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“Then I shall buy up every note of hand you have ever signed, and you shall go to the Fleet and stay there till you rot. Before you go in, I shall make sure that there is not a house in England, nor a mess table, where your name is worth the paper you write it on.” Darcy leaned down and set his hand flat upon the table. “You have lived on your face and your name your whole life, Wickham. You have lived on my father’s name too. Break your word to me, and you shall have the use of none of them again.”

For some time Wickham did not answer. He looked at the key, and at the window, and at the cold chocolate. Darcy watched him go through every door that might still be open and find each of them shut.

“You leave me no choice.”

“None. That was what I intended.”

“Then you have your bargain.” Wickham picked up his hat from the floor beside the chair and turned it round in his hands. “You always did drive a hard one, for a man who never needed to.”

“You will put up here tonight. My man of business will call on you at nine tomorrow. You will give him a list of everything you owe. Do not leave a name off it in the hope that I shall pay it later, for then the bargain is void.”

Darcy picked up the key and unlocked the door. On his way he took up Elizabeth’s gloves from the settle, where she had laid them down as though she meant to stay all evening.

The passage was dim. Elizabeth stood under the one lamp, with Georgiana held close against her side. Georgiana’s bonnet ribbon still hung loose and crumpled. When Wickham came out, she turned her face into Elizabeth’s shoulder and did not look at him.

He stopped in front of them. He seemed to consider Georgiana for a moment, and then he looked at Elizabeth instead and gave her his old smile. It was the same one he had worn across the card tables at Meryton, but it had gone thin and sour since then.

“My compliments, Mrs Darcy. I ought never to have let you sit down.”

Then he put on his hat and went away down the passage, into the noise and lamplight of the yard.

Georgiana lifted her head.

“I nearly went.” It came out of her in a rush. “Fitzwilliam, I had my valise in my hand. If she had not come, I would have—”

She could not finish it. She came to him blindly, and he caught her, and she wept against his coat. She cried as she had not cried since she was a little girl, with great gulping sobs that shook the whole of her. Some of it was shame. He could hear that. Most of it, he thought, was only that it was over, and she was not in a chaise on the road to Barnet, and her brother had his arms round her in a passage that smelt of tallow and spilt beer.

“You did not go,” he told her. “That is all I care about. Do you hear me? That is all.”

She only cried harder. He held her and did not try to stop her.

Over her shoulder, he looked at Elizabeth.

She had not moved from under the lamp. Her face was very pale, and her hands were bare and clasped tight in front of her. She did not smile at him, or speak. She only looked back at him, steady and grave. He thought of her in the carriage, saying We shall find her, and of how he had heard the word and not trusted it.

She had walked into that room alone. She had sat down beside his sister with that man at the table, and talked about the roads and the regiment and Lydia, and she had not let her voice shake once. She had told a girl of sixteen that she had been fooled too, which no one else alive could have told her. He had stood in the passage and listened to her do it. He knew he would never be able to say what that had been to him, and he did not try.

He held out her gloves to her over Georgiana’s shoulder.

Elizabeth came and took them. For a moment her fingers rested on his, and she did not draw them away.

She did not put the gloves on. She stood close beside him with them in her hand, while Georgiana wept herself quiet between them, and out in the yard the night coach for the north rolled away without them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Elizabeth

“You will leave the candle?”

“I will leave it all night, if you like.”

Georgiana was nearly asleep already. She had drunk a cup of warm milk with nutmeg in it, and cried a little more, and made Elizabeth read to her from a novel she had read twice before. Somewhere in the third chapter her hand had let go of Elizabeth's sleeve. The marks of the bonnet ribbon were still on her fingers, red against the white. Elizabeth tucked the hand under the coverlet, as she used to do for Lydia when Lydia was small enough to allow it, and drew the bed-curtain until only a strip of candlelight fell across the pillow.

She waited until the girl's breathing was slow and even. Then she went out and closed the door without a sound.

Mr Darcy was on the landing. She had sent him away an hour ago, because Georgiana could not bear for her brother to see her cry any more, and he had gone exactly as far as the top of the stairs. He still had his greatcoat on. Elizabeth doubted he knew it.

“She is asleep.”