Page 68 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Elizabeth watched it for a long time.

This house was a stage, she thought. Every window a box at the theatre. Every morning the papers came in through the front door, and notes came in through the area door, and callers came in and went out and carried away whatever they had seen, and somewhere in Brook Street, very likely, somebody sat at a pretty writing desk and read about it all, and smiled, and chose what to write next. Georgiana could not walk to the music room without being watched. She could not go to the Park, or to church, or to her singing master. She could not sleep. She was being hunted, in her own home, and there was nowhere in London she could go where the hunter could not follow.

But London was not the whole world.

Elizabeth thought of a place she had never seen: a great house backed by wooded hills, with a stream that swelled into a lake, and beech trees in the park the exact colour of the paper on these walls. A place a hundred and fifty miles away, where nobody read the Post until it was three days old, and the only callers were tenants' wives and the vicar, and the housekeeper, a Mrs Reynolds, had known Georgiana since the day she was born.

She went to find her husband.

He was in the study, with Richard, bent over a map of London on which they had been marking every place Wickham had been seen. He looked up when she came in, and she saw his face change: the way it always changed now, when he saw her, as though somebody had opened a shutter.

"What if I took Georgiana to Pemberley?" said Elizabeth.

The room went very still.

"Not running away," she said quickly, before he could speak. "I know what we said. Side by side. I have not forgotten. But she cannot bear this, Fitzwilliam. Not another week of it. There is a woman in the square with a spyglass on her window. They are putting notes through the area door. Every single thing they write, they write to hurt her most, because she is the one who breaks." She took a breath. "If she is not here, they cannot reach her. And if I am with her, they cannot say I have crept away in shame, because I will have gone to take care of my sister. Any woman in England would do the same."

"And you would leave me here," he said slowly.

"I would leave you here to finish it. You and Richard. You can go where I cannot: White's, and Salisbury Court, and places I do not want to know the names of. And you would not have to be afraid for us every minute while you did it. Neither of us." Her voice wavered. "I do not want to go. I want you to know that. I do not want to be a hundred and fifty miles from you for even one night. But I think it is right. I think it is the one move we have that she has not thought of."

He looked at her across the map of London for a very long time.

Richard, very quietly, put down his pencil and went out, and shut the door behind him.

Chapter 19: The Parting

Darcy House. Friday, 10th April 1812

When the door had closed behind Richard, Darcy did not speak for a long time.

He stood with his hands flat on the map of London, looking down at it. Richard's pencil marks lay scattered across it like shot: Wych Street, Salisbury Court, the Bell, Oxford Street, the mews behind Brook Street. A web of little crosses, spun out from the West End to the Fleet and back. Somewhere in the middle of it, somebody was sitting very still, and waiting.

And his wife stood on the other side of the desk, and asked him to let her go a hundred and fifty miles away.

Every part of him refused it. He had spent a month learning to stand beside her instead of in front of her. He had built a door with no lock so that there would never again be forty yards of passage between them. Last night he had knelt on the threshold of that door and sworn to her: no more secrets, side by side. And now she wanted the whole of England between them.

"You said," he began, and stopped.

"I know what I said." She came round the desk, and stood beside him, and looked down at the map too. "I meant it. I still mean it. This is not me leaving you, Fitzwilliam. It is me going to hold the other end of the line." She put one finger on the map, on Brook Street. "She is here. You are here. And every day she aims at the thing in this house that bleeds most easily. If I take that thing away, she has nothing left to aim at but you. And you," she added, with the ghost of a smile, "do not bleed half so easily as you think."

He looked at her.

"And if she follows you?"

"To Derbyshire? A lady of fashion, in the middle of the Season?" Elizabeth shook her head. "She would be seen. It would be talked of. She cannot leave London without everybody asking why. That is the one thing she cannot afford."

"And Wickham?"

That stopped her, for a moment. He saw it.

"Wickham is in London," she said slowly. "Richard is hunting him. And Pemberley has—how many servants?"

"Forty-one, indoors and out. And Mrs Reynolds."

"And Mrs Reynolds," said Elizabeth, "who has known him since he was in short coats, and would know him again at a hundred yards in a fog." She put her hand over his, on the desk. "We will be safer there than here. You know it. Here she can put a note through the area door. There she would have to come through forty-one servants and a housekeeper and your whole park to reach us."

He turned his hand over under hers, and held it.