Darcy Writes in His Journal about Searching for Wickham

Welcome to our epistolary retelling of Pride & Prejudice! Jane Austen’s original version of the story, First Impression, was told entirely in letters, so it seemed like a great group project. We’ll be posting a new letter every Wednesday. 

Private Journal of Fitzwilliam Darcy

12 August 1813 — London

I have spent the morning in a gaming house in Covent Garden, in conversation with a man named Pratt who reeks of inferior tobacco and who charged me one hundred and forty pounds for the pleasure of his company. This is not, I should record for any future reader who might otherwise form a charitable impression of my August, the strangest errand I have undertaken this week. On Tuesday I was in a tailor’s back room off the Strand. On Wednesday I spent two hours in a counting house near Cheapside whose proprietor had evidently decided that Wickham’s unpaid account constituted a personal injury to his bloodline and required some considerable soothing before he would discuss terms. Yesterday I bought a debt originally incurred at a wine merchant’s in Gracechurch Street, and another from a livery stable whose owner had the decency to look somewhat ashamed on Wickham’s behalf, which is more than Wickham has ever managed himself.

I have purchased, to date, seven separate debts in Wickham’s name, totalling approximately six hundred and thirty pounds. I say approximately because Pratt revised his figure twice during our conversation this morning, in the manner of a man who has discovered that the commodity he is selling is worth more than he initially believed, and so I am uncertain whether the final sum he accepted represents the true amount of the debt or a round number he arrived at through some private arithmetic of his own. I have begun to keep a separate ledger of the whole enterprise, which makes for very disagreeable reading but at least imposes some order on a situation that is otherwise entirely resistant to it.

The question of how many more there are I cannot yet answer with any confidence. London alone may be as bad again. Meryton, I have not yet been able to account for, as making enquiries in a small Hertfordshire village requires a rather more delicate approach than making them in London, where one may be relatively anonymous and where no one finds it surprising that a gentleman should wish to purchase another man’s debts without advertising his reasons. In Meryton, I suspect every tradesman knows every other tradesman’s affairs intimately, and a wrong question in the wrong shop would be through the village before the ink had dried on anything.

I had better set down the sequence of events in their proper order, as I have been putting it off, and the longer I leave it the more it rearranges itself in my memory into something more manageable than it actually was, which is a habit of mind I distrust.

I found them on the fifth of this month.

The finding was Mrs Younge’s doing, which is to say I paid Mrs Younge for information she would not have given freely, and I paid considerably more than the intelligence was worth in any rational assessment, but Mrs Younge’s assessment of her own worth has never been rational and I had not the time or the inclination to negotiate. I shall add it to the ledger. It fits the general character of the enterprise.

They were in lodgings in Henrietta Street. The neighbourhood, I shall not describe here in any great detail, save to say I believe I was propositioned twice on my way to the door, and once just after entering it. The landlady was visibly surprised to receive my card, as she did not look like a woman who received many cards of any description. I waited in the front parlour for approximately ten minutes, during which time I studied a watercolour of a spaniel on the wall opposite in considerable detail, and then Miss Lydia Bennet came downstairs.

She was, I think, the last of the two of them I had expected to present any difficulty.

I shall do her the justice of recording that she was not stupid about it, or not entirely. She understood very quickly why I was there — more quickly, perhaps, than I had expected — and she was a great deal calmer than I had anticipated, which I attribute less to composure of character and more to the particular confidence of a girl who is deeply, incomprehensibly certain that everything will arrange itself to her satisfaction. She had that certainty entirely intact. I am not sure anything I said made the smallest impression on it.

I made the offer as plainly as I could. A secure settlement. A removal from London to a location of her choosing. Assistance in framing whatever account of her absence she wished to present to her family. I was — and I am recording this because it is the truth and this journal is for accuracy — I was as persuasive as I know how to be, and I do not think I know how to be particularly persuasive with girls of sixteen who have already decided, so it may not have been a very high bar. She heard me out. She tilted her head in a way that reminded me, with rather painful clarity, of someone else entirely who would never in her life have been in this situation, and then she said that she could not possibly leave Wickham, as he loved her and was going to marry her, and that she could not imagine what had possessed me to think otherwise.

I asked her when the wedding was to be.

She said, with perfect serenity, that it had not been fixed yet, but that it would be very soon, for Wickham had said so.

I held my expression, for I am practiced at that. I said what remained to be said, which was not much, and I left.

I have been devising a secondary plan ever since.

Wickham will not marry her from honour, as he possesses none. He will not marry her from feeling, as whatever feeling he had was almost certainly an invention to serve the moment. He might marry her from fear, if the alternative were bad enough, but Wickham is a slippery man who has been fleeing consequences for the better part of fifteen years and has not yet been caught badly enough to change his methods, so fear alone is uncertain.

He will marry her from interest.

Wickham’s interest is money, and Wickham’s money is consistently and significantly in the negative. If I hold enough of his debts, I become the creditor he cannot ignore — the one whose cooperation is necessary to any future that is not an extremely small room in a debtors’ prison, which is not, I think, the future Wickham has in mind for himself. He is vain as well as dissolute, which is occasionally useful; a man who thinks himself charming cannot quite imagine the world entirely without his charms in it, and will go to some lengths to preserve the conditions that allow him to exercise them.

Six hundred and thirty pounds is a good beginning. It is not enough.

I need to know the true sum before I approach him, which is the problem that presently occupies me. If I go to him too soon, before I have the full picture, he will hold back what I do not know and use it later as a fresh demand, and the whole business will unspool indefinitely while Miss Lydia’s reputation collapses further with every week that passes. If I wait too long — if I wait for certainty on the debts when certainty may never arrive — I lose weeks I do not have.

I have perhaps four more days before I need to make a decision on it. I have a man in Meryton as of yesterday who is conducting the enquiries as quietly as such enquiries can be conducted, and who will send word by the end of the week. I have a solicitor who is tracking two further London debts that have not yet been confirmed. After Friday, I shall proceed with what I have.

What I have not set down, and will now set down, because this journal is the only place it exists, is the other thing.

I keep returning to Ramsgate.

Not the horse, not the accident — that is a separate catalogue of humiliations I have already committed to paper elsewhere and need not revisit. I mean what preceded it. What preceded Ramsgate by a year, or two years, or perhaps longer; what I could have done and chose not to, because my first instinct was always to protect Georgiana’s privacy rather than to prevent the next injury to someone else.

Had I spoken plainly of Wickham’s character when I had occasion — had I said, in any of the contexts where it would have been heard and believed, what I knew to be true about the man — had I said it last autumn in Hertfordshire when he arrived in that regiment and began his campaign of slander against my name and his pursuit of every young woman in the neighbourhood with an inheritance — had I said it then, Miss Lydia Bennet would not be in lodgings in Gracechurch Street waiting for a man who has not fixed a wedding date.

I chose silence. I chose the lesser embarrassment. I called it dignity and I called it restraint and it was neither; it was simply the habitual privacy of a man who is more comfortable managing his own affairs than involving himself in other people’s, and that is a comfortable way to live and an occasionally disastrous one.

I intend to note this and not return to it, as the returning to it is not useful.

Evening addendum

I have not written her name in this journal during this entire business, which is not an accident.

I will not write it now. I will say only this: I left Lambton because there was something I could do, and remaining would have meant doing nothing, and doing nothing is the thing that has already cost more than I care to calculate. Whether anything will come of the doing is a separate question and one I will not answer here, because I do not know the answer, and because I have learnt, rather recently, that I am a significantly worse judge of my own circumstances than I have always believed myself to be, and some humility on the point seems both warranted and overdue.

She does not know I am here. She will not know, if I can prevent it. If I cannot — if the Gardiners, who have been more gracious in this than I deserve, should let anything slip — I shall manage that when it happens. For the present, what she knows is that her youngest sister is in London unmarried and the family is in distress, and what she does not know is that anyone is actively working to change either of those facts.

I should like, when this is over and something has been settled, to return to Pemberley.

I should like — and here I will be entirely honest, in the way this journal occasionally permits — I should like, eventually, to find some means of returning to a conversation that was interrupted at an inn in Lambton in late July, when I said very little of what I meant and left before I could say any more, on the grounds that there was something more useful to do. I hope the grounds remain valid. I hope useful turns out to be enough.

I have Pratt’s receipt to add to the ledger. I have a letter from my solicitor to answer. I have a man in Meryton whose report I am waiting on, and Wickham’s accounts to re-examine, and four days in which to determine whether six hundred and thirty pounds plus whatever Friday brings will be sufficient to make a man without principles behave as though he has some.

It is not the summer I had in mind.

I shall be at my desk.

Read all the letters from Confessions & Correspondence here!