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She stops.

I wait. Her lips part. I can see her gathering herself, the way she gathers herself before she says something brave, and I do not want her to say anything brave. I do not want her to have to. I can see what Wickham's lies have done to her already, how pale she is, how her hands shake in mine. I will not have her distressed by him for one moment more.

"Hush," I say, and lift her hands, and kiss the backs of them, one and then the other. "No excitements. Pettigrew's orders. For both of us."

Her eyes fill.

"You do not need to say anything," I tell her. "Not to me. Not ever. I know you."

She looks at me for a long moment, with the tears standing in her eyes and the blossom in her hair.

Then she leans forward, and rests her forehead against my chest, just over my heart, and stays there.

I put my arms around her. Lightly. In her father's garden, in full view of the house, where anyone might see. I do not care. I hold her, and feel her breathe, quick and uneven against my waistcoat, and I think that I would very much like to break George Wickham's handsome nose.

***

The Colonel rides into Meryton on Tuesday afternoon with a list.

He went up to town on Sunday, on some business of his regiment, and I wrote to him on Monday, after the garden, in a temper that made Lowe hide the good pens. I did not say much. Only that Wickham was in Meryton, and had approached Elizabeth, and attempted to extort money from me, and that I wanted him gone.

My cousin, it seems, did not even wait to reply. He went straight to Wickham's tailor, and Wickham's bootmaker, and the three gaming houses in St. James's where Wickham is known, and then he got on a horse.

He finds me at Netherfield and drops the list in front of me on Bingley's library table without a word.

It is two pages long.

"Seven hundred pounds in town alone," he says. "And that is only what I could find in a day. I stopped at the Meryton tradesmen on my way through. The draper. The bootmaker. The Red Lion. He owes every one of them. He owes Colonel Forster's own lieutenant sixty pounds at hazard." He sits down, heavily. "He has been here five months, Darcy. He has been spending like a lord."

I look at the list. I recognize some of the names. I paid them myself, five years ago. It seems they have been patient enough to give him credit again.

"Thank you," I say.

"Do not thank me. I enjoyed it." He leans forward. His face is grave. "Darcy. What did he say to you? Exactly. In the yard."

"I told you. He wanted a thousand pounds."

"For what?"

I almost laugh again. "For keeping quiet about my engagement. He said Elizabeth refused me at Hunsford, and that I had forgotten it, and that she had taken advantage of my cracked head to make a good match." I shake my head. "He said he could see it in her face."

The Colonel goes completely still.

I have known my cousin all my life. I have seen him under fire, at Corunna, by his own account, and I have seen him under my aunt's, which he says is worse. I have never seen him look the way he looks now. He has gone the color of the paper in my hand.

"And you said?" he asks. His voice is very quiet.

"I laughed at him. I told him she cried buckets."

The Colonel closes his eyes.

"Richard?"

"Nothing." He opens them again. He stands up. He picks up the list from the table. "Nothing, old man. Leave this to me. You are not to have any excitements."

"Everyone keeps telling me that."

"Then perhaps you ought to listen." He is already at the door. "I am going to have a word with Colonel Forster. And then with Wickham. And then with every tradesman in Meryton, who will be very interested to learn that he means to leave without paying them."