On Air: An Elizabeth and Darcy Story (Part 6)

Greetings! It’s another week — and so here’s another part of my Elizabeth and Darcy story, On Air!

As usual, it’s unedited, and I didn’t quite manage to reach the true end of Part 6. But I thought I’d go ahead and post what I have and beg your forgiveness for all my shortcomings! (I’m worse than my students when it comes to procrastinating sometimes!) Thanks for your patience, and thanks for reading!

If you’re interested in starting this story from the beginning, here are links to the other parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Despite the rough-draft nature of this part, I hope you find a bit of joy in reading it!

On-Air (Part 6)

(An Elizabeth and Darcy Short Story)

All week, he had waited for this moment: not to learn the truth about George Wickham (he had found out something of that business on his own). No, he had waited to hear Bennet’s voice—to hear it directed at him, and only him. It wouldn’t have mattered what she’d said, and he knew, if he’d given her the chance, she’d have told him to go to hell.

But he hadn’t given her the chance; he’d avoided her, assiduously. Her chitchat with Mel, the elevator operator; her laughing exchanges with Miss Lucas; her rehearsals with the “Tales for Tots” team—these had been verses in a siren’s song he had only been able to resist by turning away from her, the moment he heard her voice.

Fortunately, he had enough work to keep him out of her path: meetings with the board, dinners with their biggest advertising clients, early mornings and long nights looking over the accounts, searching for that miracle he knew would not come. PBN was in the red, for the second year in a row.

“Your father never enjoyed the business of running a company,” Mrs. Reynolds had once confided, with a frankness born of twenty-five years of service to Pemberley (first, Pemberley Publishing and then, when George Darcy had branched out to that newfangled radio business, PBN). “He is a storyteller and a talent-maker, not an accountant. But at least he’d had the sense to hire good accountants and managers before…well, before the accident.”

The accident—that euphemism they all used for what had happened last year.

“Just an accident!” his father had boomed from his hospital bed. “And look at me—hearty as can be, though I can’t say the same for my poor Packard!”

Yes, just an accident: his luxury automobile, mangled by a tree—as if it had been the tree’s fault, and not George Darcy’s drunken spree that had led to the collision.

“A miracle!” the attending physician had told Darcy, when he’d rushed to New York from Spain, having been wired the news. “Your father emerged from the wreckage with nothing more than a bruise to the head!”

If it was a miracle, it was a short-lived one, for bruise seemed to be the beginning, not the end, of George Darcy’s health problems. Headaches, forgetfulness, rapid shifts of mood. Then, more gradually, coughing, wheezing, and jaundice. Those symptoms likely had nothing to do with the head injury, but instead were his body’s surrender to the cigars and whiskey he had enjoyed, in no small quantity, for decades.

So really, the accident hadn’t been a beginning or an end—just the midpoint in a life of fast, hard living. For that had been George Darcy’s motto: live hard, live fast, live fully.

Rather, live fully by his standards.

“You’ll waste your youth, studying in libraries!” his father had exclaimed, when Darcy had shown him the acceptance letter from Harvard. “I didn’t need to go to college to make something of myself!”

(Perhaps because you were born to a publishing magnate and married a wealthy heiress?)

“I don’t understand why you’re going to medical school,” his father had complained, when Darcy had announced his decision to attend Johns Hopkins. “We’re starting a broadcasting network, William, not a hospital!”

(You are starting a broadcasting network, Father.)

“You can’t be a doctor!” his father had cried—almost literally, he had cried. There had been tears in his eyes when he had shouted these words at his son, the day after his graduation from medical school.

“I can’t not be a doctor, sir,” Darcy had responded, gently sliding the offer of employment (Vice President and General Manager of the New York Station) across his father’s desk. “I don’t know how you could have believed otherwise, after all my years of study—”

“I thought”—his father grabbed the unsigned contract and tore it down the middle—“it was a lark! I thought”—another tear—“you were sowing your version of wild oats! I thought”—so many tears the paper had become confetti, thrown in the air to celebrate nothing—“you would come to understand your duty to Pemberley—to this family!”

If his mother had not died, perhaps she would have convinced George Darcy that his son’s interest in medicine was no lark. Then again, had not the nature of Anne Darcy’s death—that unstoppable influenza, killing rich and poor alike—been proof enough? If he had been a doctor in 1919, instead of a boy sent off to boarding school, could he have saved her? Unlikely, but he had been determined to save other people’s mothers. (Not to mention their fathers, sisters, brothers, children…)

Yes, he had been determined—once. Now, he was exactly where his father had begged him to be, only he was here too late to do much good. His father was declining—and so was PBN.

Even with Georgiana, he had failed. She had been so young when he had gone away to school, and though he had come home every holiday, bringing gifts, playing endless games of hide and seek, helping her with homework, the two of them were more like distant cousins who enjoyed each other’s company when they happened to meet—not siblings who shared their burdens with each other.

How was he to tell her what he had already learned of George Wickham, not to mention whatever details Bennet was about to share with him?

“Darcy,” she said to him now, placing a tentative hand on his forearm. “Are you all right?”

He stared down at her fingers, pressed into his jacket sleeve, and wished she would slide her hand into his. What if they simply walked away—from Grand Central, from PBN, from the mess of their lives—and went to dinner somewhere?

No, that was what he wanted. She had a beloved sister and nephew waiting for her.

“We’re going to miss the train,” he said.

“You worry too much, Darcy. We made it last time, and we’ll make it this time, too. We have”—she glanced up at the terminal’s large gold clock—“six minutes to spare.”

“Six whole minutes, eh?”

“Only five and three quarters minutes now.”

He felt the laughter before he heard it: a warmth in his chest, the loosening of his shoulders, that tilt of his head, at just the right angle for catching the widening of her eyes.

“You, sir, are an intricate character,” she said, with a lopsided grin. “I have made far wittier comments, but now you choose to laugh?”

“Yes, now.” He hesitated, then turned his palm up, offering her his hand. “Come on. The train.”

She held his gaze for one, heart-stopping moment. Then, slowly, she slid her hand down the length of his forearm until her palm touched his.

“Well, come on,” she said, tugging on his hand. “The train.”

“You worry too much, Bennet,” he said, deliberately dragging his feet now. “We have at least four and a half minutes now.”

Now it was her turn to laugh, and he wondered what he might give to make this a regular occurrence, hurrying through Grand Central, holding her hand, making her laugh.

Only when they had stowed their bags and settled into their seats did he allow himself to remember George Wickham—and only then because he owed it to his sister to make certain his deductions were, in fact, correct.

“Tommy,” he said, his voice catching on the boy’s name. “Is he…is Wickham…””

“Yes,” she whispered, staring down at her hands, now balled into fists on her lap.

He leaned into her slightly, so that their arms touched.

“How did you know?” she asked, glancing up at him. “When he admitted to being a postal clerk before joining PBN, I saw how you looked at me, but I don’t understand how you knew, just from that slip…”

“It wasn’t just that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. “Last week, Caroline Bingley told me of the town gossip—that your sister had been involved with a postal clerk who left Meryton, just around the time she became pregnant.”

“And that alone…?”

“No, I also hired a private detective.”

“What?”

The word erupted from her, so that the person sitting in front of them turned and glanced back at them.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I don’t know why that caught me by surprise.”

“It’s nothing to the reaction I can expect from my sister.”

“And rightly so.”

He stiffened. “I don’t think it was a terrible idea to hire someone, Bennet. After all—“

“Look, I understand why you did it, but if one of my sisters went behind my back and hired someone to investigate you—” She stopped, swallowed, and blushed. “It shows a lack of trust, that’s all.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged, feeling far lighter than he should have, all things considered. “I don’t suppose it helps that I wasn’t just worried about her. I…I wanted to make sure he wasn’t taking advantage of my father, too.”

She glanced at him, eyes widening. “And…is he?”

“I only hired the man last week. All he’s found out so far is Wickham’s past addresses, including his six-month stay, five years ago, at Minuteman Lodging House in Meryton.”

“Ah, so it was the address plus the postal clerk slip…”

“Yes.”

“But you haven’t told your sister yet.”

“I don’t know how,” he admitted. “Today, I tried to convince her not to go with him, to stay at home, to celebrate with me—“ He stopped and shook his head.

A cake, he’d told Georgiana. I’ll bake you a cake. Never mind that he had never before baked a cake, but he had remembered, suddenly, that conversation between Elizabeth and her sister the week before, at the train station.

“I’ve heard it’s someone’s birthday, and we need to make her a cake,” Elizabeth had said to Tommy. He could just picture them—though he had never met the youngest three—sitting around a table together, with Tommy on his mother’s lap as she drew in a deep breath to blow out the candles.

God, how he had wanted that moment for Georgi and himself. His sister had paused, just for a moment, as if she might say yes—but then she had laughed and said he was being ridiculous. Besides, she had a date!

He’d almost told her about Wickham then; perhaps he should have told her then. But it wasn’t a crime, having a child with another woman, almost five years before he met Georgiana, and it would have been just as likely that his revelation would have sent her running to George Wickham, rather than away from him.

“You don’t think she’ll believe you?” Elizabeth prompted gently.

“If I tell her what I’ve discovered—and how I’ve discovered it—she’ll see it as one more example of my snobbery. She thinks I am against him because he doesn’t come from a wealthy or well-connected family.”

“Well, I do have to admit,” she said, nudging him lightly, “you are rather good at appearing a snob.”

He smiled, in spite of himself. “How else am I to hide my true pirate nature from the world?”

She laughed, and again the man in front of them turned and stared.

“Just a warning,” she said to the man, who startled at being addressed directly.  “This man, sitting beside me–he tends to take umbrage at men who sit in front of him. Why, just last week, he knocked the hat off the gentleman in the row ahead of us!”

Abruptly, the man swiveled back to his front-facing position.

“You knocked off the hat, as I recall,” Darcy said, unable to keep from laughing.

“Me? I suppose you’re right.” She flashed him a winsome smile. “Last week feels so long ago.” Then, all at once, she deflated. “A very long time ago.”

He hesitated, then asked, “The news?”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t difficult to guess what she’d been thinking. The whole office had fallen silent yesterday, just after the regular morning programming—some melodrama or variety show—had been interrupted by the incoming broadcast: Germany had invaded Poland.

© 2025 Christina Morland

Author’s Note: Many thanks to Glynis, who suggested in a comment some months ago that Darcy needed to have Wickham investigated by a private detective. Darcy, it seems, has great respect for Glynis’s understanding (and deep dislike) of Wickham!