The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 29. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had exactly one thing to give the search, and I gave it once we were all at my uncle's house in Cheapside.

My father looked up from the map spread out on my uncle's desk. "And where did you come by that, Lizzy?"

"From somebody who had reason to know his history." I kept my eyes on the shelves of ledgers in my uncle's study, and did not give the somebody a name; and after a moment my uncle took out his note-book and set the name down in his good clear hand, and did not ask again. My aunt watched me from her chair for slightly longer than the question had wanted, and then she too let it lie.

My uncle made a great work of Mrs. Younge once we were in town. There were lodging-houses enough in that quarter to swallow a fortnight, and a woman may call herself anything she likes on a brass plate; and within a few days he had come back with the name crossed through. "We will come back to her," he said, which is what one says of a thing one does not expect to come back to.

By then the search had found its shape. My uncle went at the business as though it were a ledger that would balance if he were only patient enough. My father faced it with the same grim determination he brought to any social gathering he was forced to attend. It was not despair. My uncle was too steady for it and my father too proud. But they were not hopeful. I watched my father most. He sat in my uncle's dining-room each evening turning the day's nothing over in his hands, and he was so plainly out of his right element that I could hardly bear to look at him and could not look away. I had spent my life watching that man be the cleverest person in any room he chose to exert himself in. London did not care how clever he was. London had simply mislaid his daughter, and declined to be reasoned with about it.

On the fifth evening I could stand the dining-room no longer, and I asked him to walk out with me.

He came without the argument I had half-counted on. I knew that he loved walking and riding in the countryside, but he found London oppressive. Instead of arguing, he got up and found his hat.

We walked up out of Cheapside and came in time to Finsbury Square, which was new then. It was an odd thing, that square: a piece of country manners laid out in the middle of a town that had no manners at all, and surrounded by wrought iron so the town could not get at it. We had it nearly to ourselves. My father took a turn of the gravel in silence, and then another, and I knew his methods too well to fill the quiet for him.

"Charlotte Lucas's death never felt right with me," he said at last, to the railings.

I said nothing, which was the correct thing to say.

"Footpads." He brought the word out. "On the open road between Lucas Lodge and Longbourn, in the broad afternoon, for a woman with nothing on her worth the hanging it would have earned them. I have known that road sixty years. There has never been a footpad on it. And then your sister Mary was struck down in a Kentish lane, and we put it about that she was travelling for her health, and I let it be put about, and did not believe a word of it from the hour I heard it. Two women of one small connection, knocked on the head within a season, on two quiet roads a hundred miles apart, and nobody the wiser and nobody the worse for it but us." He turned the corner of the square. "I do not like coincidences. I find them ill-bred."

"What did you do?" I asked, because he wished to be asked, and because my voice was steadier than the rest of me.

"I did a thing I am not in the habit of doing. I wrote letters." He said it as another man might confess to having broken a window. "To Sir John, at Meryton, who is a magistrate because his father was, and who answered me very handsomely and told me nothing whatever. And to a man in Kent who was a good deal less handsome about it and contrived, in three pages, to tell me that there was nothing he was at liberty to tell me. Neither of them would say there was anything in it. Neither of them would say there was nothing in it." He stopped walking, and looked at me. "And I do not, Lizzy, for the life of me, see what any of it has to do with Mr. Wickham and your sister. I cannot fit it to the rest, and I cannot set it apart from the rest. Three unconnected misfortunes would not cost me a night's sleep; I am too idle to lie awake over other people's bad luck. These three keep me awake, and I could not tell you, if you put me on my oath, what binds them together."

I could not answer him, for I did not know what to say. There was Mr. Wickham, who had once poisoned a young woman because he could not get at her fortune. I was not brave enough to tell my father that my cleverness might have led him to pursue Lydia, might even have led him to murder her. I also could not see why he would have harmed Charlotte or Mary. And there was Anne de Bourgh, who had apparently come all the way to Meryton in disguise just to watch Mr. Collins seek a wife. She might have been behind the attacks on my friend and my sister, but I could not see her involving herself with the likes of Mr. Wickham.

My father did not press me for an answer. Perhaps he did not want to distress me, from kindness or fear that I would make a scene.

I did not give him one. We turned at the north side of the square and walked back down toward Gracechurch Street and the maps and the lists and the day's allotment of nothing.