Page 41 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"And she has written such things about the ball. About Mr Darcy and the admiral, and Lady Pembury's niece." Jane hesitated. "She seems to know a great deal. More than I should have thought, when she was not there."

Elizabeth looked up. "Was she not?"

"No. She was at home with a cold, she said. But she knew what everyone wore."

Something tightened in Elizabeth's chest. She had not told Jane about the snow at Whetstone. Not in so many words; only that they had been delayed on the road. She had written it all to her father, laughing about Mrs Pym and the leaning inn, and he had read the letter aloud at breakfast, the way he always read the best letters aloud.

"Jane," she said slowly. "When you were at Longbourn, after the wedding. When I wrote to Papa about the inn at Whetstone. Was Caroline there?"

Jane thought. "She came to stay the week after, while Charles and I were settling in. We all dined at Longbourn on the Sunday. Papa read your letter." Her face changed. "Oh, Lizzy. She laughed so. I thought she was only enjoying the story."

They looked at each other.

"And the paper came sealed," said Elizabeth, thinking aloud. "With a black box round the paragraph, in a neat hand. And somebody wrote won in the margin of the betting book at White's, in a neat hand. And Caroline has hated me since the first day she saw me with mud on my petticoat." She stood up, and went to the window, and stood looking out at the grey square with her arms wrapped round herself. "I do not want it to be her, Jane. Truly. She is Charles's sister. She is your sister now. But who else is there?"

Jane was silent. At last she said, in a very small voice, "She did ask me a great many questions about you. At Christmas, and after. Where you liked to walk. Who your friends were. What Mr Darcy said in his letters. I thought she was trying to be friendly at last." She swallowed. "I told her about the builders. The green room. The door. I thought it was the most romantic thing I had ever heard, and I wanted her to know how much he loves you. I thought it would make her kinder."

Elizabeth turned round.

"Oh, Jane," she said, and went back to the sofa, and took her sister's hands again, because Jane's lovely face had crumpled. "Dearest, you could not have known. You never think ill of anyone. That is why we all love you."

"But if I have helped her to hurt you—"

"We do not know that she has hurt anybody. Not yet." Elizabeth squeezed her hands. "But I think we must find out."

There was a card on the mantelpiece, propped against the clock: an invitation to a musical evening at the Hursts' house in Grosvenor Street, on Thursday. Mrs Hurst had sent it the day before, very correctly, for the sake of her brother's new sister-in-law. Beside it lay a note that had come the same afternoon, in a pretty sloping hand, from Lady Theodosia Rowe.

I hear Miss Bingley has been very busy with her pen this week, Lady Theodosia had written. And with her tongue. I would not say so to anyone but you. Do be careful, my dear.

Elizabeth had read it the day before and felt only a faint distaste, as though someone had whispered in church. Now she took it down, and read it again, and put it back.

"We shall go on Thursday," she said. "You, and Charles, and Fitzwilliam, and I. And I shall ask her."

#

Aldridge's note came on the Wednesday morning, blotted and underlined and very much relieved.

Found out. The fellow at the whist table came as guest of HURST. Hurst signed him in. I asked the porter. Name given as Mr G. Wakefield. Porter did not like him, says he tipped in bad coin. — A.

Wakefield. Darcy read the name twice, and felt his mouth go hard. Wickham had always liked to keep his own initial when he borrowed a name. He had done it in Lambton, and at Ramsgate.

And he had been signed in by Hurst.

He did not go to Grosvenor Street. He went to Bingley, who was staying at a hotel in Albemarle Street until the Hursts' spare rooms could be aired, and found him eating a late breakfast in a dressing gown, reading a letter from his steward upside down and smiling at nothing in the way of a man two months married.

"Hurst," said Darcy, and put the note on the table.

Bingley read it. His smile went away.

They found Hurst at his club, which was not White's but a smaller, stuffier place in Pall Mall, where the claret was cheap and the chairs were deep and nobody expected a man to talk. He was asleep in one of the chairs with a newspaper over his face, and it took both of them to rouse him, and some time after that to make him understand what they wanted.

"Wakefield?" He blinked at them with his heavy, pouched, bloodshot eyes. "Wakefield. Ah. Yes. Fair fellow. Very pleasant. Good company. Played a decent hand of whist." He yawned. "Why? What's he done?"

"How did you come to take him to White's?" said Darcy.

Hurst frowned with the effort of remembering. It was not, Darcy suspected, an effort he often made.

"Caroline asked me," he said at last.