Tales of Disturbance

Wickham at the Reaping

Wickham's eyes narrowed. He was trying to block out the light, desperate to pretend he was anywhere else. With anyone else. 

The audible sound of retching coming from the bush was making him feel ill, not only because he himself was also very hung over, but particularly because they seemed to resemble the habitual primal screeches of his wife Lydia. Heads turned. He couldn't abide a hungover wife, particularly when he was feeling so ill, and particularly at this crucial juncture in his financial circumstances. 

For he had lost last night. He had, and not by a trifle. No, he had lost spectacularly. He shuddered as he remembered the triumphant gazes of Denny and Sanders, (though in fact with all the wine their heads were actually amalgamated then divided into eight different heads like some sort of military sea monster, with gold buttons out of control.) Thirty. Thousand. Pounds. He had lost everything. In the morning, he cried. He had cried since he was six years old when he fell from Darcy's unusually spirited horse he'd been riding without permission.

He more used to the tears of women crying over him. Women he had abandoned, left pregnant, or simply become bored of. 

He was never the crier; but now he'd lost thirty thousand pounds. What was he going to do?He saw himself rotting away in a debtor's prison full of rats, stale moldy bread and uncouth men. Men without charm. Unlike he, Wickham, who could charm the county. 

It was of course all Lydia's fault. Lydia who had told him she needed the money. This is what had driven him back to gambling with gusto. He was sick, he didn't mind telling you, of the constant  competition with the Bennet sisters sisters. Lydia's insistence on dressing in the finest fashions and keeping up appearances. Everyone knew Wickham was a philanderer - even Wickham knew it on rare moments of insight. Lydia Bennet had married a scoundrel of impressive proportions. A scoundrel who could barely afford to keep himself on the bribery money he had ascertained in return for marrying her in the first place. 

Lydia returned to his side. He looked sidelong at his young, fair wife, red and puffy, her busty frock failing to conceal her generous bosom which she liked to show off now she was 16.

'Aren't you going to ask me how I am, Wickham?'

Wickham tried to look anywhere else and shut himself up like a clam.

'Well if you did I should tell you I am very ill. Very ill indeed. But of course you do not care for me one jot.'

He whistled towards the sky. All Wickham wanted was for Lydia to stop talking so he could think. He had developed the talent of retreating into the still, private room of his head and that was really how he survived. (That and the odd affair. Drinking. Gambling with the boys who, now he thought of it were behaving rather oddly. Here at the reaping he observed, they were quite different. Were they becoming a little nasty? 

And the money. Had he really lost it all? He had been very drunk. 

Regardless, he needed it. The Darcys were his only hope. Though asking Darcy himself would be like asking the piece of grouse on his dinner plate at the last Pemberley supper. The reply would be just as reticent and undoubtedly  more hostile. If he was being completely honest, being poor was starting to bore him. The debts were mounting up like mole hills.

Wickham's plan was to aim for some kind of dinner invitation where he could pick his moment. 

He had thought before of the Hunger Games, the cash incentive (the winner, should they stay alive, received 50 thousand pounds), and actually found he was starting to hope that Lydia's name was called up for the women. For he certainly wouldn't want to do it. 

And Lydia would be fine - she liked a bit of fun and she was as strong as an ox and slippery as a snake. Yes his hope was Lydia being called up by Caroline Bingley to compete in the 2nd Hunger Games for District M.