Page 77 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

The enclosed to be printed Tuesday without fail. A fair copy to the Post the same evening. Double the usual fee. The young lady is to be presented on Thursday; it must be seen before then, or it is worth nothing.

No signature. No initials. Only a small, pretty, sloping hand.

And a g in young, and a g in nothing. Each one ending in a little hook, curving up and back, sharp as a fishhook.

Darcy did not move. He found that he could not.

"I know that hand," said Caroline Bingley.

Her voice had changed. It was lower, and a little unsteady, and for the first time since he had known her there was nothing of performance in it at all.

"I burned the note, the one asking me to have Hurst take her friend into White's. I told you so. I did not tell you why I would not give you her name." She drew a breath. "It was because I was ashamed. Because she had never once spoken to me in six seasons, except to be very kind in a way that made me feel like a tradesman's daughter, and then she wrote to me as though I were her particular friend, and asked me a favour, and I was so flattered that I would have done anything she asked. I would have walked to Brighton." Her mouth twisted. "I have eleven notes from her. Thanks for flowers, regrets for dinners, all very pretty and very distant. I keep them in a box. I used to take them out and look at them. I am not proud of it."

She lifted her chin.

"That is Lady Theodosia Rowe's hand," she said. "I would know it anywhere. I would swear to it before the Lord Chancellor. I have spent six years wishing she would write to me."

The study was very quiet. Outside, a coal cart was going round the square, and the coal-heaver was calling. Bingley, in the doorway, had gone white.

Darcy stood up. He came round the desk, and stood in front of Caroline Bingley, and looked down at her: at the plain grey gown and the ruined gloves and the fierce, proud, unhappy face.

"Miss Bingley," he said. "I owe you an apology. I accused you, in your brother's library, of a thing you did not do. I was wrong, and I was unjust, and I am more sorry than I can say." He paused. "And I owe you a great deal more than that. I do not know how to repay it."

Caroline looked up at him. For a moment something moved in her face that he had never seen there before. Then it was gone, and she was herself again.

"You may repay it," she said crisply, "by telling your wife that I did it. And by never, ever telling anybody that I went to Salisbury Court in a hackney." She drew on her ruined gloves. "I shall need a new shawl."

#

Brook Street Mews. Tuesday, 28th April. Six o'clock in the morning.

The clerk from Drummonds was a thin anxious young man named Pettigrew, who had been got out of bed at five by Mr Lavender and was plainly regretting every choice that had led him to this cold wet cobbled lane at dawn. He stood between Darcy and Richard in the shadow of a hay loft, with his coat collar turned up and his teeth chattering, and watched the back gate of the Earl of Stanway's house.

Lord Stanway was Lady Theodosia's father. He was seventy, and deaf, and lived in two rooms on the ground floor with his port and his gout, and had not been into society for ten years. His daughter ran his house. His daughter ran everything.

"The footmen come out at half past six," murmured Mr Lavender, at Darcy's other elbow. "To fetch the milk and the rolls. Every morning, regular as a church clock. My man's watched them three days."

At twenty-five minutes to seven, the back gate opened, and three footmen came out into the mews in their shirtsleeves and waistcoats, yawning, with baskets on their arms.

The third was very tall. Six foot three at least, and thin as a rail, with a long nervous face and a habit of looking over his shoulder. He had pulled a plain brown coat on over his livery waistcoat, as though he had done it in a hurry. There was powder on the collar.

Pettigrew's breath went in with a hiss.

"That's him," he whispered. "That's him, sir. The one with the gold. I'd know him anywhere. He always stoops to come through our door."

Richard was already moving.

He did not run. He strolled out of the shadow of the hay loft like a man going to buy rolls himself, and fell into step beside the tall footman at the corner of the mews, and put a large friendly hand on his shoulder. The footman turned, and saw a big, sunburnt, smiling gentleman in a greatcoat, and then, over the gentleman's shoulder, saw Darcy coming out of the shadows. And he went the colour of whey.

He did not try to run. Darcy thought afterwards that he had been waiting for this for a month.

Their talk took place in the back room of a chandler's shop at the end of the mews, which Mr Lavender seemed to have arranged in advance, with the shutters closed and a single candle. The footman's name was Samuel Hobb. He was two-and-twenty. He had been in Lord Stanway's service since he was fourteen, and before that his father, and before that his grandfather. He sat on an upturned crate with his big raw hands between his knees, and shook.

"I never read them, sir," he kept saying. "I never read what was in them. I can read. I never did. She said I mustn't, and I never."

"Tell me what you carried," said Darcy. "From the beginning."

It came out slowly, in pieces. The first time was in March, a week before the first paragraph: a sealed packet and a purse of gold, to be taken to a tavern in Salisbury Court called the Bell, on a Monday evening, and given to a fair gentleman who would ask for it by the name of Wakefield. Then the bank. A draft of two hundred pounds, paid in gold, into an account at Drummonds in Wakefield's name, and he was to change out of his livery first, and not give his own name, and not say whose house he came from. Then more gold, three times since. Then more packets, every Monday. Twice, a note, sealed, to a printer's shop in the same court, left on the counter with money under it.