“I heard you with my own ears. At the beginning of the week, at the exhibition, you told a young lady that Rutherford ‘spends more time than is good for him in gambling dens and gin houses—and worse’.”
“Oh,verygentlemanly, Mr Darcy, eavesdropping on ladies’ conversations! But I said nothing that was not true. Rutherford…politicks.” Her pause and the gesture she made with her hands as she searched for the word indicated her distaste for the activity.
“A group of us in Whitehall are working to see such dens of iniquity shut down,” Rutherford explained.
Lady Tuppence tilted her head accusingly at Darcy. “There is a certain ilk of men who find this ambition particularly distressing. Are we to assume you are one of them?”
“I shall not dignify that with an answer, madam. I would have thought it was obvious that I was concerned what sort of man you were encouraging the young lady to meet. It was not clear from what you said to her that policymaking was the reason that your cousin frequents illicit establishments. Indeed, quite the opposite—you specificallycalled him out as a cad.”
Lady Tuppence gave a loud, mirthless laugh. “He is notacad—he isTheCad! That has been his nickname forever.”
Rutherford grinned awkwardly. “My initials. I was christened Charles Andrew David. Though, I was not actually known as The Cad until I was at school. In fact, I believe it was your cousin who first coined that name.”
“Barclay?” Darcy looked at Fitzwilliam and groaned inwardly to see him grimacing with contrition.
“Gads—do you know, Darcy, now that Rutherford mentions it, that might be where I heard it said that he was a bit of a cad. Makes sense now.”
Darcy stared at his cousin in disbelief. This entire week of mayhem and misdirection, all his failed interventions and sleepless nights had come about on the back of that one, misremembered appellation! He was not much less vexed with Lady Tuppence, whose careless words and strange behaviour that day had further confused matters. Thanks to both, here he now stood, in the home of the man he had unjustly accused, who might very well one day be his brother, looking an utter fool. Darcy abhorred being made to look ridiculous.
“I beg you would forgive me, Rutherford,” he said tightly. “The misunderstanding is deeply regrettable. It was only the insistence with which her ladyship was pressing her companionto agree to a meeting she was clearly averse to that gave me such cause for concern.”
This did not provide Darcy with the exoneration he had anticipated. Lady Tuppence’s mouth set into a hard line, and she raised a solitary, reproachful eyebrow and stared at him for longer than was comfortable before replying in a disdainful voice.
“I would not have been in such a rage to persuade Miss Bennet to meet Rutherford, had she not so desperately needed the panacea of his consequence to repair her damaged reputation—damageyoucaused, when you gave her the cut direct in front of the entire assemblage of the British Institution.”
“I am afraid I do not take your meaning, madam. I have not, and never would, give any lady, least of all that one, the cut.”
“Au contraire, Mr Darcy. I could call fifty witnesses to attest to the fact that last Monday morning, you walked into the upper east exhibition room, halted in your tracks upon seeing Miss Bennet, looked her directly in the eye for long enough that nobody could mistake it for a fleeting glance, then turned your nose up and left again. The whole place was scandalised.”
“I did no such thing,” Darcy said with a strength of conviction that he was far from feeling. Indeed, as the seconds ticked by, an appalling sense of being very, very wrong began to creep over him.
“Oh my! I think you might have done,” Georgiana whispered in a distressed tone. “We did leave very suddenly because you had seen her if you recall.”
He was not likely to forget it. He had almost cried out when he spotted Elizabeth mere feet in front of him—had only been saved from doing so because the sight of her had quite literally taken his breath away. He knew he had stared, too, because he had been unable to tear his eyes away from her while his headand his heart battled over whether or not he ought to speak to her. In the end, his head had won, and he had turned on his heel, grabbed Georgiana’s arm, and all but dragged her out of the exhibition before Elizabeth could notice either of them.
They had made it as far as the pavement before his heart overruled his head and persuaded him that such an opportunity ought not to be thrown away. He had left his sister waiting in the carriage and gone back in to search for Elizabeth. Except, by the time he returned, she had attached herself to someone new—Lady Tuppence, he now understood—and he had spent the next ten minutes skulking behind pillars and eavesdropping on conversations, before ultimately leaving without ever saying a word.
The possibility that he had done far worse than failing to talk to her—that he had inadvertently given her the worst conceivable form of public insult, that she must have seen it and thought it was intentional, and that she was suffering society’s scorn as a result of it—was so distressing, it took him a moment to comprehend that Lady Tuppence had asked him a question.
“Pardon?”
“Miss Bennet—do you mean to tell me that youknowher?”
“I do, yes.” Darcy’s ears were ringing.
“My cousin is as generous as the most generous of his sex, madam,” Fitzwilliam said, “but he is nevertheless not generally given to trying to resolve the romantic difficulties of young ladies he does not know. All three of us are acquainted with Miss Bennet, and happily so.”
Rutherford gave a little grunt of surprise. “Then—and I hope you will forgive me for asking—why did none of you approach her directly with your concerns?”
Darcy could scarcely order his thoughts, which must be why he could not think of a single rational answer to this. “Ihad reason to believe she would not wish to speak to me,” he mumbled at length.
“Well, I can see why!” Lady Tuppence said, laughing genuinely now. “A shocking way to behave, even if it was by accident. The irony being, of course, that despite your best efforts to save Miss Bennet from Rutherford’s wicked ways, it would seem thatyouare the only cad among us, Mr Darcy.”
She evidently thought this was vastly amusing, and Darcy supposed he ought to be grateful when everybody else joined in her mirth, for it broke the tension and allowed them to laugh their way out of the inauspicious beginning. He did his best to share in their amusement, and when the chance came to change the subject, he seized it with both hands. He gave Georgiana frequent encouraging smiles, nodded ‘yes’ to Fitzwilliam’s every silently sought assurance that he was well, and even managed to make Lady Tuppence laugh once or twice.
Privately, Darcy was despairing. He had not liked to think that he would never see Elizabeth again, but he could have borne it much better knowing that, wherever she was in the world, she did not think ill of him. He smiled at something Rutherford said and felt the expression stagnate on his face as he considered that now, Elizabeth would despise him forever.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
