“Oh. Thank you. How did you know I would be here?”
“My butler heard you give the direction to your coachman. I guessed you had come to speak to your mother. It seemed the most logical idea.”
He had followed, hoping to speak to Mrs Bennet as well, then. Elizabeth accepted this new mortification with a resigned nod and told him what the servant woman had said about Mrs Randall. “My whole family might be ruined if I cannot find my mother and make her stop.”
“Bingley’s too.”
He did not add, ‘and my own’, though she knew he must be thinking it, for the reports linking their names were an albatross about both their necks. She hung her head in shame.
“I shall wish you good day now,” he said, opening the door. “You ought to be at home. You have had a shock. I shall continue to do what I can to find Bingley and get word to you if I discover anything of your mother’s whereabouts.”
“Oh…yes, I suppose…yes,” she mumbled, despairing to comprehend that his resolve to protect his friends and family from hers meant they must continue to collude. How he must loathe the very sight of her!
“Thank you for concealing this for us,” she said quietly as he climbed down and turned back to fold the step away. She thought he would not respond, and indeed he did not speak, but he paused to nod before closing the door. She heard him tell Benjamin, in his most masterful voice, that she had been taken ill and must be delivered back to Gracechurch Street with all due haste.
She closed her eyes, humbled by Mr Darcy’s discretion and consideration in the face of this insurmountable indignity. How she regretted telling him she would never marry him. And how he must be rejoicing that she had promised she never would.
24
REMEDY AND REMORSE
“You are not dead, then.”
Darcy ceased staring into the fire for long enough to acknowledge Fitzwilliam’s arrival with a brief glance. Then he returned his gaze to the flames.
His cousin came farther into the room and made a show of arranging himself in the armchair opposite his own. “When you did not come to dinner, we began to wonder whether you had been murdered in your bed.”
“The most obvious conclusion.”
“I have never known you to simply fail to turn up without explanation.”
“I apologise. It slipped my mind.”
“I shall try not to take it personally, but Cunningham was crushed.”
Darcy answered with only a satirical glare, then, shaking himself out of his torpor, took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his face. “I shall send a note to your father. Coffee?”
“Please.” After a pause, Fitzwilliam asked, “What will the note say?”
Darcy pushed himself to his feet and rang the bell for Bellamy. He looked at the clock as he stretched his shoulders and was surprised to see that he had been idling in his study for far longer than he realised; it was almost two in the afternoon.
“It will say ‘sorry for missing dinner’—what else would it say?”
Fitzwilliam screwed up his face in a stupidly exaggerated show of deliberation. “Perhaps, ‘I apologise for missing dinner—I was too busy wooing thetonwith Miss Elizabeth Bennet’. Why—was thatnotwhat you were doing?”
“No, it was not. Why—” The door opened, admitting the butler, and Darcy gave a curt instruction for him to bring coffee, then finished, “Why would you think it was?”
His cousin reached into his inside breast pocket and drew out a folded section of newspaper. He held it out to Darcy. “Because that is what the rest of the world thinks.”
Darcy took it from him and read, with increasing alarm, a protracted piece detailing what the paper was calling ‘the worst-kept, most-relished secret of the Season’, in which it seemed that every one of his encounters with Elizabeth—and several that had never taken place—was listed as proof of their understanding. Her forthcoming attendance at Lady Rothersea’s soiree was noted to great acclaim; their waltz at Aubrey’s ball described in lurid detail; even their argument on Gracechurch Street was talked about as something to be celebrated, the paper insisting that ‘our darling couple’s attempts to remain undetected are charmingly ineffective. No two people who argue so much like man and wife will ever convince the world that they are unattached’. It predicted that they would be wed by the summer and boldly declared that no other alliances announced that Season could hope to garner such widespread support.
“What paper is this?”
“The London Chronicle,” his cousin replied, “but there are similar articles in at least two others.”
Darcy tried to summon the outrage which, prior to all this, he knew he would have felt at being embroiled in such a public furore. It would not come. All he managed was to make himself feel more miserable. He screwed the article into a ball and threw it in the fire, then leant with one hand on the mantel, pinching the bridge of his nose with the other.
“Cunningham seemed to think that you might be warming to the idea of an alliance,” Fitzwilliam said behind him. “Was he so very far off the mark?”
