Page 61 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"She held me," Georgiana said at last, very low. "When I told her. She held me while I cried. She said it would be our secret forever."

"I know, dearest."

"Why? Elizabeth, why would she?"

Elizabeth did not answer. She thought of Richard's voice in the study, the night before last: she wanted you, old fellow. You were her best chance and she knew it. She thought of a beautiful woman of four-and-twenty, sitting year after year at Matlock House, waiting for a man who never looked at her. And then watching him come back from Hertfordshire married to a nobody.

It was not an answer she could give a girl of seventeen on a staircase. So she only held on.

#

Thursday, 9th April. The day of the Drawing Room.

At two o'clock in the afternoon, while forty young ladies in hoops and feathers stood in the crush at the Queen's House waiting to make their curtsey, Georgiana Darcy sat at the pianoforte in the music room in Grosvenor Square in a plain grey gown and played scales.

Darcy stood in the doorway and listened.

She had made the decision herself, the night before, sitting on the stairs with Elizabeth's arm round her. She would not go. Not this time. Not with the Post on every table and every eye in the room looking for the girl who had nearly gone to Gretna. She would go in June, to the Birthday Drawing Room, when everybody knew the truth. She had told Lady Matlock so herself, in a note, in her own hand, which had been blotted only twice.

And this morning she had come downstairs at nine, dressed, and eaten her breakfast, and gone to the music room, and begun to practise. She had not stopped since. Scales, then the sonata, then scales again, over and over, steady and stubborn. He did not think it was a very musical performance. He thought it was the bravest thing he had ever heard.

"She is doing it on purpose," said Richard, at his shoulder, very low. "So that we can all hear her. So that we know she has not gone back to bed."

"I know."

"She is a Darcy after all." Richard's big hand came down on his shoulder, briefly. "Come away, old fellow. You are making her nervous. She keeps looking round."

They went to the study. Richard shut the door and put his back against it.

"Wickham has moved," he said. "I went round to his lodgings in Wych Street this morning. He left on Tuesday, the morning the Post came out. Paid his shot in gold, the landlady said, which she had never seen him do before, and took a hackney west." He paused. "West, Darcy. Not to Brighton. Not to his regiment. He has not been with his regiment since March, I would lay money on it. Forster must be tearing his hair."

"Paid in gold."

"Somebody is paying him very well." Richard's face was grim. "We could have him taken up. You hold his Lambton debts. You could swear them out before a magistrate tomorrow and have him in the Fleet by Saturday."

Darcy had thought of it. He had thought of it all night, the way a man with a toothache thinks of the pincers.

"And then?" he said. "He sits in the Fleet and says nothing, and waits for his patroness to pay him out. Or he says a great deal, and it is all lies, and nobody believes him because he is a debtor and a liar. And she walks into my aunt's drawing room the next day and weeps for poor dear Georgiana, and my aunt comforts her, and we have nothing. A handwriting on a Christmas letter. That is all we have." He shook his head. "It is not enough. My aunt would never believe it. You said so yourself."

"No," said Richard. "She would not. I know my mother. She would say it was a forgery, and that you had always been unjust to Theo, and she would never forgive you for saying it." He rubbed his face. "So we wait."

"We watch. We find the link. Wickham to her. The printer to her. Something in her own hand that reaches from Brook Street to Salisbury Court. Coker said the copy came in a clerk's hand, on good paper. Somebody wrote it out fair. Somebody paid for it." Darcy looked out of the window at the square, bright and ordinary in the April sun. "Until then, we tell no one outside this house. Not my aunt. Not Bingley. Not anyone."

"And your wife?"

"My wife," said Darcy, "is going to walk in the Park at five o'clock this afternoon, as she does every afternoon, with her maid and a footman, because she says that if she stays at home they will say she is hiding. I have argued with her about it for two days. I have lost."

Richard laughed despite himself. "And you let her?"

"I do not let her. I married her." Darcy turned from the window. "She is not a thing to be locked in a cupboard, Richard. She would never forgive me. And she would be right."

Richard looked at him for a long moment, and something in his face softened.

"You have changed," he said. "Do you know that? A year ago you would have had her under lock and key with a regiment of footmen at the door."

"A year ago I did not know her."

In the music room, Georgiana had finished the scales, and begun, very slowly, the first movement of the sonata. The sound came faintly through two closed doors. Darcy stood and listened to it until the end, and did not say anything else.