Page 50 of Mr Darcy’s Inconvenient Wife

That evening, on her way up to dress, she passed the morning room again. The door stood ajar and the fire had been let go out. In the last of the daylight she saw a folded paper on the carpet, half under the writing desk. It must have gone there when the chair went over.

She stopped in the doorway. She did not want to pry. She had four sisters and knew very well what it was to have one's secrets picked over by other people.

Elizabeth went in and picked it up.

It was not one letter but several, folded together. Each had come inside an outer sheet addressed in a round, girlish hand, the kind that would lie on the salver in the hall and pass for a letter from a school friend. She knew the hand before she had read a line. She had watched it often enough in Meryton, keeping the score at loo across her aunt Phillips's card table.

My dearest Georgiana.

She glanced at the signature. Wickham.

Her eyes scanned for a date at the top. It was dated the week after she had arrived.

He had heard of her brother's marriage, he wrote, and it grieved him to think of her alone in that great house. He knew how these things went. A new wife came in, a woman with nothing of her own, who had wormed her way into the family by means he would not soil his pen to describe. Such a woman would never rest until the sister was pushed aside and forgotten. Had Georgiana not noticed already that her brother had less time for her than he used to?

From the wife he went on to the brother. He set down the old injuries one after another, from their boyhood on. There was the jealousy of a father's fondness, and the tales carried to the steward. There was the living refused, and the door shut in his face before old Mr Darcy had been a month in his grave. She was old enough now, he said, to hear the truth about the man who had kept her from her oldest friend.

Let me see you, if only for a quarter of an hour, somewhere we may talk freely. Let me take you away from a house that no longer loves you.

Elizabeth turned to the next, and the next. The last had been written on Sunday.

Five minutes on Saturday were not nearly enough. You looked so lovely under the lamps.

The paper was rattling. It took her a moment to understand that it was her own hand shaking it.

She had been at Vauxhall herself. She had danced and smiled and called it a trick of the light, while not fifty yards off he bent his head down to a girl of sixteen. And it was Elizabeth he had used to do it.

She thought of Anne on the edge of the sofa with her gloves on, telling her about the stables at Rosings. She thought of herself in Meryton, nodding along to his sad story and believing every word, because he told it so well.

A quarter of an hour ago she had heard the pianoforte in the music room. It had stopped.

Elizabeth folded the letters together again. She did not go up to dress. She went down instead, past the drawing room and along the passage to the library, where a line of candlelight still showed under the door.

She did not knock.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Darcy

“Put it on the desk, my dear. I shall look at it in a moment.”

Darcy did not look up. Only Georgiana ever came into the library without knocking, and she generally came with a piece of music she wanted him to hear, or a page of a novel she could not keep to herself. He had three lines left to write to his steward about the drains in the lower meadows, and he meant to finish them first.

“Mr Darcy.”

His pen stopped. It was not his sister's voice.

Elizabeth stood just inside the door. She had not gone up to dress. She must have come down the stairs too fast, because she was out of breath, and the lace at her throat rose and fell with it. Her face was white as the paper in front of him.

She came to the desk and put a bundle of letters down on the blotter, on top of the drains.

“These were on the floor of the morning room. I did not know who else to bring them to.”

He knew the hand before he had unfolded the first one. He had watched it learn its letters across a schoolroom table at Pemberley, years before it had learnt to write anything worth being afraid of.

My dearest Georgiana.

Darcy read it through, and then the next, and the one after. None of them was long. Wickham had never needed many words. Every line had been made to fit some small sore place that was already there. Darcy knew the trick. He had watched it worked on his father for twenty years.