Page 92 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"I know," said Elizabeth. "But she would want to know. She is not a fool, Fitzwilliam. She is only a woman who loved somebody who did not deserve it. So was your father."

He looked at her for a long time.

"And then?" she said. "After your aunt? What do we do with Lady Theodosia?"

He looked out of the window at the lake, and the rooks going home to the beeches, and the far rise where the road came over the hill.

"My aunt Catherine," he said slowly, "asked me, when I left London, to leave her to her. I think I am going to let her have her wish."

Elizabeth laughed, softly, and put her head on his shoulder.

"God help Lady Theodosia," she said.

"God help all of London," said her husband, and kissed her hair.

Chapter 25: Family

Grosvenor Square. Wednesday, 6th May 1812

They came back to London on the Wednesday evening, in the long gold light, all four of them in the travelling coach, with Darcy riding alongside on a fresh horse because he said he had been in enough coaches to last him a lifetime, and Elizabeth said he only wanted to look at her through the window.

He did look at her through the window. The whole way from Derby.

The blue door opened before the coach had stopped. Pearce stood in it, very upright, and behind him was the whole of the hall of Darcy House, full: Mrs Dawes, weeping openly into her apron for the second time in a month, and Hannah's friend the second housemaid, and the fire girl who could not read, and Grey, and the cook, and Richard, burnt brown and grinning, taking the steps two at a time.

And at the top of the steps, in black, as upright as a lance, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

She did not come down. She stood at the top of the steps with her hand on the railing and watched the coach door open, and her face did not change at all as Georgiana got out, and then Elizabeth. It did not change when she saw Hannah, or the hamper, or her nephew swinging down from his horse.

Then Anne got out of the coach.

She did not wait for a footman. She did not wait to be lifted. She put her own hand on the door frame and stepped down onto the pavement by herself, in her stout Derbyshire boots and only one shawl, with her cheeks pink from three days on the road and her bright hazel eyes brighter than Elizabeth had ever seen them. And she walked up the steps of Darcy House, one by one, all six of them, without stopping, without coughing, without holding on to anything at all, and stood in front of her mother at the top.

"Mama," she said. "I climbed a hill. And I screamed at George Wickham. And I have not taken my drops since Leicester."

Lady Catherine looked at her daughter for a long time.

Elizabeth, at the foot of the steps, saw the old hard face begin to do something she had never imagined it could do. It trembled. Just once, at the corner of the mouth, like a crack running across ice. Lady Catherine de Bourgh put out one gloved hand, and touched her daughter's pink cheek, very lightly, with the tips of her fingers, the way Anne had touched hers in the stable yard three weeks before.

Then she turned her head sharply away, and said to nobody in particular, in her loudest voice, "Pearce. Tea. In the drawing room. At once. And a great deal of it," and went inside.

Anne looked round at Elizabeth, and grinned.

#

They had tea in the drawing room, all of them, even Richard, who ate eleven slices of bread and butter and told them in between what had happened in London while they were gone.

Samuel Hobb had sworn his statement before the Bow Street magistrate on the Tuesday morning, and signed it with a large careful signature and not a cross, because he could write, he told the magistrate proudly, he only never had. He was now at Pemberley, or on his way there, with his two sisters, on the stage. Pettigrew from Drummonds had sworn to the bank. Mr Lavender had found the man in the blue coat at Pickering Place, the one who had answered to Wakefield: a broken-down gentleman-gamester named Sowerby, who had been paid twenty guineas by a lady's footman to wear a fair wig and play hazard under another man's name for a week, and who had confessed it all over a bottle of brandy without even being asked twice.

"And Lady Theodosia?" said Elizabeth.

Richard's face darkened.

"She has been to every ball in London," he said. "Every one. Radiant. In white and silver, mostly, I notice. There is a new story going round that you ran away to the country in disgrace, Mrs Darcy, because the Ramsgate paragraph was true, and that Darcy has gone after you to try to hush it up." He set down his cup. "And she has been to see my mother three times this week, weeping. Saying that Darcy barred his door against her. That she only wanted to comfort Georgiana, and he treated her like a criminal, and she cannot think what she has done to deserve it."

There was a silence in the drawing room.

"And your mother?" said Darcy quietly.