Page 47 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"We lose your aunt forever. And Georgiana's trust. And I lose my only friend." She sighed. "And if we are right, she will know we suspect her, and be twice as careful."

"So we do nothing?"

"No. We do something." She sat up a little on her elbow, her hair falling round her in the dark. "We ask Georgiana, very gently, to keep what happens in this house in this house. Not because we suspect anyone. Only because London is full of ears. We are pleasant to Lady Theodosia and we tell her nothing, nothing at all, that matters. And we wait for Richard. You said he was coming soon."

"Thursday week."

"Then we wait until Thursday week. And in the meantime," said Elizabeth, lying back down and fitting herself against him again, "there are to be no more secrets between us. None. I promise. Not the small ones, not the ones I think will hurt you. Everything."

"Everything," he agreed, and she heard the smile in his voice for the first time that day. "Then I have one to confess."

"What?"

"I have been lying here for the last quarter of an hour," said her husband, "making a very serious list of suspects with you, and all I have truly been able to think about is that you are wearing nothing under that nightgown but a great deal of hair."

Elizabeth made a small outraged sound, and then laughed, properly, helplessly, for the first time since breakfast. It went on for a long time. By the time it stopped, his mouth was at her throat and hers was in his hair, and the list of suspects was forgotten somewhere down among the pillows.

London could print what it liked, she thought, a long while later, drifting towards sleep with her head on his shoulder. It could not print this. It did not know about this. This was theirs.

#

Darcy woke before dawn, as he often did now, and lay for a while watching his wife sleep.

She slept the way she did everything, with her whole self: flung across more than her half of the bed, one arm over her head, her hair everywhere, her lips a little parted. In the grey light she looked about seventeen. There was a faint crease between her brows, as though even asleep she were still turning over the list of names.

Good-morrow, he thought, and did not say it aloud, because he found that he could not. Somebody had taken that word and put it in the Morning Post. He would have it back. He did not yet know how. But he would.

He slipped out of bed without waking her, and went through the door with no lock into his own room, and pulled on a dressing gown, and lit a candle at his writing table, and wrote three letters.

The first was to Richard, at his regiment's depot at Canterbury.

Come as soon as you can. Within the week if you can get leave. W. is in London under the name of Wakefield, and he is not working alone. Somebody in society is paying him, or directing him, or both. I need a man who can find a rat in a granary and does not care whose granary it is. Tell nobody you are coming. — D.

The second was to a man in Bow Street whose name he had been given, years ago, by his father's solicitor, and whom he had once employed to find Wickham's creditors in Lambton.

I wish to know who owns and who prints the sheet called The Tattler's Glass, and who carried to it a certain paragraph published on the seventeenth of this month. I wish also to know who carried to the Morning Post a paragraph printed in its Fashionable Intelligence on the thirtieth. I will pay whatever is needed. Discretion is essential. Report only to me, and only in person.

The third took him longest. It was to his aunt Matlock.

He wrote it three times. The first time it was angry, and he burned it. The second time it was cold and correct, and he burned that too. The third time he wrote, simply:

Dear Aunt,

Thank you for your warning. You are right that somebody is well informed about my household. I am looking to it. When I know more, you will be the first person I tell, because I think you are the only person in your house who wishes us well, and I do not forget it.

Elizabeth sends her duty, and her thanks for the shawl. She wore it to Lady Pembury's. I do not think you have heard what I did there, or you would not have written so kindly. I refused to dance with anybody but my wife, and I would do it again tomorrow.

Your affectionate nephew,

F. D.

He sanded it, and folded it, and sealed all three, and put them on the tray by the door for Pearce to take down at seven.

The sky was turning pale over the chimneys of the square. Somewhere below, the fire girl was clattering her coal scuttle on the back stairs. The house was waking.

He went back through the open door, and found Elizabeth awake, lying on her side with her cheek on her hand, watching him come in with her dark eyes.

"You were writing letters," she said. "I heard the pen."