Caroline visibly reacted, as if she was overcome that this man remembered her name.
He offered them both berries. “Picked these, walking.”
Caroline shook her head.
Elizabeth took one.
He ate the remaining few berries. “I don’t think I know your friend.”
“This is Miss Bennet,” said Caroline. “Miss Bennet, this is His Grace, the Duke of Neithern.”
My half-brother,thought Elizabeth, looking him over. Did they look alike? Not at all, she didn’t think. However, there wassomethingabout his visage that struck her in a way she could not quite place. He looked familiar in some way. “So very nice to meet you, Your Grace.”
“Indeed,” said Neithern. “I actually was going to just appear on Houseman’s grounds, uninvited, and see if I could get in ona game of battledore and shuttlecock. I have good luck with this sort of thing. People don’t say no to you if you’re a duke, I find.”
Caroline laughed as if he’d just said something uproariously funny.
Elizabeth laughed, too, but only gently. “Well, they were at bowls when we left, actually. But why don’t we all walk back there together, then?”
“I should like that very much,” said Neithern.
Elizabeth gave him a conspiratorial smile. “You may say we invited you, even, and it won’t be a lie.”
He chuckled. “How clever you are, Miss Bennet.”
She smiled at him.I have never had a brother before,she thought.What must it be like, then?
But as they walked back, she found herself rather tongue-tied. It was no matter, for Caroline kept the conversation going, asking the duke’s opinion on positively everything and then slavishly praising whatever it was he said, assuring him that she absolutely agreed, that absolutely everyone would think the exact same thing.
Elizabeth began to notice that the duke was trying to conceal the fact that her responses were making him smirk.
At one point, he said, “You are ever so exuberant, Miss Bingley. It is singular, I must say. I have never met anyone with such passion.”
“Your Grace is too kind,” said Caroline.
But Elizabeth got the impression that the duke was making fun of Caroline. Well, perhaps Caroline deserved that, too. Perhaps Caroline and the duke could go off together and say one thing and mean another to each other all day long.
Perhaps knowing this brother of hers was only going to make her see why it was that she was glad to have not been raised in the household of a duke, after all.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS NEARLYa two hours’ horse ride to the country estate of the Vicomte de Larilane, and Mr. Darcy decided that if he began it early enough, he could get there around noon and then return by the afternoon.
He told Georgiana he had business to see to, and Georgiana said that she thought that he had taken care of all of his business before they left, that he had claimed to have done so, at any rate. “I think it’s something to do with those Bennet women,” she said. “They seem to appear positively everywhere and whenever they appear, everyone loses their heads.”
“It has absolutely nothing to do with either of them,” Mr. Darcy lied.
And he left early in the morning on the morrow and rode to Larilane’s house. Larilane’s country estate seemed to have been purchased almost entirely with money provided by his wife’s family, and Darcy wondered at that, wondered if this man really had left everything he had to Matilda Bennet, even though she had not been carrying his child. The place was large and formidable, lavishly decorated.
He waited for half an hour in the gilded sitting room before Larilane joined him.
His wife was conspicuously absent this time, Mr. Darcy noticed. Before, he had spoken to both Larilane and his wife, andDarcy had suspected that Larilane might be concealing things from his wife.
“You’ve come back,” said Larilane. “I haven’t the foggiest notion why. I have told you everything I could tell you about poor Matilda, I am afraid.”
Darcy noted that Larilane had not offered him refreshment. This was going to be a bit adversarial, then. “Some letters were found. Well, not full letters, but beginnings of a letter, one that Matilda was composing to you, one that she seemed to try to write and abandon a number of times. It concerned the fact that you had told the Duke of Neithern about the child she was carrying.”
“Oh, God, she had that in writing somewhere? His name?” Larilane dragged a hand over his face. He muttered something to himself in French, unintelligible, but Darcy thought it might have contained the wordmerde.
