Page 72 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Their situation, this mission, was all but unbearable already. By adding that, confessing it, Lizzy would make the mission irreversibly unbearable. Darcy was often stoic, but the emotion of the last few days showed on his face now, the toll it was taking plain. Lizzy could feel the same toll it was taking on her.

Besides, what do I know about his plans for his future?My own just clarified for me?epiphany in the form of a surprise.

But a not-unwelcome surprise.

Darcy had shared his reservations about his job, about MI-6, about spying. He’d had those reservations before, it seemed, and yet had continued with his station and its duties. He had feelings for her, she knew that.I do know, don't I?He had even used Yeats to suggest their depth. However, she had no reason to think that he, like her, was ready to quit, to exit the spy world and return to normalcy. Civilian life. To leave behind the constant shifting of appearance and reality, the subsistence in shadow.

Lizzy was unsure whether she could find herself after all that shifting. She’d had years of it, long periods where she had, ineffect, forgotten who she was in order to be someone else. Many women…not one. And never herself. Could that sort of deliberate and sustained self-alienation be reversed?Have I condemned myself to a habitual alienation that might alienate me from the very things I was imagining?

She was sitting on the couch beside Fitzwilliam Darcy, picturing him as her husband and the father of her children, when only minutes ago she had been pinned to Fanny's kitchen counter, another man's arousal pressed hard into her middle, his lips pressing hers. The man beside her was struggling with that fact, she knew, trying to hide and control his jealousy and hurt, real jealousy and hurt, though he knew she was pretending.

If I'm going to quit, why not now? Why not just walk away?

One reason she didn't was what she had just told Darcy?she was stubborn and wanted to bring Wickham down, bring him to justice. She wanted to do it for Georgiana and for Darcy.

Another reason was that it was ridiculously early to speak of children with Darcy (ridiculously too early to bethinkingof children, imagining them, on my own). Even though Darcy had proposed as Ned, that was not a real proposal. The engagement was a mere appearance, not a reality. They had kissed each other last night inpropria persona,as Lizzy and Darcy, but they had never been on a date; they knew little about each other. There’d been no courtship…unless this was it.

She wanted to walk away from the spy world, yes, but she wanted to walk away with Darcy, or at least with the hope that he and she could be together out in the light and still want each other as much as they did now in the shadows.

Her thoughts and feelings so preoccupied her that she lost track of the moment. Darcy was still waiting for her to tell him what she was thinking about. His curious look had intensified.

Finally, Lizzy shook her head. "Nothing. Not really." She paused, disliking the dishonest answer but afraid to tell thetruth. A bitter cherry topping an evening of lies.This is what worries me, that lying comes easily and truth only with difficulty. She couldn't tell Darcy the truth, not thewholetruth. "I was just wondering…about you. Have you ever thought about another life?" She kept any investment in his answer distant from her voice.

His question had been deflected from her to him, she realized, and he probably noted it, too. Darcy looked lost for a second, taken aback, and then sad. His face became unreadable before he started to answer. "Yes. Sometimes. Before Georgiana, before I started chasing Wickham, I believed I was losing my…taste for it, what drive I had for it. Did I tell you how I got started?"

She shook her head again.

He sat back. "I guess we have time before Bingley's likely to return. I was recruited by one of my university professors. He had served in British intelligence in the late 1970s. After he was discharged and became a professor, MI-6 asked him to keep an eye out for…talent. He agreed. I admired him and got to know him. Attended his lectures. Typically he was a private man and hard to get to know, but he sought me out. I thought it was because of my philosophical promise—and it was, partly—but it was also because he thought I had promise for MI-6 as an agent. He knew I was unhappy, eager to be on my own."

"Why? I assumed you had a privileged childhood, a privileged life."

Darcy nodded. "Yes and no. I've told you that Georgiana is my half-sister. My father married well. My mother was from a very wealthy family. Shortly after I was born, she was diagnosed with cancer. It took her quickly. She was the one from wealth, and she knew how to handle it…a woman of sense."

He glanced at Lizzy and went on. "My father, left alone with a small boy, did not know how to handle wealth and he was not…amanof sense. He lost most of the money in a succession of risky schemes, all of which failed miserably.

"Dad got married again before he lost it all, married another woman of sense—his one gift was choosing wives. His new wife, my stepmother, quickly got pregnant, and soon Georgiana was on the scene. She and I were close from almost the beginning and got closer over the years.

"As I grew older, I became more aware of my father's waywardness…more opposed to him. My stepmother kept us afloat financially, but it meant constant battles with Dad, who constantly came up with new schemes meant to make up for his failed ones, each one crazier than the last. Like a gambler chasing his debts. Eventually, I stepped in to resist him, too, aiding her. Our relationship was tense and bitter by the time I was at Cambridge, and I wanted to be on my own, independent of him. He was complaining all the time, complaining about tuition and my bills, about paying for aphilosophystudent. ‘Funding a future blowhard barista,’ he liked to say.

"I related all of this to my professor just before the end of my second year, and he quickly suggested I could be independent even before finishing at Cambridge. He chose just the right moment. I happened to have fought with Dad the day before. I jumped at the chance and, almost without realizing what I had done, what I had committed myself to doing, I was at MI-6's version of your Farm a couple of weeks later."

"So, wait," Lizzy said, paying close attention, "you became an agent while still a student? I joined right after graduation."

He nodded his acknowledgment of her comment and then answered the question. "I did. It was strange, being both a student and an agent at the same time. MI-6 didn't ask much of me during the academic year, but I had brief missions during breaks, normally mission work as part of a team, learning from experienced agents."

Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and glanced at Lizzy, then stared at the floor "I almost quit early on. My MI-6 instructors talked endlessly about the Greater Good. Some of the other, experienced agents liked that phrase, too, as if it was a blanket justification for anything we did. So long as that was our end…or we said it was, we had clean hands no matter what underhanded means we used.

"That reasoning seemed—and still seems—fallacious to me. I don't buy the Greater Good notion. Even if I did, why should I trust some politician to know what it is? Or worse yet, some unelected lifetime bureaucrat? The actions you perform chip away at your wholeness as a person, or they ruin it all at once."

To Lizzy, Wickham's visit seemed very much between her and Darcy at this moment even though she sat near him on the couch. He continued, "You tell yourself the end does vindicate all the work, the goal of the Greater Good, but all the while, you're violating yourself. That didn't work for me. For a long time, I thought maybe I had reconciled myself to the job by using Double Effect."

"Double Effect? What's that?" Although she could make a guess at what the term meant, it was new to her.

"It's the notion that you can distinguish between theintendedconsequences and the merelyforeseenconsequences of your act. Only the first is supposed to matter. It might be used to justify, say, a World War II bombing mission, the decision to bomb a munitions plant at night when some civilians might still be there working." He sat back up and faced her. "That’s an example, a stock one. For a long time I told myself that some such distinction could be used for what I did on missions. I never made myself think it through, face it." He stopped talking and used his thumbs to rub his temples. Lizzy fought back a desire to put her arms around him, pull him to her.

Instead, she wondered whether she had made such a distinction herself without knowing its name.Am I doing it now where Wickham's concerned?what just happened at the kitchen counter?Wickham's hands on her body, her breasts, and his tongue on her lips were all foreseen but not intended consequences of her mission. Therefore, she could not be blamed for it. If she could not be blamed for it, it could not affect her.

Itdidaffect her. Deeply. It was why she had avoided seduction missions. The two she had been on before had chipped away at her wholeness (Darcy's phrase is exactly right), her sense of herself. The last few days of this mission had been so much worse.

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