Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (3 page)

“Your husband’s manly instrument will swell big and red and hard and angry and enormous…”

Here Lydia struggled for adjectives, and having accidentally lapsed into repetition, strove on, “And when he first puts it up your nonny-nonny it will be with such force as to render you prostrate with ecstasy and pain.”

She lowered her voice in a highly conspiratorial whisper, and said, “Once he thrusts into you, he will again and again and again!”

Lydia had to take a swallow. In fortune, for with each successive “again,” Jane’s eyes widened and she leaned farther away from Lydia, and by the third “again,” was almost prone upon the bed.

Lydia concluded with a deep sigh, “It is a sweaty prospect. And his spendings are sticky. And his larydoodle does go limp with great dispatch after he has had his way with you.”

Lydia had frowned at the thought of these drawbacks, but perked up, remembering, “But, if he can just stay with it, he will bring you such rapture that you will sing about it for days!”

Jane and Elizabeth were silent.

Thus Lydia, supposing it was of a stunned nature due to her oratory, added, “Of course, that is the lover that Wickham is. You, sisters, may not be so fortunate as I. For my husband is endowed with an organ of far grander proportions than other men.”

Lydia leaned forward conspiratorially again, “And this is what is most pleasing to his lover.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes and asked Lydia how she found validation of this information.

“Why, Wickham told me,” she replied without a hint of question.

Elizabeth was not in a position to know whether George Wickham’s apparatus was, indeed, superior to any other man’s. But, to her, the very fact that vapouring cock-a-hoop boasted of something automatically called its veracity into question.

Looking at the scepticism written upon Elizabeth’s face, Lydia hurried to assure her, “You cannot imagine anything so frightening as the sight of Wickham’s excited member!”

“I am sure I do not want to imagine Mr. Wickham’s excited anything.”

“You will see a great deal far sooner than you might anticipate, Lizzy, if you are not cautious with your affection before you wed.”

Lydia held up her fingernails and inspected them diligently as she said, “For a man’s ardour does not await the wedding vows.”

Of this, Lydia knew well and Elizabeth only raised her eyebrow in reminder.

Lydia saw the look and snapped, “Do not eye me so severely, Lizzy! If Mr. Darcy is half the man as Wickham, his flag will fly quite readily at the smallest provocation, I assure you.”

“You do not mean, Lydia,” Jane interjected, “that a gentleman is quite without his own will in such a situation?”

“I mean,” retorted Lydia, “that if you allow Mr. Bingley to kiss you too ardently, he will be aroused to such lust his loins will ache and his engorged lance will burst from his nether garments to ravish you! Wickham’s waggled at me more than once!”

“Lydia!”

Lydia replied self-righteously, “I have no say in the nature of men. I am merely the bearer of the information. If you do not choose to believe what is a verifiable truth, ’tis your folly, not mine,” and, with the timing of a true thespian, she then rose and quitted the room.

Jane sat upon the bed in a befuddled stupor. Elizabeth knew her dear sister’s sensibilities had been abused far beyond immediate reclamation. Was she not so curious, her own might have found insult, too. But this time, the usual annoyance Lydia incited in Elizabeth was compounded by being at the mercy of her own ignorance.

Even with no brothers to have enlightened them, Elizabeth was marginally informed upon nature’s intent. She had seen boys, of course, at least boy babies. Hence, she held some notion of the rather flagrant configuration of the male of the species. She was uncertain why she held Darcy’s…person in such interest, but until Lydia had importuned them, she had not taken the time to study the matter.

Elizabeth endeavoured to think of something soothing to say to Jane. But with her own mouth agape as it was, Jane was rising to leave before she could. Jane patted her hair distractedly and murmured about something that needed her attention. However, she stopped at the door, her hand upon the knob, and stood a moment, deep in thought.

Thereupon, she turned and bid Elizabeth, “Pray, Lizzy, there is something I do not understand.”

“Yes, Jane?”

“If it is so very painful to his wife for…a husband to…do his duty, why would she want him to be large?”

A perfectly good question.

George Wickham was not a happy major.

“Spirits” the sign had read.

In all the good humour of one who has yet to know himself disappointed, Wickham had run his glove reassuringly across the shine of the brass buttons that lined his uniform jacket, tossed his red cape back across one shoulder just so, and made his entrance into the anticipated merriment.

But he took no more than a step or two inside the door that had borne the designation of a drinking establishment. For upon his intrusion the patrons stopped all discourse, abandoned their ale, and glared in baleful silence at the fancy soldier in his pretty uniform who had just barged into their refuge.

If the sight they beheld was distasteful, Wickham was even more affronted. -Indistinguishable from the gloom of the room only by reason of the startling whites of their eyes, twenty-odd black smudged eyeballs stared at him. The two score of orbs had widened, then narrowed just menacingly enough to tell Wickham he best take his leave post-haste. That was most probably the only common ground he thought he might find in accordance with this plebeian pack of humanity. He very nearly fled.

Once at a safe distance he spat, “Bassimeçu,” over his shoulder, his arrogance reinstated with the assurance that no man in that odious excuse for a tavern would understand the insult.

He picked up his step all the same.

* * *

Although his scepticism had been on high alert, he had been assured by those who vehemently sought his egress from London that Newcastle was an ambitious but pretty coastal port surrounded by grouse moors.

Wickham, who loved nothing better than to insinuate himself into good society, had not thought much of such a bucolic milieu. He should have held out for better. Bath, perhaps. However, establishing distance betwixt himself and Darcy had been uppermost at that particular moment (hasty leave-taking and the resultant insulation of miles was the single constant in his life). Hence, the felicity of an assignment in the north-easternmost reach of England rendered itself ever more probable. Reality saw that Newcastle was, indeed, small, and had a port, but there was nothing pretty about the place. It appeared industrious, but hardly fashionable.

He and Lydia were not a ten-foot out of their hack coach before Wickham realised a dual insult upon his person. The high lustre of his boots was already besoiled with soot and there was not a bootblack in sight to polish them.

His boots’ hasty begriming bade him look about to see whence it came. There was no single culprit, for he saw nothing but cinereous stone buildings, slate streets, dingy windows, drab people, and a sky thick with smoke. It looked as if, quite literally, a film of coal grit filled every crevice and dusted every face in the town.

“Like shipping coal to Newcastle,” Wickham repeated miserably to himself as he spat upon his wife’s lace-trimmed, cambric hanky and dabbed at the toes of his jackboots.

This first impression of the town not at all promising, Wickham had looked to the moors. And again he had been disappointed. If there were any hunting retreats of the wealthy about, by the time the Wickhams had arrived in mid-December, they were long abandoned. Were they not, clearly from the seedy look of Newcastle, people of station hied directly to the hinterlands and fro, compleatly bypassing town. An altogether reprehensible situation.

Further injury awaited. For even more than hobnobbing with those elusive people of property, Wickham favoured gambling with them. Hidden behind his façade of well-mannered sociability stood a man who, after all respectable persons had gone to bed, liked to prowl the night for similarly-minded men flush with funds. Wickham liked his cards lucky, his whiskey smooth, and his women loose. There were a number of taverns, but as Wickham had soon determined, they were tended by grubby men with thick forearms instead of lusty barmaids (who might enjoy a little debauchery in a back room). And nary a den of iniquity amongst them.

Was the denial of winsome wenches not test enough, Wickham discovered the clientele of these establishments far worse than the proprietorship. It would be a struggle to name the most offensive to him amongst them: the filthy coal-haulers who did not bother to slap the dust from their clothes, the dock workers foetid with briny water, or the infernal sheep men, fresh with coin from marketing the aging lambs that weaning missed. Was a decision demanded, Wickham probably would have given the nod to those unholy shepherds, who stunk of the Cheviot flocks they brought down from the frost-browned hills and drove through the streets, thus demanding good people leap for a doorway lest they be engulfed in dust and trampled by hundreds of tiny little cloven hooves.

Wickham despised farm animals.

If he thought his ignoble introduction to the nightlife of Newcastle to be his ebb, sadly, he discovered more diversional setbacks were yet to be encountered. For the paucity of barmaids bade ill-chance of feminine company in general. If the shopkeepers had daughters, they kept them hidden, which probably proved them prudent men in a town overrun with nothing but shipbuilders and coal men. And the army. The caution of those fathers was ill-luck to Wickham, for in light of the meagre competition, a fine crimson officer’s uniform would be quite an enticement to seduction. The only remaining avenue of beguilement was within the spousal ranks of his few fellow officers. But as Wickham was one of the few (and the only one below colonel) to have a wife, even a little innocent adultery was unlikely.

Indeed, things looked very grim that winter for Wickham, reduced as he was to -taking womanly company and a game of chance with his superior officer’s wife (who was of Methodist persuasion, despised music, played nothing but Whist, and, to Wickham’s perpetual misfortune, adored his company). Thus, his evenings of sociability were spent in pointless deliberation of whether to avoid Colonel Sutcliffe’s insufferable wife or his own.

No happy outcome there. Had it not been so finger-numbingly frigid, Wickham would have simply mutinied for the garden and a smoke. For Lydia’s only merit had been as a temporary romantic conquest. Not particularly pretty, as a maiden she did have a somewhat fetching forwardness that promised she did not hold much prudence of affection. Under the stern fortress of matrimony, however, her desirability to her husband had waned disastrously. She had become the proverbial millstone about his increasingly constricted neck.

* * *

It was ever so cold in Newcastle, even for northern England in the winter. The chill was exacerbated upon Wickham’s realisation that the single reason he had married Lydia Bennet was to solve his most immediate bother, that of an embarrassing shortfall of funds and an unruly mob of unhappy, impatient creditors. Because of Wickham’s tonsorial fetish and relentless wagering, that “bother” reinvented itself four times a year, hence it was creeping upon him again with a vengeance, even in Newcastle.

Indebtedness had never been much of a barrier to Wickham’s peace of mind so long as he could find one more shopkeeper to dupe into allowing him to purchase on account (although tailors, as a rule, were a mistrustful bunch). But such obligations had landed him in his present ignobly garrisoned regiment.

As it happened, by the time of his and Lydia’s extended tryst in London, he had left a trail of outstanding bills that was extensive even for him. Moneylenders had him teetering upon the threshold of a sponge house and more than one had a shilling laid down for his arrest, hence debtors’ prison was not a mere threat. Desperation had begun to make a nasty crease betwixt his usually unfurrowed brows.

Was that not vexation enough, to be confronted in London by an obviously indignant Darcy whilst in lascivious company with the unwed, underage Lydia would have been quite unnerving to any man who valued his bursa virilia. But as a man of considerable practise with confrontation, be it broker or cuckolded husband, Wickham had hastily deduced from the absence of sword and seconds that Darcy was not there to demand satisfaction for some injury. Indeed, Darcy did not intend Wickham mortal harm just then; for what Darcy wanted of him, he needed him very much alive. From an impetus unapparent to Wickham, Darcy had gone to great trouble to find their little Soho love-nest to (of all things!) demand that Wickham redeem Lydia’s virtue through marriage.

At the time, it had been an utter mystery as to why Darcy sought them out when in the past he had but turned up his nose at Wickham’s numerous amorous indiscretions (except for that unfortunate miscalculation with Georgiana). Then, however, Wickham had not taken time to question. Thrown into a position of negotiation, dickering over specifics took all his concentration. Wickham’s finely honed sense of personal aggrandisement immediately ascertained that, for whatever reason, Darcy would do whatever was necessary to see that the marriage took place.

Darcy pledged himself to Wickham’s creditors in exchange for a wedding and the promise of settling in a northern regiment with the Regulars. Wickham had jumped at the opportunity (incarceration being a nasty alternative). The puzzle surrounding such an intervention had not truly bedevilled Wickham, however, until he had settled with Lydia at the new post. From the ill-house of vanquishment, Wickham was certain some malevolence had been done to him by Darcy’s hand. But it was nothing at all so covert, the Wickhams soon learnt. For not a month after landing in Newcastle, Lydia received the letter telling of her sister Elizabeth’s engagement to Darcy. It was almost as much an astonishment to her as to her husband.

“I cannot believe her good fortune, Wickham, for he is easily the richest man in England and I know she despised him not six months ago. What could have changed her mind so decidedly?”

The question was asked more to herself than Wickham, so after barely an instance of reflection, she opined, “I can tell you why. A man of that rank need only offer his affection and Lizzy, for all her airs, cannot call herself above any other woman in wasting no time in accepting.”

She snorted a short laugh and looked to her husband, who had glanced at her when he heard her announcement, but upon seeing her look in his direction he hastily returned his attention to his papers. That his wife’s conversation only seldom required response was one of the few advantages her husband still found in her company. He watched out of the corner of his eye as she turned back to her letter and allowed himself a sigh of relief.

Wickham could always call upon himself to foster an outward mien of ingratiating, if somewhat smug, charm. But Lydia’s reminder of Darcy’s wealth tried even his countenance. That ominous, superciliary crevice deepened upon hearing that the very lovely Elizabeth Bennet was to marry his nemesis. Wickham’s invidious nature allowed jealousy to rear its ugly head, momentarily allowing the reason he had slighted her to slip his mind. But, in the vacuum that was his soul, the wherefore of not pursuing such a comely young woman soon wafted back to him.

It was the sparseness of her dowry. What a lark! Darcy had chosen a bride that he, Wickham, had found unworthy. Gleefully, Wickham played with that notion. That conceit, however, did not last much longer than it took to think it. Almost instantly, he was brought to wonder just what particular charm Darcy had discovered in Elizabeth Bennet that he himself had overlooked. Of course dowry meant but little to a man of Darcy’s wealth, but then conversely, position and rank meant all.

Why had Darcy, who could have his pick of any woman in England, chosen a wife with such questionable connexions? Wickham’s puzzlement over Darcy’s intervention with Lydia was displaced by his pondering of such an unusual match. It was only a temporary amusement to Wickham to think that the great Darcy’s wife held the same low connexions as his own. If he smiled, it was fleeting. As much as Wickham hated to admit it, he had married a wife with the same fifty pounds a year as her sister. And he certainly had not the resources to elevate their station as had Darcy. That was not a rewarding rumination. He strove to think of something else.

But he could not.

Perhaps Wickham was not the cleverest of men. However, when it came to plottings, his mind knew the region well. Rarely was he out-manoeuvred. It was only a few minutes before he bore the full brunt of just how thoroughly Darcy had outwitted him. Quite unbeknownst to Wickham, he had held in his hand the key to the Darcy fortune. Georgiana Darcy’s thirty thousand a year was paltry compared to the sum Wickham could have blackmailed Darcy for in exchange for saving the Bennet family name from ruin. As unlikely as it was for Darcy to marry beneath him, he most assuredly would not double the insult of position by connecting himself with a family disgraced. Realising he had held such a trump card over Darcy and not cashed in upon it was of significant vexation. In bargaining, knowledge is everything. If Wickham had held any notion of Darcy’s intentions for Elizabeth, he could have discovered, monetarily, just how very dearly Darcy wanted to marry her. In the acute vision of hindsight, no figure seemed too outrageous when it came to Darcy getting what he wanted.

Not only had he botched the bargaining opportunity of a lifetime, he was marooned in Newcastle. Moreover, he was married to a young woman whose attention, which he had once supposed lent itself in enquiry no more profound than the prettiness of her newest bonnet, had somehow birthed an uncanny knack for sniffing out his every infidelity. Lydia’s brittle temperament was accompanied by a compleat lack of trust in her husband’s faithfulness.

And dogged she was. Wickham could not fathom how any one woman could be so simultaneously obtuse yet clever.

Looking again to his wife, he then just as hastily looked away, not wanting to invite her conversation. She was licking the last residue of chocolate from her fingertips with no less noise than a cow sucking its foot from the mud. He prayed that her indecorous desire for bonbons was the source of her ever-increasing girth and she was not with child, for a wailing infant would be the last straw upon his ill-temper.

Narrowing his eyes in reinvigorated concentration, Wickham thought of his situation again. There was only one promising possibility upon his horizon.