Page 37 of Dear Friend

He had spent years assuming that the difficulty lay in finding a woman who wanted what he wanted and who, once acquainted with his fortune and position, could still distinguish the man from everything belonging to him.

Elizabeth Bennet did not know him at all.

Perhaps that was why her opinions interested him so much. Nothing in those letters had been shaped for his approval. Every judgement, every jest, every unguarded confession had been intended for another woman. Elizabeth had no reason to impress Fitzwilliam Darcy, and no knowledge that Fitzwilliam Darcy existed anywhere within reach of her words. Yes, she had impressed him.

He looked down at her name.

Elizabeth Bennet.

It no longer seemed the name of a stranger.

He knew the people she loved. He knew which of her sisters tried her patience and which commanded her confidence. He knew where she preferred to walk, what sort of behaviour provoked her ridicule, what she feared for Julia, and now what she hoped for herself in marriage. He knew, too, enough of her faults to prevent the picture from becoming impossibly favourable. She was too quick in some of her conclusions and too pleased with her own discernment in others.

Darcy had disagreed with her repeatedly.

He had also, on more than one occasion, caught himself wishing he could tell her so.

That was a considerably more troublesome discovery.

Darcy rose and crossed to pour himself some port, but the movement did little to settle his thoughts. He found himself wondering what expression accompanied Elizabeth's sharper remarks, whether she laughed as readily in conversation as she did upon the page, and whether, when contradicted, she became more reasonable or merely more determined.

He knew a surprising amount about Elizabeth Bennet. But he knew nothing of what it was like to be in a room with her.

The thought detained him until another portion of the letter returned to mind.

Mrs. Tunley.

Elizabeth meant to write to her separately.

Darcy turned from the sideboard, the glass forgotten for a moment in his hand. If Elizabeth directed that letter to Willowbrook, as she plainly intended to do, it too would come into his possession. She believed Mrs. Tunley to be with Julia, perhaps too occupied by her niece's illness to answer any of the letters which had arrived over the preceding months.

Yet Mrs. Tunley was no more at Willowbrook than Julia Harding.

Until now, Darcy had given the aunt comparatively little thought. The letters had supplied enough to establish that Mrs. Tunley had attended Julia throughout her illness in Hertfordshire and had eventually removed her from there. But where had she gone afterwards? If Julia had truly been taken to her father's house in Somerset, as Elizabeth had been told, Mrs. Tunley ought presumably to have accompanied her.

Except that Julia's father had already quitted Willowbrook.

Darcy frowned and returned to his chair.

Tunley was not Harding. The difference in name proved nothing, of course. If Mrs. Tunley were Julia's aunt, she might as readily be a sister of Julia's mother as of her father, or be connected by marriage. Still, it was another person whose whereabouts were entirely unknown, and another circumstance which did not quite fit the account Elizabeth had received in Hertfordshire.

The matter was becoming increasingly strange.

He considered writing again to Humphrey, but his attorney was already making enquiries concerning Harding. Until those enquiries produced something, Darcy could give him little more than another name and a collection of conjectures.

What he wanted, he realised, was to speak of the business to someone.

His first thought was Richard.

His second, almost inevitably, Bingley.

Darcy dismissed the latter at once. Bingley was his closest friend and possessed many qualities Darcy valued exceedingly, but a talent for keeping an intriguing piece of intelligence entirely to himself was not amongst them. There was no malice in it. Bingley simply liked people too well, conversation too much, and secrecy too little. A missing young woman, a vanished aunt, eighteen letters, and an unknown correspondent in Hertfordshire were altogether too tempting a collection of particulars to entrust to his discretion.

Richard was different. He would laugh at Darcy, certainly. That could be depended upon. But beneath his levity was a soundness of judgement Darcy had always trusted.

More importantly, Richard understood when a matter ought to remain private.

Darcy looked once more at Elizabeth's letter.