A Higher Education

by Rosalie Stanton

  She figured she was going to regret this, but Elizabeth decided, when the alarm clock blared at its usual six-thirty, that she didn’t have it in her to haul ass to class.

  Hell, she didn’t think she could people at all today.

  To her astonishment, Jane didn’t seem surprised. Elizabeth listened as her roommate climbed out of bed at the normal time and went through the motions of getting ready for the day’s first class, all the while playing dead and hoping Jane didn’t come to examine her too closely.

  “I’m glad you’re staying in today,” Jane said before she opened the door. Apparently Elizabeth’s possum act hadn’t fooled anyone. She was really off her game. “I know you’ll be kicking yourself later, but trust me, the best thing you can do for yourself is give your head a break.”

  Elizabeth was still a moment, then rolled over and dragged a pillow over said head. “Mmmffpphbt.”

  “Love you too,” Jane replied. She was gone the next moment, and the room again fell silent.

  Elizabeth didn’t move, though she couldn’t say that her face pressed flat to the surface of a dorm room mattress while the pillow sat on top of her head was a position she’d recommend for sleep. Her limbs just refused to cooperate.

  When she awoke a few hours later, foggy headed and breath tasting like something had died in her mouth, she found her pillow at the foot of her bed and the blankets kicked to the floor.

  And though she felt she’d slept more than she ever had in her life, her body refused to reward her with energy. At least, the throbbing in her skull had somewhat subsided.

  A glance at the clock told her it was nearly noon. Elizabeth groaned and dug her forehead into the mattress. Her body responded to the lure of even more sleep like a wagon-abandoning addict might a shiny brick of cocaine, but she forced herself to ignore the pull and gave her head a shake.

  No. She would not spend the entire day in bed. Sixteen plus hours of sleep had been enough.

  Instead, she sat up. It took herculean effort and her body whined with every move, but dammit, she managed to get vertical. The room went sideways for a moment as her equilibrium put up the last of its fight, but she steadied herself and waited.

  Then she eyed her laptop.

  Clear over on her desk.

  “Fuck.”

  Elizabeth pressed her lips together. She wasn’t quite ready to get out of bed, but the guilt demons had already begun their assault on her gut for having skipped classes today. The best way to satiate their demands was to check in with her professors, send apologies where needed, and see what she could do to make up her absence.

  A struggle and a few minutes later, she had her laptop seated on her pillow and was squinting at her inbox.

  That was until the name Fitzwilliam Darcy solidified as the sender of an unread message.

  Elizabeth’s spine went ramrod straight, the last of her emotional hangover blinking out of existence.

  Will had emailed her. Holy shit.

  Elizabeth shook her head, dragging her finger over the built-in mouse until the cursor hovered over the subject line.

  Re: Matters needing clarification

  Shit, she was going to throw something, wasn’t she?

  For a long moment, Elizabeth debated moving that sucker straight to her trash and being done with it. Well, she debated debating it. There was no way she could actually go through with it. An awful curiosity compounded with fear and excitement.

  Fuck it.

  She clicked the message open, expecting to be greeted by a few curt lines.

  Instead, a wall of text flooded her screen. Her stomach fell. Again she considered getting rid of the email—or the laptop itself. Maybe she’d open her window and throw it onto the sidewalk before her overly curious mind could delve in. The visual was so tempting that she felt her body jolt, but destroying a costly computer seemed like something she’d fast regret.

  And in the battle of knowing versus not knowing, Elizabeth always chose to know.

  Heart in her throat, she began to read.

  Hi Elizabeth,

  Don’t worry. I’m not groveling. You made yourself perfectly clear. I just wish I’d heard it sooner.

  That said, I do think I have a right to be heard. You did a lot of talking and accused me of some pretty awful things. I thought, apparently foolishly, that you might give anything George Wickham said the same scrutiny you give everything else. But as I’ve told you before, he’s good at making friends. He knows how to sell his story. On the other hand, I have nothing but the truth to back me up—but the truth is, I believe, rather powerful, no matter how it’s presented, and I can only hope that given what I tell you (and the attachments to this email) you won’t let Wickham close enough to do to you what he did to my sister.

  Also, I’ll likely hit “send” before I can think better of this so there’s every chance this will come to bite me in the ass, but I ask you to do me the small courtesy of not broadcasting this email, its contents, or anything relating to my sister anywhere. She has worked hard to get well and doesn’t deserve to have her life upended again because I was stupid enough to fall in love with the wrong woman.

  Wickham and I were friends a lifetime ago. Very close friends. I’ve known him longer than I’ve known anyone. My hometown is one of those that moved very reluctantly into the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. If you combine every stereotype you’ve ever heard about the Deep South, you might have an idea of the environment.

  When I was about five, there was a gambling scandal. George Sr., Wickham’s father, had taken out second and third mortgages, maxing out lines of credit, but he never got ahead of it and the property foreclosed. I’ve included a link to an archived article from the Derbyshire Daily Herald that goes into this in more detail.

  Until that point, Wickham and I had been inseparable. Actually, we remained inseparable for several years to follow. He was like a brother to me. My father made sure that Wickham would not be punished for his own father’s failures. Education has always been a virtue championed by my family. Wickham went to Derbyshire Junior Academy and Derbyshire Academy due to my father’s generosity.

  It wasn’t until our eleventh year in school that I noticed things had changed. He became someone else. He had always been funny, but suddenly the things he was saying were personal. For instance, I paid for my first car myself through the money earned working summers for my father. Wickham was offered the same opportunity but declined. That was until after I had purchased my car. He was insistent that my father had paid for it, which would have been my father’s prerogative in any case but it simply wasn’t true. He told me that I had everything handed to me, and while I don’t deny I had an extremely privileged childhood, we had always done whatever we could to make him feel like part of the family. He had his own room at our home, complete with things my father purchased him that his father couldn’t. Yet every day that passed, Wickham seemed to become more resentful, and eventually I stopped sitting with him at lunch and making plans for the weekends. It was around this time Charlie and I became friends. He was a freshman when I was a senior. The little brother I’d never had.

  Wickham responded by stealing my car and wrapping it around a telephone pole outside the Lambton Inn in town. Please see the second link at the bottom of this email. At this time, I ceased all contact with Wickham and sent over anything of his (bought by my family or not) that had been left at Pemberley—that’s the Darcy estate where I grew up.

  Wickham would go on to steal three more cars, two belonging to my father (see links 3, 4, and 5), which resulted in a DUI charge and three months’ probation (link 6). My father never once pressed charges for theft.

  During my senior year, Wickham practically ignored me, and I was grateful for it. However, one day, near graduation, I overheard him while in the library making arrangements with one of his new friends to sell cocaine to the students at Derbyshire Junior Academy, where my sister was about to enter the sixth grade. Drugs have always
been a problem in our community, particularly at our school, and I will not pretend otherwise. I had suspected he might be doing something like that but I honestly hadn’t cared until he set his sights on kids.

  So yes, I narked. Wickham was searched and the drugs were found in his bag. He was arrested and expelled.

  Wickham admitted everything almost immediately upon being questioned and seemed to have, as they say, his own come to Jesus moment. He also agreed to a lesser charge in exchange for entering a rehab program and giving presentations at my sister’s school and other regional public schools on the dangers of drugs. To confirm this, I dug through my old email account and located the newsletter that was issued to the parents following the agreement. Please see the attachment.

  I didn’t see Wickham for a while after that, and that was fine by me. You are aware, of course, of what happened to my family following graduation. First, my mother died, and my father needed my help with the company. He was in no state to assume that responsibility solo, and though he was the best man I’ve ever known, he was also a man with enemies who would exploit my mother’s death to their own financial advantage.

  My father made me promise that I would return to complete my education after I turned twenty. I had every intention of doing just that, as I’m sure, my father had every intention of living. It was my third week of my first semester when I received the call that he was sick. I didn’t know just how sick until I got home. I spent the next fourteen months escorting him to and from various doctors and tests, as well as caring for my sister, Georgiana, who was at that point in the eighth grade and experiencing troubles of her own that I was not equipped to deal with. My lengthy absences and preoccupation with our father left Georgiana more or less alone, and this is something I will never forgive myself for. Because while I wasn’t there, George Wickham was.

  At this, Elizabeth had to tear her eyes away—her eyes that were stinging and blurry. She hadn’t stopped to check any of the links or the attachments, but she didn’t need to. The fact that they existed told her enough.

  Told her more than enough.

  Told her she’d been worse than the world’s biggest asshole. And god, she didn’t want to read anymore. The scrollbar told her she’d made it just past the halfway point. Her gut told her things were about to get worse.

  Georgiana didn’t tell me about Wickham. Honestly, at that point, I had forgotten he existed. She made excuses for her absences from Pemberley and it was more convenient for me to believe her at the time than to dig deeper. I’d like to say I suspected something was wrong but the truth is, I was too exhausted from caring for my father to notice much of anything. And as our father deteriorated, anything that would have ordinarily struck me as odd or unlike her was easy to justify as stress and grief, because that was how I felt.

  Three weeks after the funeral. That was when she first came to me and the first time I really saw her. She was a mess, and admitted that she had been experimenting with drugs to dull the pain of losing her mother and Dad’s illness. I did not handle that well, and that is another thing that is on me to regret. Georgiana reached out to me in a time of need and I pushed her away. I was not in a place to be the brother she needed, but that is no excuse. She has always been the best of us, and I couldn’t fathom how someone with her potential could be so reckless. My solution was to ship her off to a rehab facility and consider the matter dealt with.

  Wickham followed her. I still don’t know what his end-game was. If it was revenge on me or our family, or if he thought he could get Georgiana pregnant and force her into marriage—maybe it was all of the above.

  I don’t know why she didn’t tell me then that Wickham had been her dealer, but I can only assume it was because she thought she was in love with him. The affection he showed her when I was too self-absorbed to give her what she needed earned her loyalty. That was why she left with him when he checked her out of rehab. He had convinced her that he loved her and I didn’t. That she was too broken for me to love her anymore and he was all she had.

  That wasn’t the only thing he convinced her to do. He pressured her for several days to sleep with him—claiming it was better with someone who loved her and would take care of her. I only have Georgiana’s account of this, but I trust it. She told him no at first, but he kept pushing for it and eventually, she relented.

  She called me afterward from the motel bathroom in tears. I won’t go into more detail here—it’s hard enough to think about, let alone write. I hadn’t even known she’d been checked out of the voluntary rehab, let alone that she and Wickham had any sort of relationship. I got to her as fast as I could. How I left Wickham alive, I’m still not sure. But I did.

  It will come as no shock to you that small towns talk, and there’s nothing they love more than a story of a rich girl who hit rock bottom. Wickham threatened to go public with some version of story if I didn’t pay him. He believed he was entitled to the scholarship my father had established for students of the Derbyshire Academy, or a sum equal to it. At this point, I just wanted him out of our lives. Permanently. Even if he made good on his threat and lied about everything, the end result would be Georgiana being victimized again. The insult of him asking for money after what he did to my sister didn’t really register. However, I did have conditions, which he met. The first being that he was never to see Georgiana again or try to contact her in any way. He agreed. The second was that he would provide a handwritten account of what he had done to her that I would keep in the event he decided he wanted more money down the line and thought to come asking with the same old threat. While I don’t want the world to know what happened to Georgiana, she and I agreed it was better to have leverage over Wickham than leave ourselves vulnerable. He doesn’t have much family pride left, but enough to be threatened by the last of their legacy being exposed. See attachment #2.

  I am happy to say that my sister has been sober for nearly four years, but the road to recovery has been a difficult one. She is in therapy and attends online meetings for survivors of sexual assault, though I had to talk her into that. It was only when I was absolutely certain she was in a good place that I could consider coming back to school. She, herself, will be graduating Derbyshire Academy in the spring.

  I don’t know what Wickham hoped to gain by telling you whatever it was that had you convinced I had done something to him. I just hope that you are careful when you are around him.

  Regarding the issue with Charlie and Jane—yes, I did tell Charlie that she might be with him for the wrong reasons. I didn’t do this to hurt anyone, rather to save my friend from being hurt by a girl he had fallen in love with. Jane is a perfectly nice person and for a while, I thought she might be just what Charlie needed. But the more time they spent together, the less she seemed interested in Charlie. I started noticing this shortly after the night you and Jane spent at Netherfield. When Jane would visit, she would spend a few minutes at most with Charlie before seeking out Caroline. I didn’t think anything of this at first, but the more it happened, the more it stood out.

  And as much as I like Jane, I didn’t get the sense that she was as attached to him as he was to her. I would hope that you would understand the need to protect your friends from heartache. Charlie deserves someone who loves as hard and irrationally as he does, who doesn’t make excuses to not be with him when all he wants to do is make her happy. He deserves someone who isn’t with him because of who he is or how much money he has or how much influence he has over campus politics.

  I didn’t tell Charlie to break it off with Jane. I just pointed out what was obvious to me. Given what I saw, I don’t regret this at all. I was asked my opinion and gave it.

  I hope this message helps clarify things from my point of view. Again, I’m not going to bother you anymore—you made your feelings perfectly clear. I’m just sorry I misread you. But it’s better to know now than find out later. You just wanted to fuck. That’s fine. But that you wanted to do it thinking whatever it was you think about m
e just boggles my mind.

  I guess I’m just old fashioned.

  Will

  23

  The email was a cancer on her computer.

  Elizabeth spent the next hour checking, double, and triple checking each link and resource Will had provided while building his case.

  These had been easy enough to find—some in the same newspaper report she’d looked up after Wickham had told her his story. Had she done any deeper digging, she would have found these articles.

  The ultimate nail in Wickham’s coffin was the handwritten letter. In it, he’d detailed everything he’d done to Georgiana Darcy in a bloodless, dispassionate manner that made him seem something less than human. Part of her wanted to believe that Will was capable of fabricating something like this just to fuck with her, but she knew that wasn’t right.

  She’d been a giant asshole.

  And Wickham was a bona fide sociopath.

  With whom she had a date on Friday.

  That thought alone was almost enough to convince Elizabeth to seize her phone and fire off a cancellation. Hell, that would have been the smart thing to do—quick and easy. And she wanted quick and easy. She wanted to never have to see, speak to, or think of George Wickham again.

  At the same time, she needed to tell him what she really thought of him to his face. Make sure he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone.

  Except he had. And that was the kicker. He had fooled her. Completely one-hundred percent, can’t-get-around this fooled her.

  What was worse, she’d been an easy mark.

  A sour taste invaded Elizabeth’s mouth. She had been many things over her brief life, some good and some very not. But gullible had never once been on that list. Sure, she was known for making snap decisions without looking back, but her intuition had rarely steered her the wrong way. Wickham had completely blindsided her and she’d let him because that had been easier, more comfortable than…

  God, she hated herself.