Page 2 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

My dearest George.

Elizabeth read the words a third time, willing them to say something else. They did not. The letter remained Lydia's, the hand round and careless, the loops of the G trailing off the page. The paper was creased through in a dozen places where Mrs. Bennet had crushed it in her fist the whole way from Longbourn.

Her fool youngest sister had run off with George Wickham!

In the corridor, Mrs. Bennet wept at full volume, clutching Jane's arm with both hands. "She will be married! She must be. Mr. Wickham was perfectly amiable. Everyone said so. A handsome young man with excellent manners and a red coat, and he would not, he could not have taken her without meaning to marry her. Jane, tell them!"

Jane rubbed their mother's hands between her own and said nothing.

"We will have a wedding breakfast at Longbourn, when they return," Mrs. Bennet continued, weeping and planning in the same breath. "Nothing extravagant. Ham, and the good preserves!"

As her mother went on, Elizabeth turned away. How could she bear her mother's hope? The corridor was cold. The fires had not yet been built up. Gray autumn light fell through the tall windows and did nothing to warm her. Nothing to lighten her spirit. She did not have her mother's gift of self-delusion.

From the study came her husband's voice, low and clipped, giving orders. He had been giving them since half-nine, when Mrs. Bennet's shrieking had turned the house from sleep to chaos in the space of three minutes.

Twelve hours ago, Elizabeth had stood in the moonlight and laughed. She had said, I am free. Then she had slept deeply for the first time in weeks, Fitzwilliam's arm across her waist.

Twelve hours. Was that all the peace they were to be allowed?

Elizabeth crossed to the study, bare feet freezing on the stone, her wrapper thrown over her nightgown. She had not dressed. Nobody had dressed. Propriety had fled the house with Lydia.

Her husband sat at the desk in his shirtsleeves, writing.

"Who is the letter for?" Elizabeth asked.

"Your uncle. An express to London." He did not look up. "If Wickham took her south instead of north, Mr. Gardiner is our best hope of finding them quietly."

"And Richard?"

"Being woken. He rides for Gretna Green within the hour."

Elizabeth shut the door behind her. The latch clicked, and her husband's pen stopped.

"You knew about Wickham," she said.

Fitzwilliam set down the pen. He turned in the chair to face her. His eyes were bloodshot. Had he slept at all? He must have spent the hours since putting every thought in order. "I did," he said.

"You drove him off in the spring. From Longbourn. From Lydia. And you said nothing."

"Yes."

"You let Lydia walk into the very danger you knew he posed."

"Yes."

The plainness of it took the wind from her sails. Elizabeth had come into this room with a speech half-formed, and her husband had surrendered the field before she could deliver it. It did not make her less angry. But where was she to aim it now? "Why?" she asked. "And do not say it was to protect me. I have heard enough of protecting me to last out my life."

"Because warning your family meant exposing my sister." He said it evenly, but his hands were not even. "Georgiana's shame was not mine to spend. I told myself that every day. I was wrong every day."

"Then tell me now. All of it. Not only the shape of it. The whole."

He looked at her a long moment. Then he told her. "It was at Ramsgate, the summer before you came to Hunsford. Georgiana was fifteen, and Wickham followed her there."

"By design?"

"Everything he does is by design. He was attentive. He remembered her favorite music. She was lonely, Elizabeth, and she had known him since she was in leading strings." His voice roughened. "When our parents quarreled, she used to creep into my bed, and I told her stories until she slept. I believed I knew how to keep her safe."

"He asked her to elope."