The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 39. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The rest of that business was settled in the following weeks, and I will give it as it reached me, in parcels. I did not burden Jane with the whole sordid story, because it would have shocked her to know that there was so much wickedness in the genteel world.

Anne de Bourgh left us on a Tuesday, in the Fitzwilliams' carriage, bound for London and a house where her company had been asked for rather than required. Lydia talked, I am told, the whole way to town; Anne said afterward in a letter that it was one of the things she had been looking forward to. She went wrapped to the chin as always. But she sat forward in the carriage, looking out, and that was new.

Mr. Wickham sailed for New South Wales the first week of October, a free man on the passenger list of a transport otherwise carrying men in irons — which was, when I came to think of it, as neat a portrait of his whole career as anybody could have drawn on purpose. Mr. Darcy had dealt with the matter through men whom he had done a good turn for at one time or another. No court ever heard the name of anyone I loved.

The colony, I have read, grants land to a settler in proportion to the capital he can show and the recommendations he carries; Mr. Wickham could show none, and the letters he carried were exactly warm enough to get him aboard and not one degree warmer. His passage was paid. Nothing beyond his passage was paid, or ever would be. He landed where nobody had heard his voice or lent him five pounds on the strength of his smile. The law entitled him to what he could earn, and to nothing else. He understood the whole arrangement at once, I imagine. He is free, on paper, to come home whenever he chooses. The confession Darcy keeps is also on paper.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh reached Italy before the first frosts. I set it down plainly, because I would not have anyone mistake the shape of it: this was not an escape. She had spent thirty years as the fixed point around which a county turned: the living in her gift, the parsonage in her management, the roads, the dinners, the marriages, the very glazing of the windows disposed according to her judgment. And she woke one morning in a hired house in a country whose language she did not speak, attended by servants who stayed for the wages, with nothing left in her gift and no one left in her charge, and thirty years of practice in an occupation that no longer existed. Rosings was leased out like Netherfield, to a man who treated the Collinses well. There are people for whom exile is a lighter sentence than a scaffold. I have never been sure Lady Catherine was one of them.

And in the second week of October the knocker went back on the door at Netherfield.

Mr. Bingley came down from town with Mr. Darcy two days behind him — the gentlemen had had business together in London, and whatever had passed between them there, Mr. Bingley arrived in Hertfordshire ready to be social. He was at Longbourn the first morning, and the second, and by the fourth my mother had taken to arranging the drawing-room by eleven o'clock as a general prepares a field. On the fifth morning both gentlemen came, and sat, and talked of nothing, until my mother, by a series of manoeuvres so transparent that I could not look at my father, had carried off Kitty to the stillroom, and sent Mary for a book, and discovered that she herself was wanted about the fish. She left Jane and Mr. Bingley at one end of the room with my father, Mr. Darcy and myself at the other, like two sets of chess pieces from different games.

Mr. Darcy and I spoke of the roads.

I want it understood what that sentence contains. We had sat across a breakfast table and shared out the fates of four people between us; I had argued him out of the Tower and he had let me. And on that fifth morning, in my mother's drawing-room, we spoke of the state of the roads between Hertfordshire and London, and agreed that they were tolerable for the season.

Then Mr. Bingley stood up, very red, and asked my father for five minutes in the library, and the whole room pretended it did not know why, except Jane, who looked into her lap and shone.

My father gave him considerably less than five minutes. They came back together, my father wearing the face he wore when he was very pleased and did not intend to show it. He crossed the room and kissed Jane on the forehead and added: "You are a good girl, Jane, and you are going to be an absurdly happy one. I have no fears for you at all; you are each of you so obliging that nothing will ever be decided between you, so easy that every servant in the place will cheat you, and so generous that you will exceed your income within the twelvemonth. It is everything I could have hoped."

After that the room rather went off like a flushed covey. My mother's joy was loud, and long, and I will not transcribe it. Kitty simpered. Mary offered the couple a pious observation, which was received by Mr. Bingley with a bow of perfect and impenetrable good will. Jane went from one of us to the next as though happiness were a thing she was anxious to divide fairly, having too much of it.

And Mr. Darcy — Mr. Darcy crossed the room and wished his friend joy, and I watched him do it. He looked at Bingley the way a man looks at a thing he helped to mend and has just seen hold weight. To Jane he said that Bingley was the best-tempered man of his acquaintance. It was said with so little irony that Jane, who hears the best in everything, heard it exactly right, and coloured with pleasure.

He was warm. That is the whole difficulty set down in one word. He was present, and glad, and warm, ten feet from me, in a room where his friend had just asked for what he wanted and got it inside of five minutes; and he said nothing, and asked for nothing, and spoke to me once more before the gentlemen rode home, and it was about the weather.

I was happy that evening. I want that understood too, because I have read accounts of such evenings in novels, where the overlooked sister sits in a corner being brave, and I was nothing of the kind. It was the first entirely good thing to happen in that house in a year, and I laughed at my mother's raptures and drank my share of the wine my father sent up, and when Jane came to my room that night and was happy at me until the candle guttered, I was happy back, and both of us meant every word of it.

But a heart, I discovered that autumn, can do two things at once and be sincere in both. When Jane had gone to bed I sat on at the window with the candle out. I was not being brave in a corner. I was puzzling over a man who had offered me his heart and hand when he thought my mother was a murderess, and rode ventre a terre to Longbourn when he realized that his aunt was a murderess and had come to pay a call on us. A man who had kept that murderess and her confederate from trial when I asked for it, and then came to call on us and talked of nothing but the weather and the roads.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 38. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 5th of October

Darcy carried me off to his club after dinner. It was a grave place in St James's where the carpet takes your footstep whole and no one has laughed aloud in a generation. He had a bottle brought that wanted an hour to breathe, and then did not pour himself a drop of it. I put my boots to the fire and waited. When Darcy takes that long coming at a thing, the thing is worth a man's patience.

"I did you a wrong last autumn," he said, to the coals. "I have carried it about since, and I find I cannot carry it down into Hertfordshire with me. So you shall have it here, where you may throw the bottle at my head if you like, and nobody we know will be by to see."

"What wrong?" I said, though I had a guess. A man does not need to be clever to know which of his own hurts a friend means, when there has only ever been the one that signified.

"I parted you from Miss Bennet. Last November. It was not chance, and your sisters were only the surface of it, though I let them do the visible part. It was me."

"I know it was you." I had known it since a dinner-table at Pemberley, though I did not say so; a man lets a friend make his confession without telling him the half of it is stale. "You told me she did not care for me."

"Twice. I remember every word of both times, which is a penance of its own." He turned the stem of the untouched glass. "I believed it, and I was wrong, and I have watched with my own eyes this summer how wrong. But that was never why I took you off. The indifference was the excuse I gave you. The reason I kept to myself."

"Then in God's name what was your reason?"

"You remember I never believed the footpads."

I did remember. It came back to me whole: the last night at Netherfield, the boxes in the hall, Darcy at the window telling me a dead woman's purse had come home in her pocket. "You said nothing had been taken from her," I said. "You called it the curious circumstance. I have never forgotten it, though I never once knew what to do with it."

"Neither did I, for the longest while. But I could not let it alone, and I looked, the way I look at things, for who was the better off for Charlotte Lucas being dead. And for the better part of a year, Charles, every road I walked down came out at the door of your Miss Bennet's own family." He said it evenly, the way a man reads out a sum he has checked too many times to doubt. "I thought her mother might have had a hand in it. I could prove nothing. I could say nothing. There is no crueller thing on this earth than to lay the word murder at a mother in a houseful of daughters on a suspicion you cannot carry to a magistrate. But I believed it enough that I would not stand and watch you marry into it. So I brought you to London, and told you the girl was cold, and let you go on thinking me the proudest snob in England, because a snob is an easier friend to keep than a man who suspects your intended's mother of killing her neighbour to advance her daughter's cause."

I thought on that for a time. The fire did the talking for both of us.

"And you were wrong," I said at last.

"Root and branch. Wrong about Jane's heart, and wrong about her mother, and wrong about the whole shape of it. No Bennet harmed Charlotte Lucas." He set the glass down. "There was a name put to me, a person I would have sworn on my father's grave could not have done such a thing. That name was wrong, but it pointed towards another. I have learned this year that when you have crossed off everything that cannot be, what is left is the truth. What was left was my own aunt."

"Lady Catherine." I do not know how I got the name out. It arrived on its own.

"Lady Catherine. Wickham was the hand; she was the purse and the will behind it. How it was done, and how it was hidden, and how at the last it was found — that I will keep, Charles, even from you. Some of it is not mine to give away, and none of it does any living soul the least good now." He looked at me then, straight. "Wickham sails for New South Wales inside the week, a free man aboard a ship of convicts, which is as near to justice as this business will ever come. My aunt is gone into Italy. Neither of them will ever trouble any of you again. That is the whole of it, in the only shape I am able to hand you."

I had forgiven him somewhere in the middle of it, and I told him so, because a man ought not to be left hanging over a fire for his sins any longer than the telling takes.

"You great, grim, solitary fool," I said. "You carried a murder about in your chest for a year sooner than lay an unproved word on a pack of women who had done you no harm. You took the whole world's low opinion of yourself as the price of it, and never sent up so much as a flare. And you sit there braced for the bottle at your head." I found I could not quite manage the light thing I had meant to say. "I forgave you the Jane of it in August, the day I walked into a room and saw her colour before she could help it. This other — I am only sorry, Darcy. Sorry you did not give me the carrying of even the corner of it."

"You'd have made a poor conspirator," he said. "You have a face like a lit window."

"I have. Jane says so too." And we were, for a moment, only two men by a fire again, and I would not trade that moment for a great deal.

"Go down to her," he said. "Open the house. She has grieved the best part of a year on my account, and I should like one thing in the whole of this filthy twelvemonth to come out the way it ought."

And there it was; the thing I have been turning over ever since, and cannot make lie flat. He had spent the evening setting my life to rights, and had said not one word for his own.

"And you?" I said. "You have handed me back my Jane, and put your own aunt out of the kingdom, and paid for God alone knows what besides with your own purse and your own name. When does a thing come round the right way for you, Darcy?"

"I have had the arranging of your happiness. That will serve me very well."

"That is not what I asked, and you know to a hair it is not. There is a lady in Hertfordshire—"

"There is a bottle," he said, "which neither of us has yet had the civility to drink. Pour it out, Charles. We have talked sufficient of me to last me the year."

And he would not be moved off it, and I did not try him twice; I have learned that much about the doors he wants shut. But I know what I know. At Pemberley I had grasped something of what Elizabeth Bennet was to him. Tonight at his club, I sat there while he built my whole happiness back up brick by brick with his bare hands and would not lift one finger toward his own.

I go down on Thursday to take the covers off the chairs. He follows on the Saturday, on business he did not trouble to give a name. I carry two things out of that club that I did not carry in. Firstly: the whole ugly weight of what he saved us all from, which I will not tell Jane though I lie at her side fifty years. Secondly: the sight of a man setting every life about him straight and walking home to his own crooked one alone. I have never in my life wanted so badly to be the clever one of us, and never less known how.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 37. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

We could hear the horse being walked away, and boots in the hall, and Hill's voice; and in that little space my father folded his newspaper and spoke, to neither of us, in the voice he used for reading aloud out of books he did not like.

"I have not been inside the Meryton assembly rooms in five-and-twenty years. It has been my favorite joke, that nothing said in company could possibly concern me. The woman who attacked Mary stayed in this county half a winter, ten minutes' ride from my library, and I never once laid eyes on her." He put the paper by his plate. "I'm afraid my favorite joke has rather curdled."

There was no answer to make, so I made none; and by the time Mr. Darcy was in the doorway my father's face was his own again.

Mr. Darcy still wore a coat, covered in dust to the shoulders. He said, "Where is my aunt?" before he had properly bowed, and then heard himself, and bowed.

"Good morning, Mr. Darcy," said my father. "You are a day behind her."

Darcy took this the way a man takes a stair that is not there. Then his eye went past me to the table, and found his cousin sitting at it with a teacup, and stopped.

"Anne."

"Cousin," said Anne, and did not explain herself.

Mother and Kitty were not yet down, and Mary took breakfast in her room, under Jane's watchful eye. Accompanied by a running commentary from my father, Anne and I gave Darcy the story of his aunt's visit. The walk, the wilderness, what his aunt had said and what she had not troubled to deny, and what Anne had said with her mother standing by. He heard it standing, with his hand on the back of the chair my father had pushed toward him, and he did not once interrupt, and when it was done he looked at me for a long moment.

"You had no confession," he said. "No testimony. Nothing."

"I had her face," I said. "And a year's practice reading the wrong one."

He was quiet. Then: "I was at Rosings last night. Her steward told me where she had gone. We must have crossed on the roads. I came up by St Albans. I had meant…" He stopped and set the sentence down and took up a plainer one. "I threatened Mr. Wickham again with the magistrate, the day before yesterday. Miss Elizabeth had suspected…another member of my family…"

"It's all right," Anne said. "She confessed those suspicions to me already. It was quite understandable, given the information Miss Elizabeth had to work with." She produced the ghost of a smile. "I found her opinion of my competence almost flattering."

Darcy nodded gravely. "In any case, that led me to suspect a different member of my family. I did not mention my suspicions to Wickham, but what he told me confirmed them. He has sworn the whole of it: that he heard Miss Lucas name the road and the hour at your aunt's party; that he carried the intelligence to a woman he knew, inspite of her disguise, to be Lady Catherine de Bourgh; and that she paid him. The sum, the dates, everything. It is signed. I rode to Rosings with a copy of it in my coat."

"You went to confront her," said my father.

"I went to tell her what the law was about to do, to her face, before it did it. She was owed that much." He said it without heat.

He turned to me. "And I will tell you now what the law is about to do, because it must be set moving from this room, this morning. Wickham goes to the assizes — he has hanged himself twice over with his own mouth, and I will not lift a finger off the scale. My aunt goes to Westminster, if her father's blood entitles her to the Lords, and to the common dock of the King's Bench if it does not. I have kept one crime of that man's dark for two years because the light would have fallen on the wrong head, and I have watched what the darkness bought — a woman dead on a road, your sister struck down in a lane, your youngest sister carried out of Brighton at night. Every hour we sit here my aunt is nearer the water. An express to Dover; another to the Kentish bench; my name will carry both. I have waited a long time to have the law in my hand instead of against it, Miss Bennet. I mean to use it."

Nobody in the room doubted that he could. That was the weight of it: it was all there for the taking — the confession signed, the witnesses living, the lever finally on the right side of the stone — and every word of it was just.

"And who pays for it?" I said.

He looked at me.

"I am not going to tell you she deserves less than the Tower. I sat across from her at dinner half a spring. Charlotte was my friend, on an errand to me, on my father's own road. There have been mornings this year when I would have built the scaffold with my own hands." I had not planned any of this beyond the first sentence; I could hear my own voice finding the argument a half-step before I did. "Try Lady Catherine, and Anne stands in every print-shop window in England — the woman whose mother killed to arrange her marriage. She did not choose one act of it. It was all done in her name and around her and without her consent. A trial does not punish her mother without sentencing her too, and she is the one person in this whole business who gets no verdict of her own."

Anne spoke then. "Let my mother go where she can arrange nothing for anybody. Send her money if the estate demands it; send her no letters; let her grow old bullying the people of Italy, where nobody is obliged to obey her. I have been furniture for most of my life, cousin. If you bring her to trial I will be evidence for the rest of my life. The prospect does not appeal to me."

I spoke up then. "And try Wickham in open court, and you give him the one thing he loves most besides himself: an audience. There is a young lady whose history he would lay before the bench the moment it bought him a day's delay. Mr. Darcy knows the lady I mean, and knows what the papers would do with her, and I will say no more in this room."

Darcy's hand tightened on the chair-back.

"And the last of it is Mary. Mary is alive. I have had most of a year to learn the whole worth of that sentence. Charlotte is dead, and Westminster cannot reach her, and God knows the Tower cannot; but Mary is alive, and a trial makes her its second exhibit — the attacked Mrs. Collins, pointed out at every assembly she attends for the rest of her life. Mary is alive. I would not have her suffer for the rest of her life for the sake of those two."

"It is not justice," said Darcy.

"No, it is not justice, but you go to the same Church I do, and you know that true justice is not promised us this side of the grave."

He turned to the window, and the room let him stand there. Hill came in and took away the plates, because houses go on.

"You have spent two years keeping one girl's history out of the light," I said. "I am asking you for the same office. I have less claim on you than she has, and I am asking anyway. "

Darcy stood at the window a while longer. When he turned around he looked first at Anne, then at me, and I could see him make his decision. He sat down.

"Wickham does not go to trial," he said. "He goes to Australia as a free settler, and the confession stays filed where I can reach it; if he sets foot in England again in this life, it is produced, and he hangs on his own signature. He will keep the bargain. He has always been quickest to understand arrangements that are about himself." He drew a breath. "And my aunt keeps her head start. No express, no Bow Street, nobody behind her on the Dover road. She may have Calais, and Italy after it, and the rest of her life to be obeyed grudgingly and insolently by people who are not paid well enough to serve her politely. Anne, Rosings will be looked after. You shall have my solicitor, if you want him." He looked around the table, at my father last. "There it is, said aloud. Transportation for the one. Italy for the other. If any man here can call it justice with a whole conscience, he is a better casuist than I am."

"It will do," said my father. "I have kept accounts long enough to know when a column will not balance. One writes carried forward at the foot of it, and rules the line." He rose. "You will want pen and ink, Mr. Darcy. The library is at your service — I find I have some letters of my own to finish as well."

The two men went out of the room together.

Anne poured herself another cup of tea, and her hand hardly shook at all.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 36. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Of the hour we spent with my father I will set down very little. He heard us through without once looking away from Anne, which I had never seen him do with any guest; he asked her two questions that had not occurred to me in a year of carrying the matter; and at the end of it he sat a while turning his spectacles in his hand, and then said, "Well," and got up, and was, from that hour, of use. "Your mother," he told me at the library door, "will be told that Miss de Bourgh is paying us a visit out of solicitude for your sister Mary. It has the advantage of being plausible, and no other virtue whatever."

The house took Anne in the way houses do, without opinions. Hill carried linen up to the spare room; Cook, informed there was a baronet's daughter at table, sent up to Meryton for fish; and Anne sat in our parlour with her hands quiet in her lap and drank her tea, and asked, in a voice that hardly shook at all, whether Longbourn kept a fire in the evenings, for she felt the cold. She looked as she had always looked. She held her cup as though someone might yet take it from her. I made no observations aloud.

My mother came back from Meryton at five o'clock with Kitty, the Colonel, and Lydia, and was in raptures before her bonnet was off. To have missed Lady Catherine de Bourgh's call was a calamity from which, she assured us all, she would not soon recover. To have gained Miss de Bourgh in exchange was a stroke of fortune she attributed, on no evidence, to her own management. The visit's cause she never thought to question. Great families were forever falling out; it was, she said, one of the burdens of rank; look at what she herself had suffered from her own daughters. Nobody corrected her arithmetic, and she went off to instruct Cook about the fish that had already been sent for.

The Colonel had stopped in the parlour doorway at the sight of his cousin. Anne looked back at him. He bowed, said he was glad to find her looking so well, and asked nothing. Lydia, to her credit or to the griffin's, was too full of Meryton's admiration to notice anything so quiet as Anne de Bourgh.

It was at dinner, watching Anne decline a second helping of soup under the full artillery of my mother's hospitality, that I noticed that my old suspicion of Mr. Collins was gone. For most of a year, it had sat in me like a stone in a shoe, never provable, never quite dischargeable. Now that I knew the truth, I could see him as the pompous, foolish clergyman he truly was, rather than the homicidal maniac I had feared.

The next morning I was at the breakfast table, reading a letter from my aunt Gardiner and getting no further than the date, when a horse came up the drive at a pace our drive was not accustomed to. There had not been time — I want that set down; I had counted the hours myself — there had not been time for any word of yesterday to reach London and bring anyone back again.

Hill got the whole name out this time, and had the pleasure of it.

"Mr. Darcy, ma'am."

I stood up before I had decided to.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 35. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The coach and four came up our drive at eleven o'clock, and Hill had scarcely got the name out — "Lady Catherine de Bourgh" — before the name's owner was in the room past her.

We were a thin garrison that morning. My mother had carried the Colonel and his bride off to my aunt Philips's directly after breakfast, to be exhibited, with Kitty trailing along. Mary was resting, and Jane was in the still-room. Lady Catherine, sweeping the drawing-room with one look, found in it only my father with his book, myself with my workbasket, and furniture that had disobliged her by existing.

"This must be an inconvenient room in summer," she said, after the initial greetings on both sides were done. "The windows are full west."

My father put a finger in his book to keep his place. I understood the finger; I had watched him keep his place in that manner through twenty years of my mother's nerves, and it meant that he expected to be reading again shortly.

"It is fortunate that you have not come here in summer, madam," he said. "Your timing is less fortunate in other ways. My wife has carried everything worth exhibiting, including your nephew, into Meryton this morning."

Lady Catherine stared at him, a long look, much longer than is given in company, and my father ignored it. He merely turned a page in his book. Whatever she had expected in coming here, it had not been this. I watched her decide, with an almost visible motion, that he was beneath her notice.

"Miss Bennet." She turned to me. "There seemed to be a prettyish kind of little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company. Anne shall walk with us."

I went. I have asked myself since why I went so readily, and the honest answer is that I wanted her out of the room so that she would leave my father in peace.

The morning was fine. Our wilderness is a modest one: a gravel walk, some laurels, the currant bushes that Cook harvests in July. At the moment, there was also a thrush chasing insects at the edge of the walk as industriously as if my father paid him to do it. Miss de Bourgh came over the lawn from the carriage at her mother's nod, wrapped to the chin although the day was warm, and fell in beside us on the gravel.

I confess that my chief attention, as we entered the walk, was for the daughter and not the mother. I had spent a summer believing what I believed about Anne de Bourgh, and I had argued it to a gentleman in London not a week since, and been told I was proposing impossibilities; and here was the subject herself beside me. I placed myself so that I could see her without turning my head. It seemed only sensible.

"You can be at no loss," said Lady Catherine, "to understand why I am come."

"Indeed, madam, I cannot account for the honour at all."

"A report of a most alarming nature reached Rosings two days ago. I was told that this family expected shortly to be allied with my own nephew, with Mr. Darcy."

My breath caught in my throat at the absurdity of her accusation. In London, Mr. Darcy had tried to protect me from the negotiations with Mr. Wickham, but I could point to nothing else that might support such a claim as she was making now. I had accused his cousin, in his presence, of being a murderess, and he had marshalled every argument he could think of against the idea. We had met a few times since then, most recently at a certain wedding, but he had said nothing to me that all the world could not hear.

"Since we are already connected with your other nephew, I fail to see the issue," I said.

"That is done, and past my mending. And besides, Fitzwilliam is a younger son with no responsibilities to speak of. But Darcy is a man of consequence, who deserves better."

My chin went up. "I'm sure a man of his intelligence understands what he deserves better than any aunt might."

"On the contrary, I have much more experience of life than he has. Rosings has stood clear of scandal for thirty years because I have kept it clear — I have chosen the acquaintance, I have chosen the servants, I have chosen the very clergyman — I have arranged everything that came near my daughter from the hour she was born, because that is what it is to have the charge of a person who cannot—" she gave Anne the smallest glance, the way one indicates a sideboard "—who cannot arrange things for herself. I will not see Darcy gossiped about in three counties because he chose to tie himself to such a family as yours. I require your assurance, Miss Bennet, that you will not feed this report. I require you to contradict it."

"And if I do not choose to give such an assurance?"

"Obstinate, headstrong girl!" She stopped on the walk and turned on me. "I am not accustomed to being addressed in this fashion." And then she stared at me.

It was meant to end the conversation. I believe it had ended every conversation of her life. She held my eyes and did not blink and did not leave off, on and on, past every boundary that governs how one woman may look at another. It was the look that had rested on Mr. Collins across my aunt Philips's card-room while he bowed and scraped to a widow he did not know, and had gone on resting on him after he turned away.

The widow. The look that went at a person, like a hand on goods. I had carried that look in my mind for the better part of a year, and I had hung it on the wrong de Bourgh, because Anne's eyes went through people toward something beyond, and I had wanted a frail woman in disguise and there had been one to hand, and all that time, all that long time…

"It was you in Meryton." My voice came out before anything in me had finished. "The widow at my aunt's party. You sat by the wall and you watched Mr. Collins half the evening. Wickham heard Charlotte say the road, and the day, and the hour — she said it to me, and Wickham heard it and told you — and you paid him. You paid Wickham. Charlotte Lucas walked out to visit me and you had her killed on the road, and then in Kent, when Mary — my sister Mary, on the lane—" I ran out of voice and found more. "Tell me I am wrong. You insulted my family's drawing-room a quarter of an hour ago. Tell me I am wrong."

The thrush had moved his work under the currant bushes. Lady Catherine looked at me, and what happened in her face was a thing I had never seen in a face before: the machinery reaching for the answer that puts a servant back in her place, and finding the shelf empty. She had never in her life been required to answer. She did not know how it was done.

"You forget yourself," she said at last.

"That is no answer, madam."

"I do not answer to the likes of you." But it came out wrong, a woman quoting her own authority to herself because Mr. Collins was not here to say it for her.

"Mamma."

I had never heard Anne de Bourgh's voice raised above the level of a dinner requirement. It was not raised now. It came out small and scraped, like a thing that had been kept in a drawer for years and was being made to work, and she had both hands closed on the ends of her shawl, and she was looking at her mother — through her mother, toward whatever stood behind her — and she made herself stop and look at her, and I watched what it cost to do it. Then she turned towards me.

"I suspected it," said Anne. "In the spring, after the parsonage — after Mrs. Collins was hurt. I have suspected it since the spring. I could not believe it of her." Her breath went and she got it back. "I have sat at her table every evening since May, not believing it. That is what I have been doing since May."

Lady Catherine's head came round to her daughter, and here at the end I will set down plainly what I saw, because I have never seen it since and hope not to: there was no guilt in her face, and no fear either. There was incomprehension.

"Everything I have done," she said, "I have done so that you should have what you want. Whatever you wanted, Anne, you were to have it. You have never in your life had to ask — I have known what you wanted before you knew it yourself, always, since you were in the cradle — that has been the whole work of my life, and I did it gladly. The Lucas woman would have had the parsonage arranged past mending in a twelvemonth — the living, the household, the whole of it settled wrong, and settled for thirty years, before ever you came into your own. She was not what was wanted. I saw to it."

Anne shook her head sadly. "I was not what was wanted. Not what he wanted."

"In time, with encouragement from me, Collins would have plucked up the courage to court you. That is what a mother is for."

Lady Catherine turned, as though the interview had now concluded to her satisfaction, and walked back across the lawn toward her carriage, at her own pace, past the windows of my father's house.

Anne did not go with her. She stood beside me in the wilderness, staring blankly into the distance. "Your mother is…not rational," I said. "If you feel unsafe with her, I'm sure my mother would be willing to entertain you at Longbourne for a few days, and the Fitzwilliams can then escort you to London, or wherever else you wish to go."

Anne shook her head. "You are mistaken. Mamma would never harm me. But I cannot bear to look at her, now that I have heard it from her own mouth." She produced a tremulous smile. "And so I will accept your very kind invitation, assuming your mother does not disavow it the moment she sees me!"

"Nonsense. She would be delighted to entertain the daughter of a baronet. Any daughter, of any baronet. Since we cannot prove your mother's crimes, we will say nothing of them to her. My father has been fretting over Charlotte's death, and I might drop a hint in his ear, if you do not disapprove. He is a very discreet man."

Anne turned towards the house with a purposeful air I had never seen on her before. "I will help you explain it, if you will let me," she said.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 34. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

We changed horses at Barnet, and Lydia's wedding had already improved twice.

When she was telling the story at our first halt, there had been eleven people in the church, which was true, for I had been one of them and had counted. By the second there were rather more, and the Colonel's regimentals had acquired a sword-knot given him by a general. By Barnet the wedding had a bishop in it. My father listened to each version with the gravity he reserved for exceptionally ridiculous developments, and said nothing. Every now and again, he looked at his new son-in-law over the top of it all with the expression he usually kept for a tradesman's bill that had come in lower than expected and must therefore contain an error somewhere.

"And Denny will be sick as a cat when he hears," said Lydia, "for he always said colonels were too old to be worth having, and now I am Mrs. Fitzwilliam and shall go into dinners ahead of half the county. I shall write and tell him so on the new paper, for we have ordered everything from the stationer's with the crest on it — it is a very good crest, isn't it Fitzwilliam?"

"It has a griffin on it," said the Colonel. "You will find the griffin does most of the work of the letter."

"A griffin." Lydia sat back, satisfied, as though she had ordered one from a warehouse and it had come. "Kitty may have my blue bonnet, and the spotted muslin too, for I am to have everything new in town — Fitzwilliam says I may fit out the whole of Bond Street if I will only do it by degrees. Kitty will die."

She was exactly as she had always been: the same volume, the same total want of proportion, the wedding and the griffin and Denny's discomfiture all weighed in the same scale. And yet twice on that road I caught hints of what she had become.

The first time was the bracelet. "…and when George said we must wait for the money before we could dine anywhere fit to be seen, I took my coral bracelet down to the man at the corner myself. George offered to carry it for me and I told him no, for I had seen what he got for his own watch, and I knew I could do better. And I did. Nine shillings better."

"Nine and six," said the Colonel, without looking up from the window. "She does herself an injustice. Tell your father about the man's dog."

He had heard it before, then. He had heard it, kept the figure, and wanted it told again. A man does not ask twice for a story about a pawnbroker's dog unless he has decided the story's owner is worth collecting. I had come into that carriage prepared to pity Colonel Fitzwilliam, and I spent the journey changing my mind.

The second time came past Hatfield, in a lull, when the griffin had been exhausted and the horses were tired. Lydia looked out the window and said, to the hedgerows more than to us: "The last week was not such good fun. George was out a great deal, and the woman of the house would keep locking the street door." And then, before anyone could make anything of it: "Fitzwilliam, when we are at Longbourn you must not let Mamma seat you next to Mary, for she will improve you, and you are not to be improved until I have shown you off."

"I shall cling to my faults," said the Colonel, "for your sake."

I looked at my youngest sister and found I had nothing to say that would not have been a door better left shut. She had gone into that house at Brighton a silly girl and come out of the other one still silly, and somewhere between the two she had pawned her own bracelet at a better price than George Wickham could get for a watch, and had noticed a locked door and kept her head about it.

My father spoke perhaps four times in as many hours. Once, somewhere past the turnpike, he said: "You have barely known my daughter a fortnight, Colonel. What sort of woman do you imagine you have married?"

Lydia protested the question. The Colonel considered it.

"A woman who got nine and six above the fair price out of a Cheapside pawnbroker," he said, "in the worst week of her life. I expect to be very well looked after, sir."

"Hm," said my father, and returned to the window. He only went on watching, with the patience of a judge who has decided that the evidence is not yet all in. I thought that my father did his best work in exactly that posture, and had simply never before had anything worth doing it on.

Longbourn came up the way it always came up, paddock first, then the chimneys, and Jane was out on the steps before the carriage had properly stopped, and for a moment everything was arms and bonnets and Kitty shrieking from the doorway about the griffin, the moment Lydia mentioned it.

"Jane, you must go down lower now," said Lydia, embracing her, "for I am a married woman, and I take your place. Lord, how strange it is!"

"You are very welcome to it," said Jane, laughing, and took her in under her arm, and looked over her shoulder at me with all the questions she was too kind to ask in the drive. I gave her a look which meant that I would tell her as soon as I was able.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 33. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Mr. Wickham came up my uncle's stairs like a man arriving to dine.

I heard it in the tread: unhurried, sociable, a step that expected the room to be glad of it — and then he was in the doorway, hat in hand, and his smile checked. I had seen that check once before, across my aunt Philips's card-room, and had made nothing of it then. It lasted the width of a breath. Then the smile resumed its duties, and he bowed to the company as though we had all been assembled for his convenience.

"Mr. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner." A bow apiece, unhurried. "Mr. Darcy. Miss Bennet." He said the names as a man counts money that is not the sum he was promised. "I confess I had expected a smaller party."

"You were expected at ten," said my uncle. "You are punctual, at least."

"Other people's time is the one thing I have never wasted." He set his hat on the corner of the desk, uninvited, and looked from my uncle to Mr. Darcy and back again, and I watched him do the arithmetic of the room. "Sir, madam, you will forgive me. What is to be discussed touches the family nearly, and I find these things go gentler among those they most concern. I will speak with Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet."

It was prettily done; a man with nothing left choosing the one thing still in his gift, and making the choosing look like courtesy. My uncle glanced at Mr. Darcy, got a small nod, and rose. My aunt gathered her work without a word. At the door she said, "We shall be within call," to the room at large.

Mr. Wickham took the chair my aunt had left, turned it a little to face us both, and sat down with the ease of a man who has decided that whatever comes next, he will at least be comfortable during the transaction.

"Well," he said. "Here we all are. I should tell you quite honestly that Lydia's return will not come cheaply. Her father is spread pretty thin, but you, my old friend, are pretty plump in the pocket, and Lydia tells me that her uncle the merchant is quite wealthy." He glanced at me. "And of course, I expect Miss Bennet to be discreet about whatever she may have heard of a certain business at Ramsgate."

An indignant rejoinder hovered on the edge of my lips but Darcy spoke first. "We have more urgent matters to discuss than the incident at Ramsgate," he said. "Miss Lucas was murdered on the road between Lucas Lodge and Longbourn at two o'clock in the afternoon, and not by a footpad. You were in Meryton that winter. You heard her name the hour and the road at Mrs. Philips's party. I have not come to ask whether this is true. I have come to hear why you did it."

I had not heard it said aloud, in company, since the year it happened — murdered, flat, without the cushion of poor Charlotte or that dreadful business. My hands were folded in my lap and I kept them folded, and I was glad, for once, of every tedious hour of my education in sitting still. Darcy was not wrong to suspect him. Wickham had been in the area at the time of the murder, and we both knew he would stick at nothing, including murder, when greed or pique got the better of him.

Wickham examined his glove. "You have been busy, Darcy. You were always busy. It was the thing I could never teach you — how to leave well alone." He looked up, and the charm was still in his face the way furniture is still in a house that is to be let. "I will say this much, since we are among friends. Whatever happened on that road, it was not a business a man would undertake on his own account. There was no profit in that poor woman for anybody — least of all for me. If a man had a hand in such a thing, it is because a hand was hired."

"Then name the party that hired it."

"In good time. When I am sure of my ground — and sure of the name." He smiled at his own glove. "You would not thank me for the wrong one. A name like that is worth nothing twice."

"You were sure enough of it to take payment," I said. I spoke to relieve my feelings; if I had not, I think I would have flown at him in a rage.

He turned to me with an air of being pleasantly surprised, as though I had performed. "A reasonable assumption, Miss Bennet, except that the other party was in disguise at the time."

Because he was looking at me, and because I had carried the question five hundred miles and could carry it no farther, I asked it. "Was it Miss Anne de Bourgh?"

Darcy's head swiveled sharply towards me. Wickham stopped flexing his gloved hand, but did not look up. "It might just be her," he said. "It might very well just be her. You have a quick eye, Miss Bennet. I always said so."

Mr. Darcy looked back to Wickham. That gentleman settled back and crossed one leg over the other, and arrived, by way of a small sigh, at the true business of his morning.

"There remains the matter of the young lady at my lodgings. I am fond of her. You may believe that or not, it is true on Tuesdays. But fondness is a poor income, and her situation, you understand, is of the kind that mends with marriage or does not mend at all. A man in my position could be of service there. Such service is generally acknowledged."

"Your service will not be required in this matter," said Mr. Darcy. "At this hour Colonel Fitzwilliam is at those same lodgings, meeting with Mr. Bennet. In his regimentals, because my cousin does nothing in a small way. He will be asking Miss Lydia Bennet to marry him, and her father to bless the marriage."

"Oh, Lydia would marry any man who offered for her while wearing regimentals," Wickham agreed. "Her father might be less easy to sway."

"I believe Mr. Gardiner has warned his brother-in-law of what he might expect. And Fitzwilliam brings with him a draft marriage settlement drawn up two days ago by my solicitor."

There was a flicker of irritation across Wickham's face, before it settled back into its usual appalling good humour. "Well. It seems you do nothing in a small way either," Wickham replied.

"Her situation mends this morning, whatever you do. What is left to you is your testimony, and the price of it falls with every day you spend blackmailing your confederate before you deliver the name."

I remembered Colonel Fitzwilliam, and his good-natured jokes about marrying money, founded on the hard truth of his expensive lifestyle and modest quarterly income. He would enjoy Lydia's high spirits, and she would enjoy his humour and his splendid uniform. But Darcy must have settled a horrifying amount of money on Lydia to make this possible. My head swam at the idea.

Wickham was quiet for a moment, studying his gloved hand again. "Well," he said, rising, and the smile came back up like a shopfront shutter going up in the morning. "I shall want a day or two. A man should not sell the only thing he has left before luncheon."

"Do not wait too long," said Mr. Darcy.

"I never do," said Wickham, retrieving his hat. "It is the secret of my success." He bowed to me — the full bow, the Meryton bow — and went down the stairs with the same sociable tread that had brought him up.

The room was very quiet. Mr. Darcy stood at the window looking down into the street, waiting, I supposed, to see him well away.

"He confirmed it," I said. "You heard him. I named her, and he did not deny it."

"He did not confirm anything. He agreed with you. From that man the two are not even cousins." He turned from the window. "Consider what you offered him, Miss Bennet. A name, any name, that is not his own. You could have suggested the Archbishop of Canterbury and he would have agreed to it."

"He did not agree as a man clutching at a name. He agreed as a man hearing one he already knew."

"And I say the name is impossible, whoever he already knew. Anne does not walk from the house to the shrubbery without the phaeton waiting at the other end. You are proposing that she travelled a hundred miles from Kent, lodged half the winter among strangers in a market town, went unremarked by a neighbourhood that remarks everything, and struck down a healthy woman on an open road. My cousin has wanted the strength to cut her own meat since she was sixteen."

"You have not looked at her since she was sixteen, that is the whole of my point. You see the sick child Rosings requires you to see. Nobody watches an invalid, Mr. Darcy. It is the most unwatched life in England, and she has had five-and-twenty years to learn what it excuses her from. I sat across from her at that table. She is not absent, whatever she is. And the widow in Meryton watched Mr. Collins across my aunt's card-room all that evening and did not once trouble to look away. I have never seen a well woman do it, and I have seen Anne de Bourgh do it a dozen times."

"A manner of looking is not a journey of a hundred miles."

"And a phaeton is not a prison, though it may be made to look remarkably like one."

We were neither of us raising our voices; we might have been disputing a hand of whist. That was the worst of it. He could not move me and I could not move him, and each of us plainly thought the other was arguing from somewhere other than the evidence.

"We shall not settle it here," he said at last.

"No," I said. "We shall not."

And we did not. The bell rang again, and this time it was my father and Lydia, coming to bring the news of her engagement to the Gardiners.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 32. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Mr. Wickham was expected at ten. My father had gone off to Lydia's lodgings directly after breakfast and a few private words with my uncle. My aunt sat by the window with her work. My uncle stood at his desk, arranging papers that were already arranged.

The street bell rang at a quarter before the hour.

"He is early," I said.

"He is not," said my uncle, and did not move; and my aunt did not move either; and in the small silence that followed I heard the maid's step in the hall and understood that the bell had been expected by everyone in the room but me.

The maid announced Mr. Darcy.

I had spent the morning arming myself against the wrong man entirely.

Nobody said anything that needed saying. My uncle went to him the way a man goes to someone he has gone to before; my aunt gave him good morning as a matter of course and had her hand taken as one; and I understood, all at once and all the way down, whose negotiation had been sitting folded under the inkstand these two days past. The door I had braced my shoulder against had swung so easily because no one was holding it. Every door in the business was being held by somebody else.

He saw me and stopped. His expression reminded me of a great red stag we had surprised in a glen in Derbyshire. The stag had been obviously startled, but somehow unafraid, assessing, and so Darcy was now.

"Miss Bennet." He bowed low over my hand. To my uncle he said: "I had understood Miss Bennet was to go to her sister this morning."

"She preferred otherwise," said my uncle.

"So do I," said my aunt, "now that it comes to it."

He looked at my uncle; my uncle looked back, placid and unruffled. Mr. Darcy looked back to me. "This business will not be pleasant to hear," he said quietly.

"It has not been pleasant to live, Mr. Darcy. I would like to see it through to its conclusion."

"As you wish." Then he took the chair my uncle offered, and I had the impression that some part of him was not sorry to have me in the room. It seemed that he had arranged my absence as a thing done for me and not to me.

"Tell her how he was found," said my uncle, sitting down. "It is worth hearing rightly told."

"There is a woman by the name of Younge," Mr. Darcy said. "You mentioned to me that your niece was aware of this woman's…friendship, with Mr. Wickham." His eyes went to me. "Possibly a mutual acquaintance of ours mentioned this woman's name to her."

I didn't answer. It was possible Georgiana had told him about her decision to confide in me, but if she hadn't, it was not my secret to share.

"And how do you know this woman?" My aunt asked.

"Some years ago she had charge of my sister. She was dismissed. The cause of it does not bear on this morning's business, except in one respect. It left me acquainted with her character and her aliases, and, when I took the trouble to learn it, her address. She keeps a lodging-house in Edward Street, and lets rooms very cheaply."

I sat very still. I had carried that same name into this house a week before, and had watched my uncle cross it through his list.

"Consider Mr. Wickham's position. A man who leaves Brighton by night, with a young lady and without money, has three requirements: shelter, credit, and discretion. Strangers will not give him the second, and his friendships would not survive the lending of five pounds. He must go where his history is already known, and already priced. I could think of one such door in London. I went to it."

"And she told you," said my aunt.

"Not at once. Her house was full, which was true, and her memory empty, which was not. I called again two days later, and a third time after that, and on the third visit we arrived at her price. She had taken them in only briefly, and then recommended them to a friend with cheaper lodgings still."

"Heavens, sir, you begin to sound like a bloodhound on the scent."

"There is no great cleverness in any of it. It wanted one name, and a willingness to knock three times at a door I would rather have burned."

I understood even then something of why he had done all this, enough of it not to insult him by asking. What I had not begun to take in was the cost: a man carrying his own money, three visits running, to the woman who had helped ruin his sister, for the finding of mine.

"Mr. Wickham believes he is coming here to sell," Mr. Darcy said to my uncle, "and he is right."

"He is coming to hear what I truly think of him, though he doesn't know it yet," I said.

Darcy gave me another of his measuring looks. "Your disapproval may be helpful in bringing him to terms." He addressed himself to my uncle. "This will go better if he continues to believe the purse is yours."

My uncle took out his watch and laid it open on the desk, and we sat, the four of us, with nothing left to arrange. At one minute to ten the street bell rang.

"Punctual," said my uncle.

"He expects to be paid," said Mr. Darcy.

The maid's step went along the hall to the door.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 31. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The maps were gone when we came back to Gracechurch Street.

They had lived on my uncle's desk for five days, and I had come to hate them with a warmth ordinarily reserved for people. My father stopped in the hall with his hat still on. A house that has held its breath for a week does not go quiet in the same way twice, and this quiet was new.

My aunt came out to us before the maid could. "There you are. Supper has been put back. Come into the study, both of you."

My uncle stood at his desk, looking triumphant but bewildered, as if a difficult ledger had balanced more easily than he expected. "I have been in touch with Mr. Wickham," he said. "He will call here tomorrow at ten."

My father sat down. I did not.

"How?" my father asked.

My uncle hesitated for a moment before he said, "Through a man who knew where to ask. The how of it will keep." He took a folded paper from under the inkstand and did not open it. "I have Lydia's direction as well."

I thought of a young heiress found sick with poison after Wickham had abandoned her and my hand went involuntarily to my throat.

My uncle saw the gesture, and tried to reassure me. "She is lodged in town, and well enough, by every account I could get."

"And he will come?" my father asked. "To this house? Of his own accord?"

"He is willing enough to call. Men in his situation generally are, once they are sure it is worth their while to be found." My uncle said it without heat. "Now, I have been thinking how tomorrow ought to go. I will receive him here and settle the terms. You and Lizzy might go to Lydia while it is being done. She will want faces that are kind to her, and the fewer of us across a table from that man, the better the morning will run."

It was reasonable. It was all of it reasonable.

"I should like to be here when he comes," I said.

My uncle looked up at me.

"I have better cause than anyone in this house to know what he is," I said. "I want to hear the terms set. I want to see his face while they are set." I had been carrying what I knew of him from Kent to Derbyshire to London, sewn in like a coin in a hem, and I wanted at last to be in the room where some of it might be spent.

My aunt looked at my uncle. I had my next argument ready, and the one behind it, and a third in reserve for the appeal to propriety that any such request must bring on.

"Well," said my uncle, turning his pen over once. "If you feel you ought, Lizzy."

"There can be no harm in it, I suppose," said my aunt.

And that was all. Nobody appealed to my nerves, or my youth, or the coarseness of the business. Nobody produced a second reason to set beside the first. I had braced my shoulder for the door, and it swung before my hand ever reached it, the way a door swings when no one is holding the other side.

My father had said nothing through any of this. He said it now, from the chair, to the inkstand.

"Well. This quest for Lydia has certainly shown me my own measure. I believe I could sit an hour with my most foolish daughter and conduct myself tolerably. I am quite certain I could not sit five minutes with the man who carried her off and conduct myself at all. Your uncle shall have Mr. Wickham, and you with him, Lizzy, since you are so set on it. You were always better than I am at hating a man to his face. I shall go to Lydia, and say to her whatever will bear saying."

So it was arranged. My uncle and I at home at ten, to Mr. Wickham and the terms; my father to Lydia's lodgings, to be the kind face. My aunt kissed me at the stair and said tomorrow would be a long day and I must sleep.

I went up with every point won and not one of them fought for. Nobody had refused me anything. I slept badly on the victory.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 30. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 12th of August

I wrote last at Pemberley. I was meaning to drive over to Lambton and say to Miss Bennet the thing I had been eight months not saying. I never made the drive.

I was at the breakfast table feeling like spring when Darcy came in looking like winter.

"The Gardiner party is gone," he said. "They left for Hertfordshire before it was light. There has been—" and he stopped, which Darcy does not do, and began again. "The youngest Miss Bennet has gone off from Brighton with Wickham. There is no marriage. There is not going to be one, unless I can arrange a better one for Miss Lydia."

I sat with the toast going cold in my fingers. Lydia Bennet is a loud, harmless, silly girl I have sat across from at half the tables in Meryton — and Wickham is the man Darcy has been hunting since April, and somewhere between his two sentences I watched the whole of it come down on Jane. On Jane's house, on Jane's name, on Jane. I was on my feet before I knew I had stood.

"Then I must go to her — to Longbourn — she will be—"

"And do what when you get there?" said Darcy, not unkindly. "You cannot walk in at Longbourn in the thick of this. You would simply be one more caller they must find a chair and a countenance for, on the worst morning of their lives. And there is nothing at Longbourn to be done. If the thing can be mended at all it will be mended in London, quietly, by the few who can be trusted to hold their tongues."

He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I stood there hunting the flaw in it and could not turn one up. So I took the only ground he had left me standing on.

"Then I am coming to London with you."

"There is not the least use in your coming to London."

"None in the world," I said. "I know it. I am coming regardless. I will not sit in Derbyshire shooting your birds while that whole house comes down over a child's folly, and you walk into God knows what alone. Give me nothing to do, and I will do the nothing at your shoulder."

He looked at me a long moment. "You are the hardest man in England to be rude to," he said, and he did not tell me no again.

So here we are, the pair of us, and I am finding out what use good intentions are in a business that wants a cold head. Caroline, at least, is making herself useful at Pemberley by amusing Georgiana. The one thing I have that might have served — money — Darcy would not take.

I put it to him the first hour. "Whatever it costs," I said. "To find her, to settle her, to buy the fellow off if it comes to buying, you can draw on me for the whole of it, and not a word said to a soul, now or ever."

"I know it, Charles. I thank you. And I will not touch a shilling of it."

"Why in Heaven's name not? It is only money. I have a great deal more of it than sense, as you have told me to my face—"

"Because this one is mine to pay." He said it in the voice that shuts a subject like a drawer, and I have not tried it again. There is a reckoning somewhere under all this that is his own and no other man's, and he means to settle it with his own hand and his own purse and be hanged to anybody who offers to help.

So I make myself what use I can, which is a small and homely sort of use and beneath the dignity of the thing, and has taken the absurd shape of my keeping house for a man under his own roof. I chivvy his cook; I have opinions now on his coal and his candles; I send his footman to bed and sit up in the fellow's place. Darcy suffers the whole invasion the way he suffers weather. I have watched clever men go stupid for want of a dinner at the very hour they had most need of their wits; and if the one thing I am fit to be in a business like this is an unpaid and unwanted steward to the best man I know while he saves a family that is never to hear his name for it, then I will be that, and reckon it no bad week's work.

This afternoon the drawing room acquired a Colonel.

Fitzwilliam — Darcy's cousin, whom I have met over cards and liked — came straight from some review or field-day in the whole of his regimentals, scarlet and gold from his stock to his boots, with a sabre that took the umbrella-stand off at the knees on the way in and the general air of a man who has ridden through the door rather than walked. He filled the room the way a fire fills a cold grate.

"Well," said the Colonel, stripping off his gloves and casting about for the map he had plainly expected to find laid ready. "Where are we, then."

"Sit down, Fitzwilliam." Darcy looked at me, and I watched him weigh, for the half of a second, whether to send me out of the room.

"I'll see about something cold," I said, to spare him the deciding of it, and rang for the butler. Then I stayed.

What passed between the two of them after was carried on in a shorthand of names and streets and sums that meant everything to them and next to nothing to me, and I will set none of it down, partly because I could make no shape of it and partly because it was plainly never mine to overhear. The Colonel grew graver by the minute, his splendour sitting stranger and stranger on him as the talk went into low and ugly places.

"You are certain it is he?"

Darcy said, "I have been certain of him for a long time. The difference is that now I can prove it."

And the Colonel looked away at the middle of the carpet and would say nothing.

Twice a day Darcy goes out. He will not take me, and I have left off pressing him; a man wants no genial fool at his elbow in the places he has been going, which are, by the state of his boots when he comes in and the set of his mouth, not the sort of places a gentleman commonly leaves cards at. He goes in hired hackneys — Darcy, who keeps as good a carriage as any in town, rattling about this business in coaches no one would look at twice — and comes home later each night, and grimmer, and says less.

He came in near two this morning and stood a moment in the hall with his hat still on, as though he had mislaid the way to his own stairs. I told him there were cold meats kept back in the dining-room against his coming.

He looked at me a moment. "In my own house," he said.

"Somebody had to see to it, and it was plainly not going to be you."

"I keep a cook for that, Charles. I keep, unless I am greatly mistaken, a butler. I had the two of them a good many years before ever I had you." But he ate the cold meats standing at the sideboard while I held the candle for him, and when he had done he said "Thank you" in a different voice from the one he had said the rest of it in, and went up. I do not know where he had been. I know it had cost him.

This morning he was at the street door before eight, drawing on his gloves with the Colonel behind him, and I came down in my dressing-gown feeling every inch the passenger on another man's ship.

"You are off, then," I said.

"The game's afoot," said Darcy, with the ghost of his old dryness, and to Fitzwilliam, "Come. We have an hour before the office opens, and I mean to be on the step when it does."

"Is there truly nothing I can do?" I asked, for the twentieth time in a week.

He paused with the one glove on. "Keep yourself out of mischief, and be here when I come back. You know my methods."

"Darcy, I give you my word, I have not the least idea in the world what your methods are, and never have had, in all this time of watching you at close quarters." It fetched half a smile out of him at eight in the morning on a black day, which I count among the better works I have done in this life.

Then they were down the steps and into a waiting hackney and gone, and I came back up to write this and to wait, which is the whole of my employment now. Somewhere in this enormous town Lydia Bennet is in the worst trouble a girl of sixteen can come to, and does not know that the most dogged man in England has made her his one concern; and her sisters at Longbourn, sitting up behind drawn blinds over a disgrace they take for the end of them, do not know it either. And they are not to know. On that one point he has been plainer with me than on anything: that if this is mended, no soul at Longbourn is ever to learn whose hand mended it. I gave him my word. So I may be the one man in England who could carry a little hope down to that house, and I am sworn not to. I shall wait up for him instead, and hold my tongue, and be there when he comes in.