Page 87 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Hiding any expression of relief, Lizzy sipped her drink again and forced herself to sit straight. She put the glass down andsmiled, using the flicker of the candles to her advantage since they made her expressions harder to read. Taking up her knife and fork, she cut a piece of her steak slowly and deliberately. Wickham cut a piece of his. She tried not to pay attention to the knife in his hand.

The tranquilizer shouldn't take long. I need to keep him focused on me until it's too late, until he begins to lose motor control, consciousness.

"So how did your meeting go?" Lizzy asked before eating the piece of her steak.

He shrugged. "Fine. There was no need for it, really, although I don't regret it, given what I found when I returned." He took a bite of steak. "Mm, this is good."

"Thanks.” She smiled. “No need?"

He shook his head. "Some people have the nerve for their work, and some don't. The meeting was really just…handholding."

Fanny chuckled. "Can you tell me what you're working on, or is ittop secret?" She inflected the last two words melodramatically before eating some broccoli.

Wickham raised his eyebrows quizzically. "No, not in that sense, but it is a business deal and there are always worries about competitors, so I'm supposed to keep it quiet."

"Corporate espionage? Does that really happen?"

He nodded as he used his fork to mash butter into his baked potato and then ate a forkful. "Oh, yes, it's always a worry. Espionage."

"You know, I sometimes read spy novels," Fanny confessed, trying to keep him talking.

"Really? I took you for a…Gaskell, Austen, Eliot sort of woman."

Lizzy smiled at the truth of his words. Thosewereher favorites, the novels she read and reread before and duringcollege. "You're right, but sometimes you want a little intrigue in the drawing room or at dinner, something darker and edgier, Le Carré or Ludlum."

Wickham huffed a laugh, looking into Fanny's eyes. "I wouldn't have guessed it of you. You seem so…distant…from such things."

"Well, I am, but you know what they say. Opposites attract."Why isn’t he showing any effect of the drug yet?She could not understand it. It was supposed to be fast-working?not immediate, but not this slow.

Wickham raised one shoulder, grinning. "I don't think I've ever heard anyone use that phrase quite that way."

Lizzy nodded. "Me, either. But, yes, I like the occasional Le Carré novel." She paused and decided to push the conversation to keep him from noticing the onset of the tranquilizer…if it ever happened. "My favorite novel of his isThe Little Drummer Girl.It's heartbreaking."

He shook his head. "I've never read it. Wasn't there a movie?"

"Yes, a movie in the 80s. And a series, BBC, I think, but that's recent, only four or five years ago."

"I didn't see either one, but I must have heard of the movie. So, it's about spies?"

"Yes—and no," Lizzy offered. "It’s not that it'snotabout spies. It’s just about so much more. I think a reviewer, maybe William Buckley, said that it was a book about spies the way thatMadam Bovaryis a book about adultery orCrime and Punishmenta book about crime."

Wickham nodded, chewing, moderately interested. Lizzy was getting more worried, wondering why he was not reacting to the drug. He should have been unconscious by now.

"It's about a woman, Charlie, an actress, who's talked into a part in 'the theater of the real,' the spy world. She becomes bait,dangled by an Israeli intelligence officer in hopes of trapping a Palestinian terrorist."

"Oh, so she's…a honeypot?"

Fanny glanced away as if embarrassed. "Is that what they call it?"

He looked at her again. His eyes, she thought, were slightly glassy. He blinked. "Yes, that's the slang, thieves’ cant."

"'You want to catch the lion, first you tether the goat.'" Lizzy whispered a line from the novel to herself. The line had been pacing the borders of her consciousness since she first met Wickham, but she had never said it explicitly, internally or externally, to herself.

He kept blinking. "What? Did you say something?" The fork slipped from his hand and onto the table. He looked from Fanny to the fork, then back up. A slow…slow sneer formed on his face as if he were painting the expression by numbers. A long moment of quiet.

"You?" His glassy eyes glared. "What have you done?"

Before she could answer, his head fell to his chest as if he suddenly went to sleep.

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