might be gone with his child, and now he is dead, and—”

“ Christ. ”

She hugged herself again, shaking, as much from the cold as anything else.

“He did deserve it, then,” said Mr. Darcy. “How a man manages to divest a woman of her virtue in the forest in less than half an hour when she is obviously resistant to the entire—did you fight him?”

“I—” Her voice broke. “I didn’t.”

“He frightened you,” said Mr. Darcy softly. “He was bigger than you and stronger than you—”

“He didn’t th-threaten me,” she whispered.

“His presence was a threat, Miss Bennet. You were confused, and he was insistent. You did not fight because you could see that if you had tried, he would have overpowered you anyway, and you would only have gotten yourself harmed in the process, so you…” He sighed. “It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t know if it is my fault or not,” she said. “I am sort of… glad?” Her voice cracked again on that word. “I didn’t wish him to t-touch me again. I didn’t wish to marry him.”

“Good,” said Mr. Darcy. “Then it’s all worth it.”

“No, it’s all awful!” She had been thinking about it. “I am ruined. I cannot marry him now, because he’s dead, and there’s no way to… if I am with child—”

“I’ll marry you.”

She sucked in a very shocked breath.

“Unless you still don’t want me to, of course. I’ll do something else if you wish it. I’ll set you up somewhere to have the child and… I don’t know, maybe we can concoct some story, some husband married in haste who died—”

“You can’t marry me if I am carrying another man’s child!”

“I think I absolutely can,” he said.

“But you wouldn’t.”

“I have just said that I would.”

“You don’t even think I’m pretty! You said I was only tolerable and that you wouldn’t even dance with me, and—”

“Oh, God in heaven, you heard that?”

It was now very, very quiet.

“Why?” she breathed eventually.

“Don’t you see, Miss Bennet, this is all my fault. He attacked my sister, and I did nothing, and I left you vulnerable to him.”

She regarded him. “He attacked your sister?”

“He attempted to elope with her,” he said. “Likely, he would have managed it, except that she sent word to me, and I was able to intervene.”

“So, this is something he just did,” she said softly. “Ruined women and tried to trap them in marriages? Why?”

“Well, in the case of my sister—and I don’t know that she’s… I don’t think there was any chance my sister was with child, you see.”

“Yes, your sister would have been better at resisting him.” She was bitter.

Truthfully, no, he would have thought it the other way around.

He gazed at her. “How did you let him, Miss Bennet? What were you thinking? You must have realized, when it got to a certain point, what his intentions were. You couldn’t have thought they were noble at that point. So, how did it even…?”

She practically folded in on herself, tucking her chin against her chest in the dark gloom inside the shack, while the rain pounded down outside.

“I don’t know,” she said in a defeated voice.

“I keep thinking about it. I think I must have wanted it or something, though I didn’t want it, not truly, but perhaps I… ”

“Ah,” he said, nodding, understanding that, knowing the way it was that desire could override one’s good sense.

He supposed he hadn’t thought it happened that way to women also, but that was foolish, obviously, it did.

Women lusted, too, in their own feminine ways, and Mr. Wickham was—had been—handsome.

“Well, that simply happens to the best of us.”

“Does it?”

No, he would usually say no. He conducted his entire life as the sort of man who did not give in to temptations, who did the right thing, even if it was the difficult thing, especially if it was the difficult thing.

He prided himself on being the sort of man who had the fortitude to take on the sort of tasks that others did not have the strength of will to do.

He wouldn’t have thought he’d ever be reassuring anyone that they might forgive themselves for not having that strength of will themselves.

“Yes,” he said. “Try not to blame yourself overmuch.”

She let out a little laugh. “Oh, yes, you will take all the blame, will you, sir?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You can’t marry me,” she said, sighing.

“Look, as I said, if you don’t wish to marry me—”

“I don’t deserve it,” she said, her voice cracking again.

He didn’t know if he could bear it if she started to cry, though she likely should cry after everything she’d been through. He didn’t blame her, that was the thing, even if she had been blinded by lust, even if she had done something foolish in pursuit of pleasure.

Dash it all, maybe that was why he was in love with her in the first place, the fact that she was not nearly as self-controlled as he.

He had witnessed the way she said things, sometimes, imprudent things.

On more than one occasion she had teased him, said things that she knew would provoke him, and maybe he liked that she was fearless in that way, that she was not ruled by caution, not in the way he was.

“Well,” he said gruffly, “I am not in love with you because you deserve it.”

“You are not in love with me at all,” she said, gasping, stunned.

“Apologies,” he muttered. “I do not mean to renew such sentiments that you have already made clear you find disgusting, so let us leave all that. Even now, even in this situation, where you have no other choice, you do not wish to marry me. You did say you would not if I were the last man in England, I suppose.”

“Mr. Darcy, heavens .” She got to her feet.

She was flustered. She smoothed at her wet skirts and then began to gather up handfuls of them and try to wring water out of them, but this seemed to have the effect of the water only soaking into lower parts of her skirts.

However, she kept at it, as if she didn’t notice.

She was speaking now, words tumbling out of her mouth in agitation.

“You are still so hurt, which astonishes me, for how could you possibly still have a good opinion of me at all? You said that your good opinion, once lost, is lost forever, but I can’t understand what I must do to lose your good opinion, for I rightly should have, and you—”

“Yes,” he barked out, getting to his feet, angry now. “Yes, you should have.”

She went quiet, then, but she continued wringing out her skirts.

He ran a hand through his wet hair. “We shall talk of all of this another time.”

“I don’t know how to be this sort of woman, you see,” she said quietly. “I didn’t think I was this sort of woman. I never thought I’d be in this situation. I’m not stupid, however. If you wish to marry me, if you wish to do that to yourself, I shall let you, I suppose.”

He let out a breath. “I must do it. This is my responsibility, you see.”

“But if I am with child—”

“The child is innocent,” he said, “and must not be made to bear the weight of his father’s sins.

” Except, ironically, they were in this position because of his grandfather’s sins, were they not?

And every attempt had been made to give Wickham benefits so that he would not bear the brunt of those sins, and it had all gone very badly, and maybe if you overcompensated for those sins, maybe that set the balance all off?

Maybe Wickham knew, deep down, that it made no sense for him to be given such advantages.

Maybe that unsettled him somewhere, a world gone mad, and it made something in him switch into whatever Wickham was? Oh, Darcy didn’t know.

“What if it’s a boy?” she whispered. “You can’t let Wickham’s child be the heir to Pemberley. What of bloodlines and—”

“Well, as it happens, Wickham is sort of my cousin.”

“What?”

“It’s why my father favored him. It’s why I was soft on him.

He’s the product of an indiscretion of my grandfather, you see.

It’s complicated.” His throat tightened, thinking of how he was going to break this news to the elder Wickham, his steward at Pemberley, not only that his boy was dead but at Darcy’s own hand.

No, no, he would understand. It was a duel. It went badly. He hadn’t meant it and it had rightly been an accident, and the elder Wickham would understand.

Yes, but even still, Darcy should offer to let him retire with a nice sum settled upon him and not force the man to serve his son’s killer in his old age. It was the right thing, he thought.

“So, then, it doesn’t matter,” said Elizabeth.

“It matters, Miss Bennet,” he said. “But I shall bear it. I shall be the child’s father, anyway, and that will change everything.” Except, his father had been a second father to Wickham, and it hadn’t changed everything.

Darcy refused to believe something superstitious, that sin could infect someone, or that blood was bad or that even people were born bad.

It was a stupid thought. But he did wonder if he would be able to treat this child the same way he would treat his own child.

Maybe he would make subtle mistakes that would warp the child somehow, maybe he would not be able to love the child in the way he should, maybe…

But he could not take this back, and he wouldn’t. It was his responsibility.

“Maybe you aren’t with child,” he said. “It was only once, and it’s not so easily done. You could—but I’ve heard that really isn’t that effective.”

“What?” she said.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s indelicate. I shouldn’t even say it to you.”

“Well, we’re apparently going to be married,” she said in a hollow voice, “so, I suppose we shall have a number of indelicate matters between us.” She looked him over, her gaze settling on his crotch, and she made a face, one of utter disgust.

He was glad it was dark, because he blushed in shame, in embarrassment. And she made him feel small, he had to admit. She didn’t want him. He was consigning himself to a marriage with a woman who hated him. One who had been with another man. One who was not well connected or appropriate in any way.

Why?

Honor, he told himself firmly.

Except it was more than that, and he knew it. That temptation he was so certain he was immune to? He was not.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He jerked his gaze up to hers. No, she’d seen how he reacted?

“I didn’t mean to make you feel…” She sat back down on the dirt floor, defeated, exhausted. She rested her hands in her lap, no longer wringing out her skirts. “Perhaps it’s different if you like the person. Perhaps it’s less… foul, what with all the, erm, the…”

“The what?” He sat down too, rather curious. She didn’t sound like a woman overcome by lust and temptation, actually. It was Wickham she had found disgusting, and she assumed he, too, would be disgusting, he was realizing. It was not as he had thought.

She practically whispered it. “The seed.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, that was what I was going to say, that you could attempt to get that out of yourself.”

“Oh, I washed it off,” she said. “Well, wiped it, with a leaf.”

He was picturing things that he shouldn’t be picturing. I am going to marry her, though, he reminded himself. He cleared his throat again. “Yes, but that’s not likely to be enough to get all of it. Because some of it would have gotten into you.” He coughed. “All, er, all the way in.”

“Some of it gets in you?” she said. “How?”

“How?” He jerked his head up. “Well, it just does. That’s the entire point of the act.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Yes, of course. I’m just stupid about it. I didn’t know anything, really, not before he…”

A wave of utter sympathy went through him, for he realized that she had been too ignorant to know to stop the man. He oughtn’t have condemned her, not at all. She was too innocent, in the end, and he would not blame her for it.

He would try not to, at any rate.

“I’m ever so sorry, Miss Bennet,” he said.

“Well, so am I,” she said.