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I look at him.

He is smiling. He has always smiled. When we were boys, and he broke my father's best fishing rod and told my father I had done it, he smiled. When he stood in my study at Pemberley after my father's funeral and told me he had decided against the church, he smiled. When I came to Ramsgate a day before the elopement, with my sister upstairs in tears, and met him on the stairs of her lodgings and told him to be gone by nightfall, he smiled then too.

The smile means nothing. I learned that long ago. It is only the face he wears while he decides where to put the knife.

"Is that what you have come to tell me," I say.

"I thought you ought to know. As an old friend." He tilts his head. "I watched her face on Saturday, when your name came up. I have seen a great many faces, Darcy. I know what a woman looks like when she has something to hide. She went as white as that wall. She said no to you in April, I would stake my commission on it, and now she has you on a string, cracked head and all, and you cannot even remember that she laughed at you."

The ostler comes round the corner with my horse. He sees us. He stops, uncertainly, at a little distance.

I look at Wickham.

And I laugh.

I do not mean to. It comes up out of me, the way it did in my aunt's sickroom, from somewhere low and warm that I did not know I owned until a month ago. I laugh out loud, in the yard of the Red Lion, in George Wickham's handsome, smiling face, and I watch the smile slip, just a little, for the first time in all the years I have known him.

"She would never," I say.

"Darcy—"

"She would never. You do not know her. You have never known her. You looked at her in November and saw a pretty girl who would listen to your stories, and that is all you ever saw." I am still laughing. I cannot help it. "She did not refuse me, Wickham. She cried. When I asked her. She told me so herself."

"Did she," he says.

"Buckets," I say. "She cried buckets."

The ostler, at a safe distance, looks at his boots.

Wickham's face does something I have never seen it do. It goes blank. Not the easy, careless blankness he wears when he is lying. A real blankness, the look of a man who had expected a blow to land and has watched it go straight through empty air.

Then the smile comes back. Slower, this time. A little thinner.

"How very affecting," he says.

"Is that all?"

"Not quite." He steps closer. He lowers his voice. "You may believe her or not, Darcy, as you please. I find I do not much care what you believe. But Meryton will believe what it is told. And Meryton has a great deal of curiosity, just now, about how the proudest man in Derbyshire came to be engaged to the second Miss Bennet so very suddenly. Within a day of a knock on the head. When she had been heard, by half the town, to say she could not bear the sight of him."

"Say what you like."

"Oh, I shall. I shall say it at Mrs. Philips's card table, and at the Lucases', and in the mess. I shall say it very sorrowfully. Poor Darcy. He does not know. She refused him, and then he fell off his horse, and she saw her chance. I shall say it until every tongue in Hertfordshire is saying it with me. Until her mother hears it. Until her father hears it. Until it is in the London papers." He spreads his hands. "Unless."

"Unless."

"I have been unlucky lately. At cards. You know how it is. A thousand pounds would go a long way toward restoring my good humor. And a man in good humor has no reason to tell tales."

I look at him for a long moment.

Five years ago, I would have paid it. I would have paid it to save my sister's name, to save my own, to make him go away. I would have paid it the way one pays to have a dead rat carried out of the cellar, without looking at it, and without asking what it cost.

I find I do not want to pay it now.

"No," I say.

His eyebrows go up. "No?"

"Tell them. Tell all of Meryton. Tell them at the card tables and in the mess and the London papers. Tell them she refused me." I gather up my horse's reins from the trembling ostler. "They will laugh at you, Wickham. As I have just done. Because anyone who has seen her with me this last week knows it is not true."