Page 67 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"No more secrets."

"No more secrets. I swear it."

"And no more pistols."

He laughed, a cracked unsteady sound, and held her tighter. "Grey would never let me near them again. I think he would sooner set fire to the dressing room."

She laughed too, wetly, against his collar. Then she pulled back a little, and took his face between her hands, and looked at him for a long time in the candlelight.

"We will beat them," she said. "Not with pistols. With the truth. We will find her, and prove it, and then everybody will know. That is how we win. Not on a heath at dawn. In daylight, where everybody can see."

He turned his head and kissed her palm.

"Side by side," he said.

"Side by side."

She did not go back into her own room that night, and nor did he. They fell asleep, much later, in his bed, with the door between their rooms standing wide open, and neither of them thought to shut it.

#

Friday, 10th April

Richard came back at nine, grey with tiredness, and found them at breakfast in the small dining room, sitting side by side instead of across the table from each other, and stopped in the doorway.

He looked at his cousin's face. Then at Elizabeth's. Then at the sideboard, where Grey, in a fit of triumph, had laid the pistol case's brass key on a silver salver like a trophy.

"Thank God," said Richard, and sat down heavily, and helped himself to four eggs.

He had not found Wickham. He had been to every tavern and gaming hell between Covent Garden and Piccadilly, and to Wych Street, and to the Bell in Salisbury Court, and back to the mews behind Brook Street, and had found nothing but a hackney driver who remembered a fair gentleman who had paid him in gold and got down at the corner of Oxford Street. After that, nothing.

"He has gone to ground," Richard said, through egg. "Or been told to. Somebody knows he made a mess of it yesterday. He was supposed to come home with five hundred pounds and a broken wife, and instead he came home with nothing and a story about a duck."

Elizabeth laughed despite herself. Darcy's hand found hers under the table.

They were still at breakfast when Pearce came in with the post, and a small stiff face, and a single folded note on the salver that had not come by the post at all.

"This was put through the area door, sir, before six this morning. The kitchen boy found it. There was nobody there." Pearce hesitated. "It is addressed to Miss Darcy."

Georgiana, at the end of the table, went white.

Darcy took it. He broke the wafer and read it, and Elizabeth watched his face turn to stone, and then, with an effort she could see, soften again.

"What does it say?" said Georgiana. Her voice was very small. "Fitzwilliam. You promised. No secrets."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he handed it to her.

It was only one line, in a round careful hand that was not quite natural. Poor little G. How will you ever show your face at a ball again? Everyone will be watching you. Everyone will know.

Georgiana read it. She did not cry. She folded it up very small, with shaking fingers, and put it down beside her plate, and looked at it.

"Everyone will be watching," she whispered.

Elizabeth got up, and went round the table, and put her arms round her.

It was later that morning, sitting in the green room with Georgiana asleep on the sofa under Lady Matlock's cashmere shawl, that the thought came to her.

She had been looking out of the window at the square. It was full of carriages again. Two had already been round three times. The drivers were looking up at the windows of Darcy House, and in one of them she could see a lady with a glass, a real spyglass, like an admiral on a quarterdeck, trained on the second floor. On Georgiana's window.