Page 71 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Darcy was an incredibly resourceful agent, as Lizzy well knew from both his reputation and her experience working with him these past few days. But once she began traveling with Wickham, she would not be able to rely on Darcy?it would be up to her to take care of herself.

What will he make of what I've done?

She showed Wickham to the door. Once he left, she closed and locked it, then leaned her forehead against it. Her whole body shook with the effort it had taken to control herself and her sick stomach.

Her nausea spiking, she ran from the door into the bathroom. The evening's whiskey and water was vomited into the toilet.

Afterward, she sat on the couch, her head hanging. It felt like she had flushed her hopes when she flushed the toilet. She held a handful of tissues from the bathroom she had used to wipe her mouth. She wanted, needed, to brush her teeth but didn’t know if her stomach would allow it. The thought of toothpaste, its taste and consistency, was too much.

As she waited to feel steadier, she dug the gun Darcy had given her from between two of the couch cushions. Before Wickham’s arrival, she had carefully placed it there, grip up, so that she could retrieve it quickly. She double-checked the safety and laid the gun on top of the copy ofWives and Daughters.

The book and the gun formed a strange stack, and she found herself staring at it. The stack was a symbol of her life. Her bookish father and his lessons, their shared love of books, a love she carried with her to Haverford when she’d intended to turn that love into her career. But everything had gone—if not wrong, then…sideways. Her books had been trumped by guns.

What had Wickham said about philosophers?He had put them away like childish things.Hadn't she done the same with the books she once loved? She had buried her academic ambition, her hope of teaching, with her father.

She was still staring at the stack when Darcy's now-familiar knock sounded softly at the door.

As grateful as she was for Ned’s timely text, Lizzy was tempted to be angry at him about the inscription. That was not what was done in deep cover.You don't surprise your partner.Spies hated surprises, hated that they could add sudden confusion or perplexity to a mission's already deadly risk.She prepared herself to chide him, but when she opened the door and saw his face, saw the worry and anguish in his eyes, sheforgave him immediately. All she wanted to do was hold him and be held by him.

Instead, they stood awkwardly for a moment. Then he entered quickly and closed the door for her. "Bingley's trailing Wickham on the chance that he's not headed back to Rosings. Everything's turned off here in the apartment, the surveillance. I turned it off just after Wickham left."

She put her hand over her mouth but spoke carefully, audibly. "So you heard me in the bathroom?" He nodded grimly. He reached out to her, but she stepped back, shaking her head. "Give me a minute. Sit down."

She walked quickly to the bathroom. Seeing him had immediately steadied her. She brushed her teeth, washed her face and hands, and gargled, as much to rid herself of the taste of Wickham than anything else. After drying her face and hands, she returned to the living room.

Darcy was sitting on the couch and contemplating the gun atop Gaskell, just the way Lizzy had done earlier. He looked up at her, his face embarrassed, apologetic.

"About that inscription. Sloppy spycraft. Sloppy. I put it in there last night after I visited your room. It just…occurred to me, you see…that Ned might have inscribed it for Fanny. I meant to tell you, but we started talking about Georgiana and I forgot. I had…Yeats on my mind when we met at Covers. I never imagined Wickham taking that book into his hands. Or reading Sartre."

"Did any of that strike you as important? What Wickham said? The Sartre, the Marx?"

He glanced at her. "Maybe. He was radicalized by someone, somehow, and Marx is as likely a prolegomenon as any. The Sartre book is a slow-motion root canal—I can't imagine Wickham would have had the fortitude to suffer through it. The remark about theory and practice fits, though."

Darcy rubbed his eyes before continuing, and Lizzy realized he was as exhausted as she. “The Wicker Man isn't in the service of any particular political ideology. In truth, he'santi-politics, nihilistic. He’s about terror, destabilization. He's not trying to usher in utopia. He, the people he works for, and those he works instead want to usher in dystopia. They’re people who believe they've positioned themselves to profit from acontrolledapocalypse. Their goal is to gain enormous power, enormous wealth, or both from the collapse of order by pitting group against group—race, class, whatever."

Lizzy came and down beside him, and they shared a few seconds of silence before he spoke again. "But we don't need to talk about all that tonight." He faced her. "Why did you do it, Elizabeth, suggest traveling with him?"

"You know why, Fitzwilliam. He wants me,Fanny, so much that he's starting to take chances?coming here tonight after what happened in South Dakota, agreeing to take me with him in a couple of days. He's planning something, and from what he said, his timetable is quickening. We need to know what it is."

"We do. But not like this, risking you this way. In public or here in the apartment, we're in control. Out there"?he waved toward the dark window?"out there,hetakes control. We become reactive. We can't take the initiative, plan. And he made it clear. Next time,Fanny sleeps with him." Darcy seemed to choke on the words, his misery audible. "You've assumed Georgiana's place. Remember what happened to her." His plea was whispered but more affecting because of that.

Lizzy scooted toward him and put one hand around the back of his neck, reassuring him even as touching him reassured her. Her words started softly but grew in conviction, hardened. "I'm not Georgiana. I'm not Fanny. I'm Elizabeth Bennet, CIA. And I'm stubborn. Damn stubborn. I can't stand to be manipulated,gaslit—and the truth is, Fitzwilliam, I want totake that mandown. I need to do it. I'mnotFanny. He doesn't want the real woman he wants; she's too much woman for him.I am. He thinks he's beaten me, beaten Fanny, and it's time to claim the spoils. But it's not going to work out his way."

Darcy looked at her, admiration in his eyes. He shook his head and smiled reluctantly. His hands rose in surrender as he responded. "Fine. But remember, we're running this risk together, all three of us. Out there, Wickham hashelp—we don't know who or how many. And his company won't be a plasticized socialite or a gay priest. It will be dead bodies in South Dakota. Out there, we're truly facing not just Wickham, but the Wicker Man. The Wicker Man will burn us alive if he can, starting with Fanny. And no psalm will save her, save us."

Lizzy nodded, calming a bit, removing her hand from his neck. "I know. I do."

As she spoke, she knew something else too, knew it for a certainty. Her eyes fell again on the gun and the Gaskell.

This is my last mission.

Children.

Chapter Seventeen: Double Effect

Darcy gave Lizzy a curious look. "What are you thinking about? Your…countenance…just shifted." He smiled at his own comment, the wording of it, (countenance?) despite his obvious struggles with the whole evening, all that he’d had to see and hear. Witness.

Much as she would love to tell him that she was thinking about children, family, future, and how her imagination involuntarily populated all scenes of that future with Darcy as father, husband, and partner, how could she reveal that after what she had just done?

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