Chapter Sixteen Boundaries

Going to the cabinet, Lizzy found the bottle of whiskey among the various liquors Charlie had stocked there for Fanny. She put ice in two glasses, careful to put more ice in the one she intended for herself. An extra measure of whiskey went into Wickham's glass and much less into her own, which she dilated with water when he wasn’t looking. Since the color of hers was lighter, she hid the difference in their glasses by holding hers in both hands once she’d handed Wickham’s to him.

He had seated himself on the couch. She started to sit in the armchair, but he motioned for her to sit beside him―an order, not a request―patting a hand on the couch. She sat there, turning herself so that one knee was on the couch between them as a barrier, not an invitation.

Lizzy noticed his quietly tense, quick, and jagged gestures, which were completely unlike his previous deliberate, languid movements. Wickham had always moved commandingly but never seemed under any internal pressure. He did now. Additionally, his gaze was distracted. Lizzy was accustomed to his complete attention (not that she wanted it now or had wanted it before), and she noted its absence, his self-division. Part of him was elsewhere.

He took a long sip of his drink, and Lizzy put hers to her lips, pretending a sip she did not take. When he swallowed, his eyes closed as he savored the burn of the whiskey. A weighty sigh followed, and he opened his eyes.

"Long day?" Fanny asked, careful to keep her voice soft, devoid of any pointed curiosity.

Wickham nodded and sipped his drink again, this time without the ceremony. "Yes, it was not supposed to be a long day." His eyes became guarded, complex. "It should have been easy enough but, well, what's that line of Sartre's? Hell is other people. " He chuckled darkly.

" Other people?" Lizzy kept Fanny's tone mousy, hesitant. "I guess I had the impression—" she deliberately stopped.

Wickham leaned slightly toward her, causing the ice to clink in his glass. "What impression?"

"That you worked alone , were, you know, self-employed…or something like that. That day, on the architectural tour, you said…"

"I know." He waved his hand and then pointed at her with his index finger. "And you are right. I am my own boss—at least, as much as anyone can be." He put his hand down near her leg. "But it's impossible to do much of anything, much of anything that matters , all by yourself. Even if other people aren't ordering you about, one way or another, you’re still dependent on them, or they're…obstacles to what you're doing."

Lizzy nodded, suppressing a chill created by imagining the executed agents on a South Dakota road.

"Yes, I suppose. I didn't know you were interested in…existentialists?" It seemed like a Fanny question to ask, but Lizzy was curious, too, both professionally and personally. And she shouldn’t seem too insistently curious about Wickham's long day or about what he had been doing.

He looked at her blankly for a moment before he recalled his own remark. "Interested? That would be far too strong. I dabbled." He shifted focus, recollecting. "Years ago, I read some philosophy. Undergraduate rebellion. Marx, primarily…a lot of Marx . I tried some Hegel, too, as background to Marx. The Hegel was too much. Way too much." He shook his head. “I read some of the existentialists. Sartre because of his tie to Marx. Critique of Dialectical Reason. I read other things of his, too, a few novels and plays.”

He came back to the present. "I eventually canned the theory. Practice is all that matters. This is a practical world." His voice remained quiet but became dogmatic and edgy. "Another line of Sartre's stuck with me, the paradox of capitalist living, that people freely become commodities…that we sell ourselves. That's the truth of 'wage slaves.’" He spoke the term like a curse. "Anyway, yes, I’ve read some philosophers. But I put them away. Childish things." He said the last with self-directed exasperation and took another swallow from his glass.

Lizzy pretended to take another sip from hers, too. Since Darcy had studied philosophy at Cambridge, she wondered what he thought of Wickham's foray into philosophy. The two men were a study in similarities and contrasts. Both brilliant and capable, but on different sides of the law, civil and moral. Radically different kinds of men who, despite the similarities, were separated from each other by a fixed gulf.

Wickham stood up suddenly in an excess of nerves and stalked to the small shelf where Lizzy kept the books Darcy bought for Fanny. He sipped his drink again as he considered the titles. "I’m guessing that learned, bookish talk is hard to avoid with a librarian."

Fanny laughed softly. "Yes, it's hard to stop being a librarian, even outside the stacks. Avocation, not just a vocation."

He snickered and kept looking at the books, examining the spines. He read some of the titles aloud, pausing significantly for a moment after he mentioned Moby Dick, and kept his eyes on the spines. Then he picked up the copy of Wives and Daughters with one hand. He looked at Fanny as he held it. "You're the rare librarian a man would want to go into the stacks with , not just into the stacks from ."

Lizzy looked down as if Fanny were embarrassed.

Wickham's quiet chuckle accompanied his next comment: "You could shush me any time. Fanny Prince." He did not make clear exactly what he meant by “shush,” but Lizzy could guess.

"George…" she stage-whispered, half pleased, half protesting as an attempt to walk the line Fanny needed to walk between outright invitation and downright refusal.

Returning to the couch, he put his drink down and opened the Gaskell book he had carried with him. He made a huffing sound of contempt. "Nice inscription."

Lizzy made herself swallow the question Inscription? She didn't ask—but she could read the fly page of the book when Wickham tilted it toward her.

For My Love, Fanny, hoping for a Wife—and Daughters (or Sons)

Ned

She had not seen the inscription before this. Darcy had not mentioned it, and when she read from the book before bed one night, she must have turned right to the title page without noticing the inscription.

No, wait! He must have added it later―last night. It had to have been after the proposal.

Luckily, Wickham was staring at the page and missed Lizzy's effort to look as though she were familiar with the inscription rather than surprised by it.

"Yes, that's just like Ned. Sweet ." She smiled at the inscription and not at Wickham as he turned to look at her. It was sweet. Despite the surprise of it, it warmed her to her core, the inscription bringing back the memory of how she had felt in The Made Man when Darcy…when Ned proposed.

The inscription brought back more than the memory; it brought back the feeling itself. And more. Her mind leaped forward, toward the future, toward possibilities mentioned in the inscription.

It was the first time her imagination had unlocked in that direction―forward, toward the future. Children . With Jim Haden, her imagination had remained tightly locked despite her real feelings for him even though he had tried to unlock it…or tried to help her do so. No one since then had as much as tested the lock.

Now the lock opened as if it were animate, acting of its own accord, and her imagination flew forward in time. She had a wondrous sense of great doors flung open suddenly, unguessed vistas.

"Are you okay?" Wickham asked, leaning toward her.

She suddenly realized that she was sitting, staring hard at nothing, mouth open, color high. He closed the book.

Lizzy nodded. "I'm…ashamed," she said to cover her reaction, to explain it as Fanny's. "I shouldn't be here with you, like this. With Ned out of town…"

Wickham put the book on the coffee table and picked up his drink. "But you are. Here with me. Of your own free will, you know.” His eyes speared hers. “Shame is an excuse for minimizing yourself."

Fanny nodded, head down, her face obscured from Wickham by her hair. He put his hand on her leg. When she turned to face him, she noticed his drink was nearly empty, so she stood up. By doing so, she removed his hand. "Let me get you another and freshen mine."

He did not protest but sat back on the couch.

She poured more whiskey into Wickham's glass and only added fresh ice cubes to her own. His agitation was causing him to drink a great deal, incautiously, and her gut told her she was better off with him tipsy than with him sober. The whiskey seemed to slow his advances.

During the time it took Lizzy to freshen their drinks, Wickham had moved and now stood on the opposite side of the marble counter. The CIA laptop was hidden away, but Fanny's phone rested there. He climbed on a stool, and she slid his drink across to him, keeping the counter between them.

He took another long sip, looking at her over his glass. "There must have been men in your life before Ned." He put the glass down. His words hovered between assertion and question. It was clear Wickham was asking specifically about sexual partners, not about romances, attractions.

Lizzy had been taught since the Farm that, when creating lies for a cover, it was best to crowd the truth, to stay near to it. Doing so made the lies easier to remember. "Not as many as you might think. Certainly not as many as my friends." What Fanny said about herself was true of Lizzy…but not the bit about friends.

The truth was that Lizzy's only true close friend was Jane. Until Charlie, Jane had dated rarely and never seriously. Like Lizzy, but for a different professional reason, Jane traveled constantly. Also, she was too diffident about herself to put herself out there, to spend time at clubs or bars. When not traveling, she was a homebody.

Pretending to sip her drink, Lizzy brought her mind back to the problem at hand. "I guess I'm sort of old-fashioned," Fanny said, "I've never—"

Wickham cut her off, smiling that smile again…the one from her dream…the one that seemed to free-float in the apartment when it was not on his face. "But you should. A woman has a right to her pleasures, deserves them. Anyone who claims otherwise is gaslighting you."

The master gaslighter speaks.

Fanny shook her head doubtfully. "No. People make commitments, promises…vows. Those mean something. And part of their meaning is that they divide pleasures…into permissible and blameworthy." Lizzy hadn't read Marx or Sartre, but she had taken an ethics class; she recalled the vocabulary.

Wickham waved a dismissive hand. "Nonsense! Vows are nonsense! Fake boundaries to enhance an illusion of safety. Love isn't anything but 'sex' misspelled, Fanny, and duties are a trap for those who cannot embrace shamelessness." His tone had become coercive, impatient.

Lizzy looked right into his eyes. "And Ned is weak? But then what am I?"

Wickham put his glass down and walked around the counter. Lizzy tracked him with her body as he moved, keeping her gaze directly on him. He stopped when he was standing against her, the front of her, pinning her softly against the counter. She could feel the cold hard marble against her lower back and his warm hard erection against her stomach. His intention.

She had not drunk much of the whiskey and wasn't drunk, but what little she’d had seemed to sour inside her. The kitchen started to reel.

He put one finger on her lips and slid it slowly to her chin, his finger an obvious stand-in for what was standing against her belly. He kept pressing himself harder against her, pinning her even more tightly.

"You, my dear Fanny, are a woman who believes she is as weak as the man she plans to wed. You are wrong. You are far, far stronger than he is. All you need to do to confirm that is act on your desires, free yourself." He leaned toward her, his mouth beside her ear, and he whispered to her. "You won't have to be quiet with me, librarian. I promise you won't be. Shameless."

She knew he didn't want her to believe him, not really, but only to think that she believed him long enough for her to surrender herself to him. Later, he would want Fanny to realize that she hadn’t believed him―to realize that she had destroyed and betrayed herself, and she had destroyed and betrayed Ned. To feel the shame she would incur. He wanted her to believe she was shameless when she was not. The same strategy he used against Georgiana.

The odor of whiskey hung between them. Strong. Peat and wood. It was on Wickham’s breath as he turned to claim her lips, pinning her still harder against the counter. She felt its marble chill more intensely, and goosebumps formed on her skin.

Out of nowhere, almost randomly, it occurred to her that she had read Sartre—a novel, in a literature class, not a philosophy class. Nausea. The title sounded in her mind even as its topic slid an oily finger down her throat, choking her. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. Sartre—Roquentin, the narrator of Nausea . The kitchen spun faster.

Wickham's lips were on hers, his plump tongue sweeping over her lips and awaiting entrance even as bile rose in her throat. She fought the bile down, the fear and loathing, and she put one hand on Wickham's chest, pushing against him, trying to unpin herself. She could feel his growing erection, feel him pushing it against her as she pushed back against his chest.

A vortex was closing around her, round and round, reeling, spinning, contracting toward a black nothingness at the axis of the fast-wheeling circle—

And her phone vibrated on the counter.

Wickham jumped, his nerves on edge, the whiskey inhibiting his ability to hide the fact. He took an involuntary step back, hastened by Fanny's hand, and glared at the phone.

Lizzy turned, stepped to the side, and picked it up, grabbing it with desperation comparable to that of Ishmael grabbing the coffin life-buoy after it shot lengthwise from the sea and fell over beside him, the remnant of the Pequod.

When she looked at the phone, the nausea lessened, the revolutions of the kitchen slowed, and she managed a controlled, deep breath. "It's Ned. It's from Ned." Darcy.

Wickham frowned deeply and swallowed the liquid contents of his glass in one quick gulp. The glass made a sharp sound as he slammed it down on the marble counter. “What’s your bride-to-be have to say?"

Lizzy ignored the barb and read the text.

Lonely here without you Wish you were in my arms

Lizzy felt tears form in her eyes…and so in Fanny's.

Cursing under his breath, Wickham walked back to the apartment window. He looked out on dark Chicago and rolled his shoulders as if to loosen them. "The longest damn day…" he muttered quietly.

Fanny texted Ned back.

Miss you too Your arms Last night

She put the phone down on its face and took a couple of steps toward Wickham, careful to stay out of his arm's reach.

Darcy had timed that perfectly, a spell-breaking text just at the moment when Wickham thought his black magic had succeeded. She wanted to speak her thanks to Darcy aloud, into the air. She knew he would hear, that he had heard everything. But of course, she could not.

"You should go, George. I—" Fanny paused. "Not tonight . You're out of sorts, tired and distracted, and I'm…"

"Otherwise engaged," he snapped bitterly, turning to face her.

She let the conflict of her feelings show on her face, trusting that he would interpret it one way while she knew it meant something else entirely. She wanted Darcy near her and wanted him to kiss away all memory of Wickham's kisses. I hate this job. Why am I here?

She nodded weakly. "I'm confused, George." She told the truth since she knew he would misunderstand it. "I know what I want, but I don't know how to have it without losing something else I want."

He looked at her with obvious frustration. "If it's a contest between will and desire, desire should always win."

"Why? And what if it's a matter of desire versus desire?"

She had decided to play his game for a moment, to think like him, to see if Fanny could regain some of what Ned’s text had cost her without ending up pinned against the counter again.

"Then the strongest desire wins. Simple . Ned doesn't have to know. I'm not looking for anything permanent. I want you, Fanny Prince." His voice lowered, intense, and she could still see the evident truth of it pressing forward in his pants. "More now, right now , than I can remember ever wanting anyone. We can't keep doing this dance, taking the first few steps but never dancing…to completion."

She hated having to do it, but she knew that she was going to have to keep him in the state he was in. She made an instant decision. Lizzy needed to know more about what Wickham was doing, and that meant she had to insinuate herself more into his dealings.

"I know! I do…and I'm sorry. Maybe…Maybe if we were somewhere else, not here at my apartment, but not at Rosings, either. Are you traveling again anytime soon?"

He seemed surprised. She thought she saw a glimmer of suspicion in his eyes, but she let her eyes sink just below his belt momentarily—and when she lifted them again, the suspicion had vanished.

The suspicious glimmer had been replaced by a hard glint. "I may have to leave town on business again." He was thoughtful… and cautious. "Not tomorrow, but the day after. Don’t you go back to work tomorrow?"

Lizzy nodded. "Yes, but I still have one personal day left, and it's a time of the year when my particular responsibilities are light. Besides, the day after tomorrow is Friday. It would mean a long weekend for me…" She let the sentence trail off, encouraging him to consider how it might end.

After pausing to think, he said, "I'll see if I can make arrangements. Can I call you tomorrow evening?"

Fanny agreed wordlessly, and Wickham caught her eyes with his. "But if we leave town, we travel all the way, do you understand? No more unfinished dances."

She returned his look, keeping her eyes steady despite her stomach's twisting. "I need a change of scenery, that'll help me with…other changes. You know, like they say, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. "

He raised an eyebrow and stepped toward her. "We won't be in Vegas."

"No, I know. I mean, I didn't expect us to be in Vegas. I was just thinking of the…attitude. Adopting it." She took a step toward him so that they were quite close again. "A new dance floor and no more unfinished dances."

He studied her eyes, measuring her sincerity. Then he smiled, sensing a coming victory even if tonight was a defeat. "This trip will be good for you, Fanny. Think of me as your… one-man bachelorette party. I'll make sure you understand all you are giving up for Ned." He continued to stare into her eyes, the hard glint harder. "Think of it as a journey of self-discovery, a slow tracing of the far-flung boundaries of your passions, far farther-flung than you yet know. I will teach you, acquaint you with what is yours by right."

As he kept her eyes captive in a hypnotic gaze, he reached out and rubbed her nipple beneath her sweater using the back of his knuckles, never looking down. She could smell whiskey again and see the dilation of his pupils. He pulled back his hand, and she knew that she had finally cornered herself.

This was the fatal flaw in the logic of seduction. For a seduction mission to succeed, the spy had to make her mark believe that she would sleep with him. The decisive moment, H-Hour , so to speak, could be delayed, but never indefinitely.

It was like playing chicken, except one person was determined to avoid the collision while the other was determined to cause it. Both had to be moving at pace the entire time, both had to steer toward collision. As the moment of collision drew nearer, the spy's control over her mark typically grew, but her chance of avoiding the collision shrank. Wickham knew he had cornered Fanny. Without knowing it, he had also cornered Lizzy.

If she traveled with Wickham in two days, her chances of finding out what he was planning increased. So, too, did her chances of ending up in a position where she could no longer control Wickham, and he could assume real control of their situation. She had yielded the high ground, so to speak, in hopes of learning more. He now had the choice of locations, times, and so on―not only of where they went, but how.

Darcy was an incredibly resourceful agent, as Lizzy well knew from both his reputation and her experience working with him these past few days. But once she began traveling with Wickham, she would not be able to rely on Darcy―it would be up to her to take care of herself.

What will he make of what I've done?

She showed Wickham to the door. Once he left, she closed and locked it, then leaned her forehead against it. Her whole body shook with the effort it had taken to control herself and her sick stomach.

Her nausea spiking, she ran from the door into the bathroom. The evening's whiskey and water was vomited into the toilet.

Afterward, she sat on the couch, her head hanging. It felt like she had flushed her hopes when she flushed the toilet. She held a handful of tissues from the bathroom she had used to wipe her mouth. She wanted, needed, to brush her teeth but didn’t know if her stomach would allow it. The thought of toothpaste, its taste and consistency, was too much.

As she waited to feel steadier, she dug the gun Darcy had given her from between two of the couch cushions. Before Wickham’s arrival, she had carefully placed it there, grip up, so that she could retrieve it quickly. She double-checked the safety and laid the gun on top of the copy of Wives and Daughters.

The book and the gun formed a strange stack, and she found herself staring at it. The stack was a symbol of her life. Her bookish father and his lessons, their shared love of books, a love she carried with her to Haverford when she’d intended to turn that love into her career. But everything had gone—if not wrong, then… sideways . Her books had been trumped by guns.

What had Wickham said about philosophers? He had put them away like childish things. Hadn't she done the same with the books she once loved? She had buried her academic ambition, her hope of teaching, with her father.

She was still staring at the stack when Darcy's now-familiar knock sounded softly at the door.

As grateful as she was for Ned’s timely text, Lizzy was tempted to be angry at him about the inscription. That was not what was done in deep cover. You don't surprise your partner. Spies hated surprises, hated that they could add sudden confusion or perplexity to a mission's already deadly risk. She prepared herself to chide him, but when she opened the door and saw his face, saw the worry and anguish in his eyes, she forgave him immediately. All she wanted to do was hold him and be held by him.

Instead, they stood awkwardly for a moment. Then he entered quickly and closed the door for her. "Bingley's trailing Wickham on the chance that he's not headed back to Rosings. Everything's turned off here in the apartment, the surveillance. I turned it off just after Wickham left."

She put her hand over her mouth but spoke carefully, audibly. "So you heard me in the bathroom?" He nodded grimly. He reached out to her, but she stepped back, shaking her head. "Give me a minute. Sit down."

She walked quickly to the bathroom. Seeing him had immediately steadied her. She brushed her teeth, washed her face and hands, and gargled, as much to rid herself of the taste of Wickham than anything else. After drying her face and hands, she returned to the living room.

Darcy was sitting on the couch and contemplating the gun atop Gaskell, just the way Lizzy had done earlier. He looked up at her, his face embarrassed, apologetic.

"About that inscription. Sloppy spycraft. Sloppy. I put it in there last night after I visited your room. It just…occurred to me, you see…that Ned might have inscribed it for Fanny. I meant to tell you, but we started talking about Georgiana and I forgot. I had…Yeats on my mind when we met at Covers. I never imagined Wickham taking that book into his hands. Or reading Sartre."

"Did any of that strike you as important? What Wickham said? The Sartre, the Marx?"

He glanced at her. "Maybe. He was radicalized by someone, somehow, and Marx is as likely a prolegomenon as any. The Sartre book is a slow-motion root canal—I can't imagine Wickham would have had the fortitude to suffer through it. The remark about theory and practice fits, though."

Darcy rubbed his eyes before continuing, and Lizzy realized he was as exhausted as she. “The Wicker Man isn't in the service of any particular political ideology. In truth, he's anti-politics , nihilistic. He’s about terror, destabilization. He's not trying to usher in utopia. He, the people he works for, and those he works instead want to usher in dystopia. They’re people who believe they've positioned themselves to profit from a controlled apocalypse. Their goal is to gain enormous power, enormous wealth, or both from the collapse of order by pitting group against group—race, class, whatever."

Lizzy came and down beside him, and they shared a few seconds of silence before he spoke again. "But we don't need to talk about all that tonight." He faced her. "Why did you do it, Elizabeth, suggest traveling with him?"

"You know why, Fitzwilliam. He wants me, Fanny , so much that he's starting to take chances―coming here tonight after what happened in South Dakota, agreeing to take me with him in a couple of days. He's planning something, and from what he said, his timetable is quickening. We need to know what it is."

"We do. But not like this, risking you this way. In public or here in the apartment, we're in control. Out there"―he waved toward the dark window―"out there, he takes control. We become reactive. We can't take the initiative, plan. And he made it clear. Next time, Fanny sleeps with him ." Darcy seemed to choke on the words, his misery audible. "You've assumed Georgiana's place. Remember what happened to her." His plea was whispered but more affecting because of that.

Lizzy scooted toward him and put one hand around the back of his neck, reassuring him even as touching him reassured her. Her words started softly but grew in conviction, hardened. "I'm not Georgiana. I'm not Fanny. I'm Elizabeth Bennet, CIA. And I'm stubborn. Damn stubborn. I can't stand to be manipulated, gaslit— and the truth is, Fitzwilliam, I want to take that man down . I need to do it. I'm not Fanny. He doesn't want the real woman he wants; she's too much woman for him. I am . He thinks he's beaten me, beaten Fanny, and it's time to claim the spoils. But it's not going to work out his way."

Darcy looked at her, admiration in his eyes. He shook his head and smiled reluctantly. His hands rose in surrender as he responded. "Fine. But remember, we're running this risk together, all three of us. Out there, Wickham has help —we don't know who or how many. And his company won't be a plasticized socialite or a gay priest. It will be dead bodies in South Dakota. Out there, we're truly facing not just Wickham, but the Wicker Man. The Wicker Man will burn us alive if he can, starting with Fanny. And no psalm will save her, save us."

Lizzy nodded, calming a bit, removing her hand from his neck. "I know. I do."

As she spoke, she knew something else too, knew it for a certainty. Her eyes fell again on the gun and the Gaskell.

This is my last mission.

Children.