Page 14 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"He spent it in eighteen months. On cards, and wine, and worse. I did not ask where. When it was gone, he wrote again, and said he would take the living after all. I refused. You may think me hard."

"I think," said Elizabeth slowly, "that three thousand pounds is a great deal of money. More than my sisters and I shall have between us."

"I have paid his debts in Lambton twice since then. Tradesmen who trusted him because he had grown up at Pemberley. Farmers' daughters—" He broke off. "I will not tell you about that. It is not fit for you to hear."

"I have four sisters, Mr Darcy. Two of them were at that card table last night, laughing at everything he said. I think it is very fit for me to hear."

He looked at her. She looked steadily back, her chin up, her dark eyes serious, and he understood that she was not going to faint or blush or ask him to stop. She was going to listen to all of it, and judge it fairly. He had never met anyone in his life he trusted as much as he trusted her in that moment.

So he told her the rest.

He had not meant to. He had lain awake half the night deciding that he would tell her about the living and the debts and nothing more. Georgiana's secret was Georgiana's. Only his cousin knew. But he stood on that hill with the wind in his face and Elizabeth's eyes on him, and the words came out of him before he could stop them, as though they had been waiting.

Ramsgate, last summer. His sister, fifteen, sent to the sea for her health with a companion he had chosen himself and trusted absolutely. Wickham, turning up by chance, as if by chance. The walks on the sands. The promises. The companion who smiled and looked away. The elopement planned for a Tuesday. And himself arriving, quite by accident, on the Saturday before, to find his little sister glowing with a happiness she could not hide, and confessing everything because she could not bear to deceive the brother she loved.

"He wanted her thirty thousand pounds," he said. His voice was not quite steady. "And he wanted to hurt me. He said as much, when I found him. He laughed. She heard him laugh. She was standing at the top of the stairs."

He stopped. He found that he was looking at the ground.

"She has barely spoken since," he said. "Not really. She thinks she has disgraced us. She thinks I despise her. I do not know how to make her understand that the only person I despise is myself. I chose that companion. I let her go without me. I should have seen."

The wind moved in the oaks. Somewhere below them, a long way off, he could hear Bingley laughing.

"I have never told anyone that," he said. "Not my aunt. Not my uncle. Only my cousin Fitzwilliam, who shares her guardianship. I do not know why I have told you."

He did know why. He could not say it yet.

#

Elizabeth sat very still on the fallen oak and felt her heart break a little, quietly, for a girl of fifteen she had never met.

She thought of Lydia, who was fifteen too. Lydia, who had laughed at every word Mr Wickham said last night and asked him three times whether he danced. Lydia, whose head could be turned by a red coat and a compliment, and whose mother would clap her hands to see it. If a man like that set out to charm Lydia, who would stop him? Not Mama. Not Papa, in his library. Not Elizabeth herself, if she had not known.

And this man had known, and had not shrugged and said it was none of his affair. He had come to her at ten in the morning, sleepless, and handed her the thing he guarded most in the world, so that she could protect her sisters.

She looked up at him. He was standing with his back very straight and his face very composed, and his hands were clenched so tightly behind him that she could see the knuckles white against his dark coat. He was waiting, she realised, for her to judge him. For her to say, as he had evidently been saying to himself every night for three months, you should have seen.

She stood up.

"Mr Darcy," she said. "Look at me, please."

He looked.

"You did not fail her. You were deceived by two people who had made a trade of deceiving. That is not a fault in you. It is a fault in them." She took a breath. "And you did not fail her in the end, either. You came. You were there in time. However it happened, you were there. She is safe, and she is at home with people who love her, and one day, when she is ready, she will understand that the brother who found her did not come to scold her. He came to save her."

He did not move. But something in his face gave way, the way ice gives way on a pond in March, all at once and silently.

"How can you be so certain?" he said, very low.

"Because I have watched you with my sister Mary," said Elizabeth, "who has never in her life been noticed by anyone. And with Jane, when she was ill. And with me, in a lane, when I had mud to my knees and a torn glove." Her voice wavered, and she steadied it. "A man who takes such care of other people's sisters does not despise his own."

The silence that followed was very long. The wind lifted the ribbons of her bonnet and let them fall.

Then, slowly, he unclasped his hands from behind his back, and held one of them out to her, palm up. It was a question. She understood it perfectly.

She took off her glove and put her bare hand in his.

His fingers closed around hers, warm and very gentle, and he did not say anything at all. He only looked down at their joined hands as though he could not quite believe them, and then up at her face, and the expression in his eyes made her want to weep and laugh at the same time.