Page 21 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

Elizabeth rose and came to the doorway, close enough that he could smell the rain in her coat. She looked back at her sleeping sister. "She said something at the Bull and Bell. Papa held her and told her he was sorry, and she could not get over it. Sixteen years of his jokes, and one apology undid her." Her voice caught. "I laughed at most of those jokes. I have been thinking of it ever since."

Darcy's throat closed. There was nothing adequate, so he offered nothing false. "We will do better by her."

"Yes. Starting with the lie."

The cover story. It had to be built tonight, with no crack in it, before they traveled.

Downstairs, Mrs. Gardiner had laid the table. Mr. Bennet was already eating, slow and mechanical. Someone had put soup in front of him, and he had run out of reasons to refuse it. Gardiner came in at seven. The paperwork was filed, the clerk efficient and unimpressed, which was, he reported, the best kind of clerk.

"Meryton will whisper, whatever we do," Darcy said. "Meryton does not concern me. The Lords do. Elizabeth will stand up to swear against Braithwaite, and he will ask her about her sister, the girl who ran off with a deserter. The peers will decide that loose girls tell stories. That is what he paid for."

"Then how do we prevent it?" Gardiner asked.

"We lie." Darcy set down his cup. "Lydia was never with Wickham. She was visiting her aunt and uncle in London, took a sudden fever, and was confined to this house with Mrs. Gardiner nursing her. The expresses, the urgent travel, the whispering, all of it was the fever."

"A girl of sixteen does not travel to town alone," Mrs. Gardiner said.

"You sent your carriage and your maid, at your written invitation. Mr. Bennet consented by letter."

"I consented to no such thing!" Mr. Bennet said.

Mrs. Gardiner met his eye over the teapot. "I am certain I could find the letter. If I looked very carefully."

"I will be sworn before the Lords," Elizabeth said. "If he asks me where Lydia was that week, I cannot lie on oath."

"Nor would I ask it." He held her gaze. "You need not lie. You need only refuse. Lydia is not a witness and not on trial, and whoever presides will say so if you ask him. Meryton may have the fever. The Lords will have your silence."

She thought it through, and he watched her decide. "Then Lydia is told. What we are doing, and why. She is not lied to about the lie. And she keeps it. No dear-Wickham stories dropped at parties."

"She will keep it," Mr. Bennet said. "She is not the girl who left Longbourn."

"And one thing more." Darcy turned to Mrs. Gardiner. "Write to your sister Phillips tonight, ma'am, by the common post. Every symptom. The apothecary, the broth, how pale the poor child looks."

"My sister Phillips will read it aloud at every card table in Meryton!"

"I am counting on it. And if Graves is paying a post-boy for our letters, let him pay for that one."

Mrs. Gardiner considered this over her teacup. "I have never written a letter for a villain before! I shall try to make it very dull."

"And Mama will be the proof of it," Elizabeth said. "She will tell all Meryton that Lydia nearly died and she herself nearly died of the worry, and the telling will make it true."

Mr. Bennet looked up from his cup. "Behold, Lizzy! Your mother's tongue, an asset at last. I have waited five-and-twenty years."

It was a small joke, and a tired one, but it was his first in three days. Elizabeth's mouth twitched. Mrs. Gardiner hid her smile behind her teacup, and for the first time since the crisis began, the room was one where people could breathe.

Darcy caught Elizabeth's eye across the table. The corner of her mouth still held her father's joke. She tipped her cup toward him. He answered with the smallest bow of his head, and watched her face steady at what she read in his. Love for her went through him, plain and fierce. Whatever waited in the Lords, she would not face it alone. Neither of them looked away until Mrs. Gardiner asked for the sugar.

Elizabeth stayed at the table and poured another cup. Darcy sat beside her.

"She left the bonnet on the floor," she said. "At the Bull and Bell. The one he bought her. She looked at it and said, 'I do not want that,' and walked out."

"Good."

"It was the bravest thing she has ever done!"

He found her hand under the table. Her fingers laced through his. She did not lean on him. Elizabeth sat straight, drank her tea and held on.

"Tomorrow we take her to Netherfield, to Mama and Jane," she said.