Page 32 of Miss Bennet is Gone

She drew a breath. “I have just come from sitting with Anne. I told her I had sent no cordial. I did not ask her a single question. She could not look at me, Henry. She could not say one word. I have my answer, and so have you, though I am aware it is not the sort of answer that one can take to a magistrate.”

The Earl looked at the card on his desk for a long time. He was not a quick man, his wife had married him in part for the particular slowness that meant a thing once settled in him stayed settled, and she let him take his time, and watched the understanding go through him, and the disbelief, and the thing under the disbelief, a sick recognition.

He knew his sister, and some part of him had perhaps always known she was capable of precisely this and had simply prayed never to be shown it.

“My sister,” he said at last. It was not a question either.

“Your sister. And that poor wretched girl doing her bidding, who I do not think has slept a night through since it was done.”

He was silent again, longer this time, his hand resting beside the card without touching it. When he spoke, it was in the flattened, careful voice of a man holding a great anger still because he knew that to let it move now would be to waste it.

“We will need Darcy,” he said. “And we will need Richard. Tonight, or as near to it as can be managed. But carefully, Margaret, very carefully, for if Darcy hears this with his blood up he will be at Catherine’s door within the hour.

If Catherine takes fright, there is no telling what she does with Miss Bennet. We must know the whole of it before we move, and we must move all at once when we move.”

He looked up at his wife. “You have done a remarkable thing today. Now we must do the hard part, which is to do nothing for a few hours more.”

18

The Earl had got as far as the word carefully a second time, and was laying out for his wife the strategy of the thing he meant to do, the men quietly engaged, the magistrate sounded out in confidence.

Darcy and Richard brought in at the last possible hour so that the knowing and the acting should fall in the same stroke, when the door of the study opened without a knock and the careful plan died where it lay.

Darcy stood in the doorway. He had not been announced, he had come past the footman the way a man comes past a hedge, and the footman’s face appearing anxiously behind him told the whole of how he had got there.

He was still in his greatcoat. He had Lady Matlock’s note in his hand, the one that had been put into it four hours since, and the bottle from the modiste’s buttoned inside his coat where she had bidden him carry it and he had plainly not waited for six o’clock.

“I have brought the bottle,” he said, and took it from his coat and set it on the desk between them. His voice was low, which in Darcy was the dangerous register. Richard could have told them so.

“I have brought it before you asked for it. I have told no one but Richard, and I have gone nowhere else first, and that is the whole of my obedience, Aunt, and it is more than I have given anyone in a while. You wrote that by six you would have something for me. You wrote that it was the last thing you would ask me to bear blindly. I find the bearing has run out somewhere short of six. What do you know that you would not put in a note?”

Lady Matlock looked at her husband, and her husband looked back at her, and in the moment between the two older people Darcy read everything the silence was trying to manage, and his face changed.

“You know who has her.” It was not a question. “You know, and you were going to let me live one more hour not knowing and dole it out to me in a managed hour with the men already placed. You were going to handle me.” The quiet went out of his voice. “Tell me. Now. All of it.”

So they told him for there was nothing else to be done. The alternative was to lie to his face, and not one of them could have done it.

Lady Matlock told it plainly, the cordial and the card and the invented anecdote and the forging of her own hand, and Anne who could not look at her, and at the end of it the name.

She did not soften the name. She had learned, across a long life, that there is no kind way to hand a man the worst thing, and that the attempt at kindness only makes him carry it twice.

“Aunt Catherine,” Darcy said. For a moment he did not move at all, and then the whole of it went through him. The watch pressed on the wrong boy, the year of pollution and disgrace, the apology that had been so good, the tea, the warm questions about the wedding, visiting him the day of what would have been his wedding and then offering up her vile talk of providence, every kindness meant to wound.

“She has had her in that house the whole time. While I walked the river. While I paced off a lane like a fool. She had her a mile away, and came to my house and took tea and offered her twisted comfort.”

“Darcy,” the Earl said.

“I am going now.” He was already turning. “Richard is at his lodgings. I will have him on the way. You may follow or not, sir, as you choose, but I am not spending one further hour of her life debating the management of it.”

“You are not.” The Earl was on his feet. “You are not going to charge that door alone and hot, and I will tell you precisely why, and you will hear me, because you are not a stupid man and I will not let grief make you one for the half-hour it would take to ruin everything.

That house is full of hired servants,” he continued. “Catherine is not a fool. She has a back way and a carriage and a property in Wales I have heard her speak of, and the only thing on this earth that makes her dangerous to Elizabeth is the moment she understands she is found out. If you go through the front with no plan behind you, you give her the one thing we have so far denied her, which is warning. She will have the girl out the back and into that carriage while you are still shouting in the hall, and we will be a month finding her again, if we ever do.”

Darcy was not a stupid man. He stood with his hand on the back of a chair and made himself breathe, and Richard’s voice came back to him out of the first day, the hour it’s spoken, she’s finished; so we work in the dark.

And he understood that the dark they had worked in all these days was not yet done with them, that even now, with the name in his hand, there was a way to do this that lost her and a way that saved her, and only his own discipline stood between the two.

“Then we do it now, and we do it right, and we do it together,” he said, “but we do it now, sir. Not at dawn, not in a managed hour, now, because Anne has known that Lady Matlock came asking about a cordial, and if she has told her mother, then the warning you fear has already been given and every hour we spend placing men is an hour Catherine spends deciding what to do with a witness she can no longer keep. The caution that was wisdom this morning is folly by now. Send for Richard. We go as soon as he can reach us."