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I do not know what she sees in my face. Whatever it is, it makes her own face change. She does not say anything in front of the others. She only takes my hand, and holds it a moment longer than she needs to, and says, "Lizzy, my love. Come and help me with my trunk."

I go up with her.

She does not open the trunk. She shuts the door of her room behind us, and sits down on the bed, and pats the place beside her, and I sit, and before I know what I am doing I have told her everything. Everything. It takes an hour. She does not interrupt once.

When I have finished, she sits quietly for a little while, looking at her hands in her lap.

"I had a letter from your mother," she says at last. "Three, in fact. They were very long. They did not say any of that."

"No. They would not."

"No." She is silent again. Then she turns and looks at me, and there is something in her eyes, something bright and considering, that I have seen before when she is about to propose a scheme.

"Lizzy," she says. "Your uncle and I had meant to go to the Lakes this summer. But he has business that will not let him be away so long. So we have changed our plans."

My heart begins to beat, very hard and slow.

"I grew up in Derbyshire, you know," says my aunt. "In Lambton. Five miles from Pemberley. I have not been back in years. I should very much like to see it again."

She takes my hand.

"We are touring Derbyshire next week, Lizzy," she says. "Will you come?"

Chapter Twenty-Four — Darcy

"Brother," says Georgiana, "there is a letter for you. A lady left it at the lodge."

I am in the library, where I have been most of the last ten days. I do not read. I sit in my father's chair with a book open on my knee and look out of the window at the lake, and Georgiana brings me tea that I do not drink, and goes away again on tiptoe, as though I were an invalid.

Perhaps I am. Pettigrew would say so. No excitements, sir. I have had none. I have had nothing at all. I have sat here and looked at the water, and the house standing upside down in it, and thought of a voice saying Tell me about the trout, and felt nothing whatever, as a man with a broken leg feels nothing in the first hour, before the pain begins.

Georgiana is standing in the doorway. She has the letter in both hands, held a little away from her, as though it might be hot.

"A lady?" I say.

"Yes. Wragby brought it up from the lodge just now." She comes a step into the room. "He says she came on foot, with an older lady and a gentleman. She asked if you were at home. Wragby said he believed you were out riding, because you had ordered the black saddled this morning and then sent it back to the stable without going out. She looked—" Georgiana hesitates. "Wragby says she looked as though she might cry. And then she said, Then he must have it this way, and gave him this, and walked off toward the park."

I am on my feet. I do not remember standing.

"What did she look like?"

"Wragby says she had dark hair. And very fine eyes. And mud on her hem, because it rained in the night."

I cross the room in three strides. Georgiana gives me the letter. She is looking at my face with an expression I have never seen on her before, half frightened and half something else, something almost like hope.

The direction is in a hand I have never seen. Small, quick, a little untidy, slanting hard to the right, as though the writer were in a great hurry to get to the end of each word.

F. Darcy, Esq. Pemberley. By hand.

It is thick. Several sheets. Sealed with a plain wafer, slightly crooked.

"Brother," says Georgiana softly. "Is it from her?"

I break the seal.

***

Be not alarmed, sir.