Page 64 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"In the library, sir."

"Ask him to come to me in the study. At once." He paused. "And, Pearce. Have Grey bring down my father's pistol case from the dressing room. And see that they are cleaned and loaded."

Pearce's face did not change by so much as a flicker. He had served the Darcys for thirty years.

"Very good, sir," he said.

Halfway up the stairs, on the landing, where she had stopped to look back and had not gone on, Elizabeth heard every word.

Chapter 18: A Challenge

Darcy House. Thursday, 9th April 1812, evening

The pistol case lay open on the study desk: walnut and brass, lined in faded green baize, the two long-barrelled Mantons nested in it like a pair of sleeping birds. They had been his father's. His father had never fired them at anything but a playing card nailed to a tree in Pemberley park. Grey had cleaned them, and loaded them, and set them down in front of his master without a word, and gone out again with a face like a funeral.

Richard stood on the other side of the desk and looked at them for a long time.

"No," he said.

"I have not asked you anything yet."

"You are going to ask me to be your second. And I am telling you no." Richard put both hands flat on the desk, on either side of the case, and leant over it. "Darcy. Listen to me. I have seen men shot. I have shot men. It is not like the prints in the shop windows. It is not a clean thing. A ball in the belly takes three days, and they scream the whole time."

"He put a forged letter into my wife's hands," said Darcy. "In the Park. In front of half London. He stood and watched her read it. He wanted to watch her believe it."

"I know."

"He took my sister to the sands at Ramsgate and whispered to her until she thought she loved him, and when I came, he laughed in front of her. She heard him laugh." His voice did not rise. It had not risen once since the hall. "He has taken money from somebody to destroy my wife's name, and my sister's, and he has been paid in gold for it, and he walked through Hyde Park this afternoon in a new coat. I have let him live for ten years because my father loved him. I am done."

"And when you have killed him?" said Richard. "Or he has killed you? Have you thought of that? He is a very good shot, Darcy. I have seen him at Matlock. Better than you."

"Then he will hang for it."

"He will not. He will run to France with his patroness's gold and live very comfortably on the proceeds. And your wife will be a widow at twenty, and Georgiana will have nobody but my father for a guardian, and the Post will say that Mr Darcy of Pemberley was so ashamed of the story that he flung his life away rather than face it. That it must have been true, then. All of it. The wager. Ramsgate. Everything." Richard's voice cracked. "You would be handing it to her. Whoever she is. You would be doing her work for her."

Darcy said nothing.

"And if you kill him, it is worse," Richard went on, relentless. "Duelling is murder in law. You would have to leave the country. Tonight. You would never come back. You would spend the rest of your life in Calais or Brussels, and Elizabeth with you, if she would go, and Pemberley shut up, and Georgiana—" He stopped. "Is that what you want? Is that what your father would want?"

"My father," said Darcy, "would have called him out ten years ago."

"Your father was a good man who was fool enough to love a snake. You are not your father." Richard straightened up. "I will not be your second. If you insist on this, I will go and find Wickham myself tonight and break his jaw, and let them hang me for it. I have nobody depending on me. You have three."

They looked at each other across the open case. Outside, the lamplighter was going round the square; they could hear his ladder knocking on the railings, one post after another.

"Where is he?" said Darcy.

Richard was silent for a long moment. Then he let out a breath.

"I do not know. Truly. He was in the Park at five. He went out by Grosvenor Gate and took a hackney. I will find him. It will take a day, perhaps two." He picked up his hat. "And in that day, Cousin, you are going to think. Not about Wickham. About the woman upstairs, who is sitting on the landing where she stopped to look back at you, and who heard every word you said to Pearce."

Darcy looked up sharply.

"She heard," said Richard. "I passed her on the stairs. She did not see me. She was sitting on the top step with her arms round her knees, perfectly white, staring at the study door." He put on his hat. "I would go up, if I were you. Before you load anything else."

He went out. The front door shut behind him.

Darcy sat alone in the study with his father's pistols and the lamplight, and did not move. He was still sitting there when the study door opened again, and his wife came in, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it.