Page 80 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"And the magistrate?"

"Mr Fenwick is at the Derby assizes, madam, and will not be home till Saturday. I sent to his house. His clerk said he could do nothing without a warrant, and could not get a warrant without Mr Fenwick." Mrs Reynolds's lips thinned. "The clerk is a fool. He always was."

So there was nobody. No husband, no magistrate, no Richard. Only forty-one servants, an old housekeeper, a girl of seventeen, an invalid of four-and-twenty, and herself.

Elizabeth sat down at Mrs Reynolds's table, and put her cold hands flat on it, and made herself think.

"He did not come to the house last night," she said slowly. "He only stood across the lake with a lantern, and looked. He has been at the Green Man a week. He has asked where the ladies walk. He is not a housebreaker, Mrs Reynolds. He would never try to get into a house full of armed men. He is a charmer. He gets people to come to him." She looked up. "He is waiting for one of us to go out alone. And the one he wants is Georgiana."

Mrs Reynolds said nothing. But her eyes flickered, once.

"If he could get her away," said Elizabeth, very low, "even for one night, even with nothing having happened, it would finish everything. The Ramsgate paragraph was only a rumour. This would be proof. Miss Darcy has eloped with the same man. There would be no presentation in June, or ever. There would be no marriage for her in England. And everybody would say it was because her brother married a nobody, and let the house go to ruin, and sent his sister into the country in the care of a girl who could not keep her safe." She drew a breath. "That is what she wants. Whoever she is. That is what she has been paying for."

Mrs Reynolds looked at her across the table for a long time.

"Then what are we to do, madam?"

It was the first time the old housekeeper had asked her what to do. Elizabeth heard it, and felt it settle on her shoulders like the great ring of keys that Mrs Dawes had given her in London, heavy and cold and belonging to her.

"We are to keep Georgiana inside," she said. "Every minute. She is not to go out of this house, not even into the garden, not even with me. She is not to be alone. Hannah will sleep in her room. James is to stand at the foot of the stairs." She stood up. "And we are to go on as if nothing were wrong. Every window open. Georgiana playing in the saloon. The gardeners at work. Mr Wickham is watching the house. I want him to see nothing. I want him to think we have no idea he is here."

"And then, madam?"

"And then," said Elizabeth, "he will get impatient. He always does. Fitzwilliam told me so. He will try something. And when he does, we shall be ready."

She went upstairs. On the landing, she met Anne de Bourgh coming out of her room, fully dressed at half past seven in the morning in her stoutest boots, with only one shawl, and a look in her bright hazel eyes that Elizabeth had seen before only in Lady Catherine's.

"I heard," said Anne. "The walls in this house are very thin, for a palace. It is Wickham."

"Yes."

"Good," said Anne de Bourgh. "I have wanted to meet him again for a very long time. He put a frog in my lap when I was nine, at Matlock, and my mother had hysterics, and I was not allowed out of the carriage for a year." She pulled her one shawl tighter. "What are we going to do to him?"

#

He tried something at a quarter past three that afternoon.

Elizabeth was in the long gallery with Mrs Reynolds, going over the linen books by the window, making herself look at columns of pillow-cases and not at the park. She heard quick light footsteps along the gallery floor, and looked up, and saw Georgiana coming towards her.

She had a piece of paper in her hand. She was holding it out in front of her at arm's length, between finger and thumb, as though it were something that might bite. Her face was chalk-white. But her chin was up, and her mouth was set, and she did not stop walking until she had reached the window, and put the paper into Elizabeth's hand.

"It was in my music case," she said. "In the saloon. Between the pages of the Mozart. It was not there this morning. I would have seen it." Her voice shook. "Read it, Elizabeth."

It was a half-sheet of good cream paper, folded twice. Elizabeth unfolded it.

My darling G. I have come into Derbyshire in secret, because I could not bear to think of you alone and frightened, and I have news I dare not write. Your brother is in terrible danger in London. There is a man who means to harm him, and only you can help. Come alone to the old ice house by the lake at six o'clock this evening, and I will tell you everything. Tell no one. Not even your sister. Especially not your sister; she is being watched, and would be followed. Burn this. I am longing to hold you. Your ever-loving T.

Elizabeth read it once. Then she looked at the gs.

Darling. Longing. Ever-loving. A little hook, curving up and back, on every one.

It was in the same hand as the letter to Rosings at Christmas, and thirty letters tied up in blue ribbon in a writing box. She had come all this way into Derbyshire, then. Or she had written it in Brook Street, and given it to Wickham to use, and stayed safely in London being seen at every ball, so that nobody could ever say she had left.

Elizabeth thought the second was far more likely.

"How did it get into your music case?" said Mrs Reynolds sharply.

"There was a boy," said Georgiana. "This morning. From the village. He brought a basket of eggs to the kitchen door and asked if he might see the great pianoforte, because his sister had told him about it. Cook let him put his head in at the saloon door. I was not there. I was upstairs with Hannah." She swallowed. "He must have had it in his pocket."