Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice Sequel Bundle: 3 Reader Favorites Read Online Free Page A

establishing distance betwixt himself and Darcy had been uppermost at that particular moment (hasty leave-taking and the resultant insulation of miles was the single constant in his life). Hence, the felicity of an assignment in the north-easternmost reach of England rendered itself ever more probable. Reality saw that Newcastle was, indeed, small, and had a port, but there was nothing pretty about the place. It appeared industrious, but hardly fashionable.
    He and Lydia were not a ten-foot out of their hack coach before Wickham realised a dual insult upon his person. The high lustre of his boots was already besoiled with soot and there was not a bootblack in sight to polish them.
    His boots’ hasty begriming bade him look about to see whence it came. There was no single culprit, for he saw nothing but cinereous stone buildings, slate streets, dingy windows, drab people, and a sky thick with smoke. It looked as if, quite literally, a film of coal grit filled every crevice and dusted every face in the town.
    “Like shipping coal to Newcastle,”Wickham repeated miserably to himself as he spat upon his wife’s lace-trimmed, cambric hanky and dabbed at the toes of his jackboots.
    This first impression of the town not at all promising, Wickham had looked to the moors. And again he had been disappointed. If there were any hunting retreats of the wealthy about, by the time the Wickhams had arrived in mid-December, they were long abandoned. Were they not, clearly from the seedy look of Newcastle, people of station hied directly to the hinterlands and fro, compleatly bypassing town. An altogether reprehensible situation.
    Further injury awaited. For even more than hobnobbing with those elusive people of property, Wickham favoured gambling with them. Hidden behind his facade of well-mannered sociability stood a man who, after all respectable persons had gone to bed, liked to prowl the night for similarly-minded men flush with funds. Wickham liked his cards lucky, his whiskey smooth, and his women loose. There were a number of taverns, but as Wickham had soon determined, they were tended by grubby men with thick forearms instead of lusty barmaids (who might enjoy a little debauchery in a back room). And nary a den of iniquity amongst them.
    Was the denial of winsome wenches not test enough, Wickham discovered the clientele of these establishments far worse than the proprietorship. It would be a struggle to name the most offensive to him amongst them: the filthy coal-haulers who did not bother to slap the dust from their clothes, the dock workers foetid with briny water, or the infernal sheep men, fresh with coin from marketing the aging lambs that weaning missed. Was a decision demanded, Wickham probably would have given the nod to those unholy shepherds, who stunk of the Cheviot flocks they brought down from the frost-browned hills and drove through the streets, thus demanding good people leap for a doorway lest they be engulfed in dust and trampled by hundreds of tiny little cloven hooves.
    Wickham despised farm animals.
    If he thought his ignoble introduction to the nightlife of Newcastle to be his ebb, sadly, he discovered more diversional setbacks were yet to be encountered. For the paucity of barmaids bade ill-chance of feminine company in general. If the shopkeepers had daughters, they kept them hidden, which probably proved them prudent men in a town overrun with nothing but shipbuilders and coal men. And the army. The caution of those fathers was ill-luck to Wickham, for in light of the meagre competition, a fine crimson officer’s uniform would be quite an enticement to seduction. The only remaining avenue of beguilement was within the spousal ranks of his few fellow officers. But as Wickham was one of the few (and the only one below colonel) to have a wife, even a little innocent adultery was unlikely.
    Indeed, things looked very grim that winter for Wickham, reduced as he was to taking womanly company and a game of