Page 77 of Courting Elizabeth

A chill ran through me.

“Then Lydia may not have been chosen for her naivety alone.”

“No. He may have anticipated that I would pay to avoid a second scandal involving the same woman.”

His voice had grown so calm that I understood the depth of his anger.

“We'll find him,” I said.

“I promised you that.”

“It's not a promise you have to carry alone. We'll find him.”

He turned his hand and intertwined our fingers.

During the long hours of the journey, we worked side by side. I recalled insignificant details from Lydia's letters; he wrote them down without ever mocking their frivolity. We compared dates, places, officers' names. For the first time, I was neither the woman he protected nor the one whose affection he hoped for. I was his partner in the search.

At the first stop, he wanted me to eat. I refused. He ordered bread, cheese, and tea anyway, then sat across from me until I swallowed a few bites.

“You're giving orders again,” I murmured.

“Your body needs strength to contradict me in London.”

“Self-interested argument.”

“Entirely.”

Night fell before our arrival. I drifted off despite myself, my head against his shoulder. When I woke, the carriage was crossing the first lamplit streets of the capital. Fitzwilliam hadn't moved. His cheek rested against my hair.

“We're here,” he murmured.

I tightened my fingers around his.

“Together.”

I still hadn’t said what burned in my heart. In the carriage, every attempt had felt out of place among the maps, the names, and the fear.

He stepped down first and offered me his hand in the cold street air.

Standing before Darcy House, I realized that these words would pull him away from the search to answer me while Lydia remained missing.

I kept them until the moment they would be neither a distraction nor a debt.

Chapter 18

DARCY

London swallowed men who wished to disappear, but Wickham had never been able to give up comfort long enough to become invisible.

I began with his debts.

The creditors remembered him. A tailor on Bond Street had received a promissory note signed with a false name. A wine merchant knew an address where Wickham had had six bottles delivered before leaving the lodging without paying the rent. A former regimental comrade had seen him in a gambling house near St James's. Each lead cost money, time, and another measure of my patience.

Mr Gardiner proved invaluable.

He was not impressed by my name or my orders. He knew London differently than I did: the streets of commerce, the men who talked when treated with respect, the networks of landlords and clerks that gentlemen rarely noticed. We worked without rest for four days.

Elizabeth waited at Darcy House.