Page 53 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

"Could it also be because you didn't want him taking me in?"

"Perhaps. In any case, the second time I attempted to find you, I hired a private investigator to understand your interests. I wrote only to the Meryton parish, not to several, because I had been informed you were there. The correspondence was tedious."

"You ruined your own life. You gave birth to me, regretted it, and your family learned of it, but none of it had anything to do with me. I was an infant. All you've done so far is just so that you could bring me here and tie me to a bed and tell me to sign papers."

"An accurate summary."

"And after I signed," Mary finished, "you would have had no use for me."

"I would have had no further need of you. You might be returned to your family. I have two sons. I have a life. I have no interest in acquiring a grown daughter I do not know and have no particular affection for."

The tears that Mary had been keeping at bay arrived without asking permission. Not the weeping of distress, exactly, but the hurt that came from being told she was of no unique value. That dug at old hurts, past insecurities, but at the end of it all, Mary felt free. She knew what she wanted and whom she wished to have in her life. She understood those who mattered most to her.

"I want to go home," she said steadily.

Alice turned up her nose in contempt.

"Home, per my research, is a borrowed townhouse belonging to a man who may or may not still want you, a family that raised you without telling you the truth, a mother who has known since the beginning that you were not hers. Sign the papers, Mary. Sign them, and it will all be over. You can return to whatever you wish to return to, and I will never contact you again. That is all I am asking."

She retrieved papers from a nearby table. A quilt and ink pot followed, placed beside them with a deliberateness that made it clear the patience was finite.

Alice was staring at Mary with the confidence of a woman who expected, eventually, to get what she wanted. James stood impatiently by the door, waiting for the entire affair to conclude.

Mary did not know what her family was doing at this moment. She did not know whether the note to Elena's address had led anyone to Jermyn Street, if anyone knew she was here, or whether the morning would bring anything beyond more of Alice's frayed patience and the linen cord around her wrist.

She did not reach for the pen.

Alice's expression hardened into an emotion that held no bit of patience any more. She stood and tossed the papers in Mary’s lap. "Sign them," she demanded. Her tone was different now, stripped of the earlier calm, revealing the desperation underneath.

James stepped briefly into the corridor before reappearing in the doorway.

"There are callers at the door," he murmured.

The surprised look on Alice’s face belied the rapid, recalculation occurring in her mind. She looked at the papers, and then at Mary, and at James.

"I will return," she said to Mary. To James: "Come."

They left, the door shutting harshly behind them as Mary prayed silently to be rescued.

Chapter Twenty-four

Darcy

The Hackney coach had drawn up at the far end of the street, as arranged. Darcy stood outside the narrow townhouse alongside everyone else who had come along and attempted to understand a sensation that was not a significant feature of his interior life.

His pulse was elevated.

He wondered what could be the cause.

The situation was urgent, that much was certain. Yet it did not produce in him any physical response beyond the focus he typically brought to urgent situations.

The reason behind his elevated pulse stood a few steps to his right with her hands clasped before her and her eyes fixed on the upper windows of the townhouse.

Elizabeth Bennet.

He was not a man who led with feeling. He moved through most situations with the deliberate, ordered habit of thinking first and then acting. He was accustomed to this. He had always considered it a reliable arrangement.

It appeared to have broken down somewhere between the start of January and this morning standing here on Jermyn Street, because what he was experiencing now was not a secondary sensation. It was present, and completely involuntary, and it had everything to do with the woman standing nearby.