The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray

Author:Claudia Gray [Gray, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

As it happened, Anne Wentworth was not in the library. She had gone back to her room before breakfast, thinking only of retrieving a shawl. (Though the weather was fine, Donwell Abbey could be a bit drafty and the summer heat had not returned to its intensity from before the rains.) Her belly rumbled with eagerness. Although her appetite had suffered since Mr. Wickham’s untimely death, the body’s needs could be ignored only for so long.

She thought it would be a brief interruption in her day, no more. That idea died as soon as she walked into her bedroom and found Frederick standing by their bed, a frown on his face and a creased sheet of paper in his grasp. The slanting letters upon it could only be by Mrs. Smith’s hand.

Anne took a deep breath, stepped farther inside the room, and shut the door so no others would hear what was about to transpire.

Frederick noticed her presence only when he heard the closing of the door. Instantly his expression, already dark, became even more grim. “This,” he said, his voice a low growl. “When were you going to tell me about this?”

“I was not going to tell you about it at all,” Anne said evenly. “I knew it would anger you unjustly against Mrs. Smith.”

“Unjustly! This woman—who so short a time ago was penniless, impoverished, in need of our help to even regain her own property—she considers us a subject of her pity now, does she?”

“She does not pity us. She knows we are in distress. Those are not the same.”

“Oh, but they are.” Frederick crumpled the paper in his hand and tossed it aside. “If even Mrs. Smith considers us fit subjects for charity, what will your father and sisters say? There we will find not even pity, and certainly not charity. There we will find only scorn and abandonment. Since your sister’s illustrious marriage, they have looked upon us with greater contempt than ever. They will say that we disgrace them.”

Anne had been putting off this particular conversation in the hopes it would never have to take place. It appeared she could delay no longer. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “No, my family will not look upon us with pity, nor offer us charity. They are too proud for that. But why should you care so much for their good opinion? They have only ever granted it begrudgingly, and conditionally, to either of us. It has been many years since we troubled ourselves on their account.”

“Their good opinion means nothing to me,” Frederick insisted. “But I will not bear their contempt.”

“What if we have to bear it?”

He stared at her, wounded by what he saw as betrayal. “Perhaps you saw this as inevitable. Perhaps you always suspected I would disappoint you. Fail to provide for you. You must have done, or else why would you have refused me the first time?”

“Enough!” Anne had not raised her voice to her husband ten times in their marriage, but she did so now.

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