Page 51

The last letter was dated Sunday.

Five minutes on Saturday were not nearly enough.

He had put his pen down badly, and it had rolled off the stand. A blot was creeping across the letter to his steward. He watched it reach the edge of the page and did nothing about it. The drains would have to wait.

“Saturday,” he said.

“At Vauxhall, while we were dancing. I saw her at the end of one of the dark walks, with a man beside her. When the dance brought me round again she was going back to the box, and I told myself it was the lamps.” Elizabeth had her hands clasped tight in front of her. “I ought to have told you that night. I did not want to spoil her evening. I think I did not want to spoil mine either.”

He had nothing to say to that. He was thinking of the stable yard at Rosings, and of Wickham leaning in the stable door and smiling at him, as though they were boys again and had been caught stealing apples.

Somebody knocked.

It was not a footman's knock. It came twice, very quick, and the door opened before he could answer. Georgiana's maid stood there with a sheet of paper in both hands. She was shaking so badly that he could hear it.

“Begging your pardon, sir. I went up to dress Miss Darcy and she wasn't in her room. Nor the music room, sir, nor anywhere. Her writing desk was open, and this was in it.” She held it out, and then did not seem to want to let go. “Her blue pelisse is gone out of the press, sir. And her little valise.”

Darcy took the paper from her.

It was Georgiana's round, careful hand, the one her governess had always been so pleased with. Two lines had been crossed out and started again.

I will come to the Angel at Islington at half past six, while they are all dressing, as you ask. I dare not order the carriage, so I shall walk to the stand in Oxford Street and take a hackney. You say that where we are going I shall be truly loved, and I believe you, for nobody in this house has

That was all. She had written it out fair on another sheet, and that one she had taken with her.

He took out his watch. It wanted twenty minutes to seven.

The fire was still burning. Clarendon still lay face down on the side table where he had left him. Nothing in the room had moved in the last quarter of an hour, and none of it seemed to have anything to do with him any more. Georgiana was sixteen. She had gone out alone at dusk with a valise she could barely lift, and climbed into a hackney with a stranger on the box, so that she could give herself to a man who had tried the very same thing once before.

It did not take much working out. Georgiana's heart had never come into it. Wickham wanted her thirty thousand pounds, and if he could not have those, he would take whatever her brother would pay to get her back. More than either, he wanted Darcy to know that he had walked into this house without anyone seeing him, and taken away the one person who had loved Darcy without any conditions since the day she was born. The last time, Wickham had hurried. This time he had been patient. He had made sure first that the girl believed her own home had turned against her.

Darcy went past the maid into the hall.

“The carriage, at once! And have the bay saddled. I want him at the door in five minutes, not ten.”

The footman ran. Somewhere below stairs a door banged, and someone shouted towards the mews. When Darcy turned for his greatcoat, Elizabeth was in the library doorway.

“You are going to ride after them.”

“I am going to be at Islington before he has her in a chaise. If they have gone, I shall follow them up the north road as far as the horse will take me.”

“And when you catch them?”

He did not answer. He did not know what he would say. He knew even less what he would do.

“Mr Darcy, will you listen to me for one minute?” She came out into the hall and stood in front of him, so that he would have to either hear her or move her out of the way. “I have watched Mr Wickham work a room. I have sat at a card table while he told his sad story, until every lady there was ready to cry for him, and I was readier than any of them. I know how he does it. If he sees you come in alone and in a temper, he will either take her and run, or he will stand there and let you shout. Either way he has won. He has spent a fortnight telling her you are a tyrant. Please do not prove it to her face.”

“She is my sister.”

“She is a girl of sixteen who has been taught that nobody loves her. If you drag her out of that inn by the arm, she will stand up for him to your face, because she will be too ashamed to do anything else. And once she has stood up for him, she will think she has to keep on.” Elizabeth stopped to get her breath. “She will need a woman there. Someone to reach her, not just to fetch her home.”

“You would go into an inn yard at night? Among the ostlers and the post-boys?”

“Every one of those letters warns her against me. I am the woman who wormed her way in. I am the one who means to push her out.” Her voice had gone quite steady now. “So I am the one person who can show her he is lying. It has to be me, Mr Darcy. Of all people, it has to be me.”

He looked at her. In the light from the library door she was pale, and her chin was up, just as it had been in the parsonage parlour when she would not let him finish a sentence. She had been very sure of him that night, and she had been wrong. She was not wrong now. He could see that much even through his fear.

He had argued with her about nearly everything since Hertfordshire. He did not argue about this.