Prologue
It was as though I had always known. Right from the moment when I saw the master tearing off towards town, his charger already tiring, and heard that hoarse agonizing cry torn from his lips.
"Goddamn you, Wikham!"
He was married yesterday. I can but imagine the ceremony -- he, standing at the altar in his handsome blue coat, turning back to meet her eyes as she walks up the aisle. She -- I can see her masses of lace, as at any wedding of gentlefolk, and sometimes I fill in her face -- but I can never meet her eyes. But I am used to looking away; with averted eyes I have learned to decipher what I never saw before.
They tried their best to keep it from me. Bless them, they hoped to spare me the pain; may they never have to realize how much meaning is conveyed in an awkward pause, a warning look intended for someone else. And of course, they could know nothing about the legacy of that unfortunate intimacy - snobbery works more than in one direction, and my mother would never have let me have anything to do with that book learning - her plans for me involved secrets of a very different nature. Secrets, ironically, perhaps, which have everything to do with the other legacy of the same unfortunate intimacy.
I wonder how much longer you will remain my secret to keep. Yesterday, for the first time, I felt you move within me. It was the merest flutter, and yet I knew it could be nothing else. And this feather's touch began to reveal to me the answer to the question I had harboured within from the very first day that I entered my mother's tutelage: the eternal question of why a woman would surrender herself to dolorous torment for a moment of ephemeral ecstacy. It was a moment of bliss -- and probably at the very same moment, your father took a wife.
The announcement was stark, shorn of the details I would agonizingly have devoured.
Lately, George Wikham, Esq, was married to Miss Lydia Bennet.