A/N: This chapter ends the third arc of the story.

Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense

Chapter 17: Double Effect

Darcy gave Lizzy a curious look.

"What are you thinking about? Your…countenance…just shifted."

He smiled at his comment, the wording of it, (countenance?) although she could see how much he was struggling with everything, the whole evening, all that he had to see and hear.

She would love to be able to tell him that she was thinking about children, family, future — but how could she do that, even while her imagination involuntarily populated all the scenes of that future with him as father, husband, and partner?

Their situation, this mission, was all-but-unbearable now; adding that, confessing it, would make the mission unbearable. Darcy was often stoic, but the emotion of the last few days was showing on his face now, the toll it was taking plain. Lizzy could feel the toll of hers from the inside.

— Besides, what do I know about his plans for his future? My own just clarified for me and in the form of a surprise. But a not-unwelcome surprise.

She knew Darcy had reservations about his job, about MI-6, about spying, but he had those reservations before, it seemed, and yet had continued with his station and its duties. He had feelings for her, she knew that. I do, don't I? He had even used Yeats to suggest their depth but she had no reason to think that he, like her, was ready to quit, to leave the spy life, exit the spyworld, return to normalcy. Drop it all. Leave behind the constant shifting with appearance and reality.

And Lizzy was unsure she could find herself after all that shifting, years of it, long periods where she had in effect forgotten who she was to be someone else, pretend to be someone else.

Could that sort of deliberate and sustained self-alienation be reversed? Or had she condemned herself to a habitual alienation that might end up alienating her from the very things she was imagining?

She was sitting on the couch beside Fitzwilliam Darcy, picturing him as her husband and the father of her children, when only minutes ago she had been pinned to Fanny's kitchen counter, another man's arousal pressed hard into her middle, his lips on hers. Darcy was struggling with that fact, she knew, trying to both hide and control his jealousy and hurt, real even if what she was pretending. She was pretending to be Fanny Prince. George Wickham believed his lips were on Fanny's lips. But it was Lizzy's lips that were involved, Lizzy that was involved. She was struggling with that fact too. She had to appear to want the man she did not want while the man she really did watched and listened.

If I'm going to quit, why not now, why not just walk away?

One reason she didn't was what she had just told Darcy: she was stubborn and she wanted to bring Wickham down, bring him to justice. To do it for Georgiana, and Darcy.

The other: it was far too early to speak of children to Darcy (ridiculously too early to be thinking of children, imagining them, on my own), even if Darcy had proposed as Ned. That was not a real proposal. The engagement was a mere appearance, not a reality. They had kissed each other last night in propria persona, as Lizzy and Darcy, but they had never been on a date, they knew little about each other.

She wanted to walk away from the spyworld, yes; but she wanted to walk away with Darcy, or at least with the hope that he and she could find each other eventually out in the light and still want each other, as they had found each other in the shadows and wanted each other.

Her thoughts and feelings so preoccupied her that she lost track of the moment. Darcy was still waiting for her answer. His curious look had intensified.

Finally, Lizzy shook her head. "Nothing. Not really." She paused, disliking herself for the dishonest answer but afraid to tell the truth. A bitter cherry topping an evening of lies. This is what worries me, that lying comes easily, and truth only with difficulty. But she couldn't tell Darcy the truth, not the whole truth. "I was just wondering — about you. Have you ever thought about another life?"

She tried to keep any urgency about or investment in his answer distant from her voice.

That she had deflected the question from her to him was apparent to her if not to him.

He looked lost for a second, taken aback, then sad. But his face became unreadable before he started his answer.

"Yes. Sometimes. Before Georgiana, before I started chasing Wickham, I believed I was losing my…taste for it, what love I had for it. — Did I tell you how I got started?"

She shook her head again.

He sat back. "I guess we have time before Bingley's likely to return. I was recruited by one of my college professors. He had served in British intelligence in the late 1970s when a younger man. Then, after he was discharged and had later become a professor, MI-6 came to him to ask him if he would keep an eye out for…talent. He agreed. I admired him and got to know him. Attended his lectures.

He was a private man and hard to get to know typically, but he sought me out. I thought it was because of my philosophical promise — and it was, partly — but it was also because he thought I had promise for MI-6, as an agent. He knew I was unhappy, eager to be on my own."

"Why?" Lizzy asked. "I assumed you had a privileged childhood, a privileged life."

Darcy nodded. "Yes and no. I've told you that Georgiana is my step-sister. My father married well; my mother was from a very wealthy family. Shortly after I was born, she was diagnosed with cancer. It took her quickly. She was the one from wealth and she knew how to handle it. She was a woman of sense."

He glanced at Lizzy and went on. "My father, left alone with a small boy, did not know how to handle wealth and he was not…a man of sense. He lost most of the money in a succession of schemes, all of which failed miserably.

"But he married again before he lost it all, another woman of sense — his one great gift was choosing wives — and his new wife, my stepmother, quickly got pregnant, and soon Georgiana was on the scene. We were close from our earliest childhood and closer as we grew older.

"But as I grew older, I became more aware of my father's waywardness. More opposed to him. He was not a man of reason, you might say. My stepmother kept us afloat financially, but it meant constant battles with my father, as he was constantly coming up with new schemes meant to make up for his failed ones, each crazier than the last. Eventually, I stepped in to resist him too, aiding her, and my relationship with my father became tense and bitter. By the time I was at Cambridge, it had become bad, and I just wanted to be on my own, independent of him. He was complaining all the time, complaining about tuition and my bills, about paying for a philosophy student.

"I was so frustrated I told this to my professor just before the end of my second year, and he quickly suggested I could be independent even before finishing at Cambridge. He chose just the right moment, and chose wisely: I had fought with my father the day before on the phone. I jumped at the chance and, almost without realizing what I had done, what I had committed myself to doing, I was at MI-6's version of your Farm a couple of weeks later."

"So, wait," Lizzy said, paying close attention, "you became an agent while still a student? I joined right after graduation."

He nodded his acknowledgment of her comment, then answered her question. "I did. It was strange, being both a student and an agent at the same time. MI-6 didn't ask much of me during the academic year, but I had brief missions during breaks, normally mission work as part of a team, learning from experienced agents."

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and glancing at Lizzy as he did so, then he stared at the floor "I almost quit early on. My MI-6 instructors talked endlessly about the Greater Good. Some of the other, experienced agents liked that phrase too, as if it was a blanket justification for anything we did, as if, so long as that was our end or we said so, it gave us clean hands no matter what means we used.

"That reasoning seemed — and still seems — fallacious to me. First, I don't buy the Greater Good notion, and if I did, why should I trust some politician to know what it is, or worse yet, some unelected, lifetime bureaucrat to know what it is? I hate that kind of consequentialist thinking — actions are right or wrong depending on their consequences." He paused and wove his fingers together. "Thinking like that blinds you to the damage you do to yourself and others, the way that the actions you perform chip away at your integrity as a person, or the way they ruin it all at once."

Wickham's visit seemed very much between them then, though they were close on the couch. "You tell yourself the ends to all the work, the Greater Good, all the while you're violating yourself. For a time, for a long time, I thought maybe I reconciled myself to the job by telling myself that I could think about Double Effect."

"Double Effect?" Lizzy asked, not following. "What's that?" The term was new to her although she could make a guess what it meant.

"It's the notion that you can distinguish between the intended consequences and the merely foreseen consequences of your act — the point is that only the first is supposed to matter to whether what you've done was right or blameworthy.

"It might be used to justify, say, a World War II bombing mission, the decision to bomb a munitions plant at night, although you know some civilians may be still there, working late or doing custodial tasks. You might say that the loss of civilian lives was a foreseen but not intended consequence of the bombing and that you faced the difficulty of flying and bombing at night to decrease the likelihood of such casualties. Those casualties are then not part of the evaluation of the action." He sat back up and faced her. "Anyway, that's an example, a stock one, and for a long time I told myself that some such distinction could be used for what I did on missions."

He stopped talking and used his thumbs to rub his temples.

Lizzy fought back a desire to put her arms around him, pull him to her. Instead, Lizzy asked herself if she had made such a distinction herself, without knowing its name. Am I doing it now, where Wickham's concerned, what just happened at the kitchen counter? Maybe she was trying to tell herself that Wickham's hands on her body, her breasts, his tongue on her lips, to tell herself that all that was a foreseen but not intended consequence of her mission, so that she could not be blamed for it, and that if she could not be blamed for it, it could not affect her.

But it did affect her. Deeply.

She knew it did and it was why she had avoided seduction missions — the two she had been on before had both chipped away at her integrity (Darcy's phrase was exactly right), her sense of herself.

And the last few days of this mission had been so much worse. It wasn't just that she started the mission fatigued, although that hadn't helped. And it wasn't just her quickly developing feelings for Darcy, although they magnified all that was happening, made her happy and miserable, ashamed, all at once. It was primarily the experience, for lack of a kinder way of putting it, of prostituting herself, one part of her consenting to, even inviting, what another part of her (the better part) deplored, being groped and fondled by a man she loathed. Self-objectification.

And those things were not simply foreseen consequences of the mission. They were the very means of the mission, not its consequences, intended or foreseen.

That's why it was called a seduction mission.

Darcy was looking at her again and she saw guilt in his eyes that mirrored the guilt she felt. "I turned to checkers for answers but it only presented my problem to me anew. How can you win the game without the sacrifice of pieces?"

Lizzy could feel the personal anguish he felt, and she knew it was because of her. He went on after a moment, his voice low. "When Wickham came to the United States and I followed, I went to Kellynch expecting to be supplied an agent of a certain kind. Female agents who've been at this a long time, years, usually are…"

He searched for the right word or phrase but Lizzy knew what he meant.

The spy world hardened everyone but it was often hardest on women. More than most, it was a man's world, worse, a cruel-man's world. The female CIA agents that Lizzy knew who had been with the Company as long as she had were rarely women she found personally appealing; she had no friends among them. They were entirely closed off. Perhaps I avoid them because they show me my future. She understood them, the choices that made them; she admired their efficiency and their bravery, but they were not interested in friendship with her. Most resented Lizzy's standing with Kellynch and envied it. Lizzy was not interested in being friends with them. It's only a matter of time until I am one of them.

"I know," Lizzy said, ending Darcy's search without supplying the word or phrase.

He nodded thanks. "Given who I asked for, I never imagined Kellynch would assign…you." He smiled at her, a smile wide with recollection, and she felt lighter immediately lighter. She blew out a breath, releasing much of the tension she had been carrying since Wickham visited.

"You didn't seem thrilled with me."

"I wasn't. And I was. You weren't what I pictured for the mission but you…affected me."

Lizzy reddened. "And you made me blush, and you keep doing it, and I told myself I didn't do that. I was wrong."

He put his hand on her leg, just above the knee, and she rested her hand on his.

Perhaps in the long run the handholding would prove to be a bad idea but just now it made Lizzy feel better, even lighter. Darcy stared at her hand atop his, opening his fingers so that she could entwine hers with his. She did.

When she looked into his face again, he had grown serious. "Lizzy, I want to capture Wickham, dismantle the Wicker Man; I want to him to pay for the pain he's caused, particularly Georgiana's pain — but risking you to do that, now that I…Now that I…know you, I don't want any of it that much. We can shut this mission down, all of it. I'll take the blame, tell Kellynch that I've made Wickham suspicious, tell him something. You'll bear no blame, neither you nor Bingley. You can go back to DC; I'll go back to London. Maybe I'll manage another chance at Wickham.

She gazed at him for a moment before speaking. She wasn't sure what to say. As much as she wanted to escape from the clutches of the Wicker Man, she did not want to take her hand from his. If the mission ended and Darcy went back to London, she might never see him again. That would be true if she planned to stay with the Company but she didn't, and so it became even more likely if she returned to civilian life and he remained with MI-6.

But staying with the mission, staying with Darcy, required facing Wickham again, out there in the world, subjecting herself and Darcy to more of Wickham's advances.

She decided to try to express some of what she felt, her confusion, when his phone vibrated. He had to let go of her hand to pull the phone from his pocket.

"It's Bingley," Darcy said. "He'll be on the computer in a minute. Can you get it back out?"

She swallowed what she was going to say and got up, going to the bedroom to retrieve the computer from the spot where she had hidden it in the closet.

When she came back with it, Darcy was standing at the window looking out, the same window Wickham had looked out when he complained of his long day. Darcy seemed lost in the lights of the city.

The computer came on and a moment later Bingley was on the screen. "Hey, Lizzy. Where's — "

Bingley stopped his question as Darcy stepped into view. Bingley gave Darcy a wave and then seemed to regret the gesture. He cleared his throat and dropped his hand.

"Well, Wickham didn't go straight to Rosings. He was headed that way, then he made a U-turn, headed back to the city, and he ended up ringing the bell for a while at an apartment a few miles away. No one answered. I was able to have analysts check on the address. Turns out it belongs to the young woman who I saw in the Polaroid photo with Wickham and Lady Catherine."

A photo from a student ID came on the screen, replacing Bingley for a moment. It showed a dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman with a shy smile.

"She's a UIC student, Teresa Sanz, a sophomore. Her parents pay for the apartment. It's not clear how she and Wickham or Lady Catherine met each other but it seemed to me he was there hoping for…what he didn't get at Fanny's."

Lizzy looked at the photo more closely. She wondered what the story was for the young woman, how she had found herself on a Rosings' bedroom polaroid. "Does she have a record?"

"No," Bingley said, "none." His face reappeared on the screen."The analysts sent me what they had. High school and college transcripts, good student. Other than that, there's not much. I'll send copies to you, Lizzy."

"After Wickham got no answer, he drove straight on to Rosings. He must have borrowed one of Lady Catherine's cars to go to the airport, to Fanny's, and then, eventually, to Rosings."

Lizzy sighed in frustration. "Do we still not have any clear picture of how Lady Catherine is involved with Wickham — I mean other than the bedroom way?"

Bingley shook his head. "No, nothing concrete, specific. It seems unlikely that she doesn't know who he is, and what he is, but there's no financial record linking them that the Company's been able to find. I doubt she's just handing him piles of cash over dinner in Rosings, but," Bingley shrugged, smiling grimly, "who knows?"

Darcy looked from the screen to Lizzy. Annoyance colored his comments. "I've told them we need to know that. A dedicated team, both Company and MI-6 analysts, have been scouring Lady Catherine's finances since we've been in Chicago. Whatever she's done, doing, she's hiding it well."

"Do you think that Father Robyn might have seen anything between them, or noticed anything odd?" Lizzy suggested. "He doesn't like Wickham, hates him. Maybe if Fanny talked to Father Robyn…"

Darcy shook his head. "No, not yet. Father Robyn's not exactly discreet, and his dislike of Wickham might make it hard for him to keep Fanny's visit and questions a secret, even if she asked. Hell, even if he tried to be quiet. He might feel the need to wax eloquent about Errol Flynn again and who knows where that might lead…"

Lizzy shrugged. "OK, but we should keep him in mind. He's not an idiot, even if he is indiscreet."

"Yes, we will. I'll be over in a few minutes, Bingley. Anything else?"

"The detectors implanted in Lizzy's door frame showed that Wickham carried no gun into her apartment, carried nothing questionable. He took nothing with him when he left."

Darcy flicked his eyes to Lizzy. "Well, he took something with him when he left, and he took it to Ms. Sanz, but she wasn't there for him to give it to." The comment started half-jokingly but it ended with Darcy speaking from between clenched teeth. "We need to know more about her. Sanz. Bingley, you're going to find her tomorrow, meet her cute if you can manage it, undercover, and see if you can get a better sense of her. Is she only what she seems to be in Polaroids, a dalliance, or does she matter to the Wicker Man?"

Bingley did not look enthused about his new assignment. "Ok, Darcy, I'll do it. You're on your way back?"

"Yes, soon." Darcy shut the computer. He looked at Lizzy and she thought he might revive the conversation Bingley interrupted but he did not. He just stared at her, his eyes full of emotion. What she had said the past few minutes had made it clear that she was going to pursue the mission, she realized. Darcy seemed to accept it.

"Take tomorrow, stay inside, rest. If Wickham calls, be sure to try to get some indication of where you're going the next day, so that we can plan. And remember, if he calls during the day, you'll be here, but at work. Bingley'll make sure the fake phone tree's in place, so it will seem like he's called the Library.

"Right," Lizzy said, feeling tired again, heavy. She had chosen the mission. For all sorts of reasons. All sorts of confusing reasons. She walked with Darcy to the door. He stopped before he opened it.

Gently, he put his hand behind her head and tugged her lips to his. "We're committed," he told her when their lips parted. "Together."

He closed the door and she wiped tears from her eyes.

She had kept them from forming until the door shut.

A lower tension finish to a high tension arc. Come back next time as we start the fourth arc. Drop me a note. Love to hear from you. (I've been ill again, Covid this time. Can't catch a break.)