Page 76 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Darcy stared at him.

"Last night."

"Last night, sir. Friday. Whoever your lady's gentleman at Lambton is, he wasn't in two places at once. Lambton's a hundred and fifty mile. If he was at the Green Man on Tuesday, he's come back to town since, or it's another gentleman altogether." Mr Lavender coughed apologetically. "A great many fair gentlemen pay in gold, sir, and ask questions in tap rooms. Lambton's a small place. A stranger's always news."

The cold in Darcy's chest eased a little. Not all the way.

"Your man is certain?"

"He's been following Mr Wickham on and off since March, sir. He knows the back of his head better than his own mother's."

Richard put a hand on his shoulder. "He is here, Darcy. In London. We have been hunting him for a fortnight and at last we have found him. And whoever is at Lambton, it is a hundred and fifty miles from your wife and forty servants and a housekeeper who would know Wickham in a fog." His grip tightened. "She said herself it was probably nothing."

Darcy stood in the hall with the letter in his hand and looked at the postscript for a long time.

I dare say it is nothing. Only I thought you would want to know. No secrets.

Every part of him wanted to be on a horse. He had wanted to be on a horse for twelve days. But he had promised her he would finish it. That had been the whole point of her going: to give him the room to finish it. If he rode north now, at a rumour, while Wickham sat at a hazard table in Pickering Place, he would be undoing everything she had gone a hundred and fifty miles to do.

"Put two of your men on Pickering Place," he said at last to Mr Lavender. "Day and night. I want to know the moment he leaves London. The moment."

"Yes, sir."

That evening, he wrote to Elizabeth. He told her about Pickering Place, and about Mr Lavender's man who knew the back of Wickham's head. He told her it was very likely nothing, as she had said. He told her to keep the doors locked at night anyway, and to take James and a groom whenever she walked out, and not to go beyond the park wall. He told her that he loved her.

He also wrote, by the same post, to Mrs Reynolds, in terms that he did not show anybody. And to the magistrate at Lambton, an old friend of his father's.

Then he sealed the letters, and sent them, and sat for a long time in the study with the lamp unlit, and told himself it was nothing.

He did not quite believe it.

#

Monday, 27th April

Miss Bingley was announced at eleven o'clock on Monday morning, which was an hour at which no lady of fashion was ever announced anywhere, and she swept into the study before Pearce had finished saying her name, with her brother trailing behind her looking harassed, and a flat leather portfolio clutched to her bosom like a shield.

She was in grey. Plain dark grey, without a single plume or flounce, and a close bonnet that hid most of her hair, and a pair of stout walking boots that Darcy would not have believed she owned. There was a smudge of something black on one glove. It looked very like printer's ink.

"Mr Darcy," she said. "Colonel. You will want to sit down."

Darcy, who had risen, sat down. So did Richard, looking fascinated.

"I told you," said Caroline Bingley, "that I had been making enquiries. I have been making them for three weeks. I have been to places no lady should go, and spoken to persons no lady should speak to, and I have had to tell my sister a great many untruths about where I was spending my mornings, which I did not enjoy. I have also ruined a very good pair of gloves." She laid the portfolio on his desk. "I am not doing this for you, Mr Darcy. Or for your wife, whom I still do not like. I am doing it because somebody used my name to play their nasty little game, and made me look like a common gossip in front of my brother and my sister-in-law and you. And I do not permit that."

"Caroline," said Bingley faintly, from the door, "went to Salisbury Court. Alone. In a hackney."

"With my maid, Charles. I am not a savage." She opened the portfolio. "The printer, Mr Coker, is a very disagreeable man. But he has a wife. And his wife has a great many children, and a great many debts, and a very poor opinion of her husband's business, which she says will bring them all to the gallows one day. And she keeps his papers. All of them. In a box under the stairs. Because she has always thought that one day somebody would come asking, and she wanted to be able to prove it was nothing to do with her."

She took out a small bundle of papers, tied with string, and laid them on the blotter.

"This," said Caroline, "cost me eleven pounds and my second-best shawl."

Darcy untied the string.

There were four sheets of copy, written out fair in a plain, flat, careful clerk's hand, each one headed with a date. He recognised them all. The wager. The inn at Whetstone. The door, and good-morrow. Ramsgate. His stomach turned over to see them there, the very words, the originals, lying on his own desk.

Pinned to the last one, the Ramsgate paragraph, was a smaller sheet. A half-sheet of good cream paper, folded once. Not in the clerk's hand. In a lady's.