Chapter Text
Elizabeth Bennet had once said that a really robust, strong love could be strengthened by almost anything. Darcy had known she was right about that for a while now — that arguing with her just reinforced that she was clever and determined, that hearing her play a note wrong on the pianoforte turned his eyes to her and let him see the crease in her brow over those utterly beautiful eyes, that even dancing could be forgiven when it meant he sometimes got to touch her hand.
It was deeply unpleasant to realise that it was true even of such things as a well applied rejection.
Fitzwilliam Darcy had not bared his heart to her until he felt he had no other choice. Until he had tried absolutely everything to feel any other way than he did, and determined that his feelings were utterly immovable.
And then — even though she was at constant risk of becoming homeless whenever her father happened to die, even though marriage to him would remove that risk forever, even though on an estate as big as Pemberley it was very easy for husband and wife to have almost nothing to do with each other if that was what either wanted — she had shot him down. Without one speck of softness or ambiguity, without regret, without consideration. Because she absolutely refused to be married to anyone who had hurt her sister.
Given that her other main objection had been a misunderstanding of something he’d done to protect his own sister, of course he could respect that. Of course he was surer than ever that Elizabeth Bennet was exactly who he would want Georgiana’s sister-in-law to be. But he had long since blown that, if he had ever had a chance at all.
By this point, she'd either read his letter or she’d thrown it away. Darcy didn't think he wanted to know which. Either way, it was entirely possible that he had said the last thing he would ever say to her. Almost certainly the time of their arguments — which he had found fun and lighthearted and she, apparently, had not — was over. And tomorrow he would be leaving Kent, with no certainty of ever seeing her again.
Maybe that was for the best. Miss Elizabeth certainly wouldn't want to see him, and now he knew it.
There was a crack in the wall Darcy was staring at. He wondered if he should tell his aunt about it.
Not every change could be seen, even by those most directly affected by them. Indeed, sometimes things could change from the course they might otherwise have taken simply by going as planned.
Mr Gardiner was not called by unexpected business to cut short the Northern tour he took with his wife and second-eldest niece. They still passed through Derbyshire, and even spent an extra day there, since Mrs Gardiner had not been back in some time and wanted to see how old haunts and old acquaintances had changed.
But they did not visit Pemberley, and even if they had they would not have run into Mr Darcy — whom Elizabeth spent their day in Derbyshire endeavouring to think about as little as possible — since he was still in London.
Instead, they continued right through to the Lakes, which Elizabeth in particular quite enjoyed. They saw a good amount of the country, wound across many lovely walking trails, and had in all respects a great time.
Until, of course, the letters came to tell them of Lydia’s elopement, and fun met its end.
Lizzy was a fool. An absolute, irredeemable idiot. She had known what Wickham was, and what had she done about it? Been a little cold and snarky the last time she saw him, very soon after learning that her ‘a little cold and snarky’ didn't signal ‘I find you despicable and revolting’ quite as clearly as she’d thought it did.
What she hadn't done was tell the rest of her family. Information that got to Kitty got to Lydia, and from Lydia to Mama, and from Mrs Bennet to Meryton. She had been told what she knew in confidence, she couldn't do that.
But if she had, Lydia would be safe at home today.
Instead, her littlest sister was off God knew where with a man Lizzy had known for months couldn't be trusted not to lie about the weather or gamble away a bread roll. The most likely way any of them were going to see her again was found dead in a ditch.
Little Lydia. The only sister younger by enough for Lizzy to really clearly remember her first babbled nonsense words, or what she looked like with porridge down to her knees and up to her eyebrows. Even now something of the baby lingered in her dimpled cheeks, the bright shine in her wide blue eyes. How long would it last when she was hungry and alone?
How long would she last, at all?
Lizzy almost wished that Mr Darcy were somehow here. She had utterly failed to follow up on the warning he had given her, had left her baby sister open to the manipulations of a charming cad, and the only other people in the world who knew it were Jane — who would never condemn her for it — and Wickham — whom she would kill with her bare hands if she ever saw again.
At least if Lizzy were getting yelled at there’d be some scrap of justice done for the fate of poor Lydia.
Misters Bennet and Gardiner scoured London for months without one glimpse of either of them. They didn't even know if Lydia and Wickham were in London, or if they might have moved on from there, or if they were still in the same place as one another. Every acquaintance was consulted, every favour called in; no progress was made.
Eventually, as it always somehow does, life moved forward. Around a gaping, bleeding hole, but it moved forward nonetheless.
In February of 1813 Mr Bingley finally returned to Meryton, and within a week had made the proposal the town had expected a year ago. For the day or so afterward Mrs Bennet was almost her old self again. She even actually smiled. While talking about carriages and wedding finery, but a smile was a smile.
After that, Bingley started joining the search expeditions, equipped with different acquaintances to call on, different favours to exchange, and a nearly endless supply of the optimism that had been so quickly fading.
It was Georgiana Darcy who eventually reported having seen Mr Wickham at a restaurant (which she had, consequently, left). That had been months prior, and she hadn't thought much of it at the time, but it gave them a starting point beyond ‘probably London', which was more than they'd had.
Within another week they found a landlord with no end of complaints to make about the late rent payments of one Mr Wickham ‘and his whore’, who had formerly been tenants of his. He could at least be credited with consistency of opinion, because there was not a flicker of embarrassment about him upon learning he was speaking to said ‘whore’s’ concerned father.
Barely a half day after that, they found Lydia.
The apartment was the kind of one-room situation that barely even deserved that term. There was a wall set up, hasty and thin so that both halves of what ought to have been a mid-sized bedroom could be let out to different people, and the door sat rather crooked in its wall.
In one corner a bed was shoved, in another a low table and chair, and after that the space ran out. There was no window. Lighting came, when it did, from the often-open door into the boarding house hallway.
Lydia spent most of her time convincing herself that Wickham was about to walk back through it. It was the kind of belief held onto out of the need for it to be true rather than out of any reason to think it actually was, but who didn't have a few beliefs like that?
Papa believed that the world would be more bearable if he laughed at it; Mama believed that she could make it so men would want to marry her daughters by nagging them (the daughters, the men, other people entirely); Jane believed that everyone acted out of a sincere belief they were doing the right thing; Lizzy believed that there were objectively right or wrong answers to things; Mary believed that if she could sound enough like a book people would want to read her; Kitty believed that if she didn't make decisions for herself it wouldn't be her fault if she made the wrong ones; Lydia believed that she was not going to die alone in a boarding house.
It is perhaps telling of how well she knew she was deluding herself that when the landlady came to tell her there was a man to see her she successfully guessed it to be Mr Bennet. That she might have thought it was Wickham did not even occur until they were halfway to Longbourn.
Before that, there was the arguing. She was alternately scolded for terrible decision making and desperately embraced. She alternately dreamed of and dreaded going home. Pleaded, indeed, to be allowed to stay where she was — because if she left then Wickham would not be able to find her, and so he would not come back, and so she would have destroyed her own reputation and that of everyone around her for nothing at all.
It was not exactly Bingley’s soft “if he were going to return, he would have by now” that convinced her, though it prompted it.
The fight only abandoned her when she heard her own voice shout, “I know!”
After that it was fairly short work to pack up what remained of the poorly-planned rucksack she’d taken with her to London and set about the kind of extended carriage ride in which much ought to be said and very little was. Mr Bingley provided most of the conversation, and was very lucky that he did not much mind being used as background noise. Neither present Bennet would have been reliably able to list the topics he raised for discussion, but the fact that there was something being discussed helped to quiet the silence.
Regardless of anything else — of the consequences that would follow every member of the Bennet family for the rest of their lives — there is something to be said for crying into your own pillow, and eating awkward, crowded meals beside your own family members.