Page 30 of Dear Friend

She insists it is becoming. Kitty insists upon agreeing with her because she wishes to borrow it on Sunday. Mama has declared it very elegant, which settles the question entirely against them, and Papa has refused to express an opinion upon a subject which he says has already consumed more of his household than Bonaparte.

There. You see how necessary you are. Jane will smile when I say such things, but she will not agree with me, and Mary would explain at considerable length why I ought not to say them at all. You, at least, possessed the charity to laugh first and correct me afterwards.

Jane asked me last week whether I meant to continue writing when I have received no response. I told her that I do. These letters have become rather like the conversations I should have had with you had you remained in Hertfordshire, and I see no reason to surrender those merely because I must presently conduct them alone.

I do not know where you are, Julia, or whether these pages ever reach further than whatever hands first receive them. I only know that I would rather continue writing into uncertainty than discover one day that you returned and I had allowed your silence to persuade me to forget you.

I hope that will be the reason I eventually cease writing, because you have returned and there is no longer any need of paper between us. I cannot bring myself to consider the other reason there might be.

Wherever you are, I hope you are well. I hope someone is kind to you. And if these letters ever do find you, I hope you will know that Meryton's forgetting you did not mean that I had done the same.

Yours, always,

Elizabeth

Darcy reached the end and remained there for some moments, the letter still open between his hands.

Elizabeth.

No surname followed it.

He had meant only to discover a direction and a name. Yet he had read every word.

Worse still, his first feeling upon reaching the end was not regret, but disappointment that there was no more.

The realisation brought Darcy abruptly back to himself. He folded the pages along their former creases and placed them upon the desk. He had gone looking for a direction and come away instead with the peculiar, entirely unearned sense of having listened to one half of a conversation.

From one letter he had gathered surprisingly much. This writer, Elizabeth, lived at an estate called Longbourn, near a town called Meryton in Hertfordshire. There were parents, several sisters, an aunt Phillips, and a Jane to whom she appeared particularly close. Julia Harding had gone to Hertfordshire at some point before March, had formed an attachment to Elizabeth, and had resembled her so remarkably that an entire neighbourhood had apparently entertained itself with the likeness.

That alone was curious.

Darcy glanced again at the letter. He might have dismissed the claim as an exaggeration had Elizabeth not written of it with such complete familiarity. She seemed less interested in the resemblance itself than in the fact that everyone else had ceased to care about it.

They remember the novelty of you, while I remember you.

That sentence remained with him.

Five months without an answer, and she still wrote. Whatever Julia Harding had been to the rest of Meryton, she had plainly been something very different to Elizabeth.

But there were other things in the letter which Darcy did not understand.

Oakham Hill.

An argument Elizabeth refused to revive, though she had evidently not surrendered her claim to having won it. A first meeting before a milliner's window. Julia's habit of laughing at Elizabeth before correcting her. Small references to conversations and incidents which meant nothing to him but had required no explanation between the two women.

Darcy's gaze moved to the sixteen sealed letters beside the one he had opened.

The earlier half of the conversation lay there.

He caught himself almost as soon as the thought occurred.

That was curiosity, pure and simple.

He had opened one letter upon the pretence of discovering its author's direction. He could manufacture no such excuse for opening another merely because he wished to know what had happened at Oakham Hill, or how two women who apparently looked enough alike to astonish an entire town had first come to stand opposite one another outside a milliner's shop.

He gathered the correspondence into a neat pile, placed Elizabeth's letter on top, and pushed the whole to the far end of the desk.

Mr. Humphrey had promised further enquiries. Darcy would wait. If Harding were found, the letters could be forwarded and the matter would cease to concern him. If he were not, Darcy now possessed an address by which Elizabeth could be informed that Julia Harding no longer lived at Willowbrook.