Page 43 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"Oh, be quiet, Charles. You are the worst of them. My own brother." She rounded on Elizabeth. "I do not like you, Mrs Darcy. I never have. I will not pretend otherwise; I have too much pride. I think you are impertinent and countrified and I think you were very lucky, and when I read that paragraph I laughed, and I sent it to Jane because I wanted her to see it, and I am not sorry. But I did not write it. Do you imagine I want the Bennet name dragged through the mud? My brother has married a Bennet. My name is tied to yours now, whether I like it or not. Every door that shuts on you shuts a little way on me." Her voice shook. "I have had two invitations withdrawn this week myself. Did you know that? No. Of course you did not."

Elizabeth had not known it. She looked at Caroline, standing very straight on the Turkey carpet with her plume trembling and her hands clenched at her sides, and saw that she was telling the truth.

"Then who was the friend of a friend?" she said quietly. "The man you asked Mr Hurst to sign in. Who asked you?"

Caroline's mouth opened. Then it closed again. For a moment something like embarrassment crossed her face.

"A lady," she said at last. "A lady of the very first consequence, who has never before done me the honour of asking anything of me. She sent me a note. A very pretty note. She said a friend of her family, an agreeable young man, was in town and longed to see White's, and could I think of any gentleman who might oblige him, and that she would be so grateful. I was flattered. I will not deny it. I asked Hurst. That was all."

"Who was she?"

"I will not tell you." Caroline lifted her chin. "I burned the note. And I will not repeat a lady's name in a room full of people who have just accused me of writing to the newspapers. You may think what you like." She swept to the door, and turned there, magnificent in her outrage. "But I will tell you this, Mr Darcy. If somebody has been using me, and my brother-in-law, and my name, to play their nasty little games, then I should very much like to know who. And when I do, they will be sorry."

The door banged behind her. They heard her heels go down the landing, very fast, and a burst of chatter as she swept into the tea room.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

"She did not do it," said Jane at last, very softly.

"No," said Elizabeth. She found that she was shaking, and that she felt, absurdly, ashamed. "No. She did not."

#

They did not take the carriage home. It was only a few hundred yards from Grosvenor Street to the square, and the rain had stopped, and Elizabeth said she wanted air. So they walked, arm in arm, under the lamps, with Pearce's second footman trailing discreetly twenty paces behind with a lantern.

She did not speak for the whole length of Grosvenor Street. Darcy did not ask her to. He could feel her thinking, through the sleeve of his coat, the way a man feels a clock ticking in his pocket.

At the corner of the square she said, "I was so sure."

"So was I."

"No, you were not. You told Charles you did not know. I heard you, on the landing." She sighed. "I was sure. I wanted it to be her, Fitzwilliam. That is the dreadful thing. I wanted it to be someone I already disliked, so that I need not go on looking. I went in there tonight and I was not asking her. I was accusing her. And she was telling the truth."

"She was also flattered into being useful by a lady of the very first consequence," said Darcy, "and did not stop to ask why. Caroline is not innocent. Only not guilty of this."

"That is not much comfort."

"No."

They had come to the railings round the garden in the middle of the square. The trees were bare and black against a sky still faintly luminous with the lamps of the town. Elizabeth stopped, and put both hands on the cold iron, and looked through it into the dark.

"A lady of the very first consequence," she said slowly. "Who wanted Mr Wickham taken into White's. Who knew that Caroline was flattered by great ladies, and would do what she was asked without asking why. Who knew that Mr Hurst would sign in anybody if he was asked by his family, and never remember it after." She turned her head. "That is somebody who knows all of them very well, Fitzwilliam. Caroline. Hurst. Us."

"Yes."

"And who knew that if anything went wrong, if anyone traced it back, the trail would stop at Caroline Bingley's door. The one person in London whom we would both believe capable of it at once." Her hands tightened on the railing. "Somebody wanted us to go in there tonight. Somebody laid it out for us like a path in the snow."

Darcy was silent.

That was the thought he had had himself, walking home from Pall Mall in the rain: that it was too tidy. Too neatly done. He had felt then that there was someone standing in the wings, watching him walk onto the stage. Now Elizabeth had said it aloud, standing at the railings in the lamplight, and he felt the back of his neck go cold.

Somebody had been clever. Somebody had been patient. And somebody had been close enough to them both, to him and Elizabeth, to know exactly which door they would knock on first.

"Who pointed us at her?" he said slowly. "Before Hurst. Before Aldridge's note. Who first put Caroline into your head?"

Elizabeth frowned. "Nobody. Jane. The letters. Caroline sending the paper to Netherfield." She hesitated. "And there was a note, on Tuesday. Only a line. Saying Caroline had been busy with her pen, and to be careful."

"From whom?"