Page 10 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

Elizabeth glanced at her husband. A fractional nod.

"We are going to London," she said. "The address is Cheapside. My uncle will have the express by now. We can be there by afternoon."

Mr. Bennet straightened. And there was something in his face Elizabeth had never seen in the whole of her life. Not the dry detachment, not the sardonic half-smile. None of the armchair distance from which he had watched his family for his own amusement. "She is my daughter," he said. "I failed her. I will not fail her now by sitting in my library while better men clean up the mess I made."

He went for his coat.

Elizabeth stood in the hall with the box in her arms and bay leaves on her fingers, listening to her father's tread overhead. Heavy. Deliberate. The step of a man walking toward a thing instead of away from it. For twenty years he had hidden in his library, and today he was leaving it.

Fitzwilliam touched her arm, a light pressure just below the elbow. "He will be all right," he said.

"He is angry at himself."

"As he should be. As we all should be. But he is moving. Everyone is moving. That is what matters now."

She leaned into his hand, only a moment, only enough to feel the warmth of his palm through her sleeve. Then she went to find Kitty.

Kitty sat curled in the corner of the settee with a shawl drawn up to her chin, eyes swollen, looking far younger than her seventeen years. Smaller, too, since her confession that morning.

"Kitty."

Her sister flinched. "I know what you are going to say."

"I am not going to say it." Elizabeth sat down beside her. "Tell me what you know."

Kitty's hands twisted in the shawl. "She was writing to someone. For weeks. She would not tell me who at first, only she was so happy, Lizzy. Giddy. The way she is when there is a ball, or a new officer." She swallowed. "Then she told me. Mr. Wickham. She said he loved her, and they would be married, and there would be a cottage in Surrey, and everything would be perfect."

"And you kept it secret."

"She made me swear. She said if I told, everyone would ruin it, Papa would forbid it and you would interfere, and she should never forgive me as long as she lived." Kitty's voice cracked. "I did not think she would leave! I thought it was letters. I thought it was Lydia being silly, the way she always is, and that it would pass."

Elizabeth took her sister's hand. The fingers were ice. "You are not to blame for this."

"I am, though. I knew, and I said nothing."

"Then we have that in common."

Kitty looked up.

"I found one of her notes weeks ago," Elizabeth said. "I told Jane. I set Mary to watch her. And I said not one word to the single person who could have stopped it. I thought I could manage it myself." She squeezed the cold fingers. "I was wrong, and you were wrong, and we shall both do better. Starting this minute."

"You?" The disbelief on Kitty's face was so raw it hurt to look at. Had Kitty truly believed, until this moment, that her clever sister never failed at anything?

"Me. Now. Will you have a task, or will you sit under that shawl all week?"

Kitty wiped her eyes with the edge of it. "A task."

"Stay here and help Hill. When Jane can be spared from Netherfield, help her with Mama. Be the sister who keeps this house in order while the rest of us are in London."

Kitty nodded. Then, small: "Lizzy. Will you find her?"

Down the corridor, through the open door, the made bed. The gaping wardrobe. Cheap perfume still hanging in the air of an empty room.

"Yes," Elizabeth said. "We will find her."

She did not say the rest. Finding Lydia was only half the problem. What would they find when they did?

Mary was waiting in the corridor, a book against her chest and a folded paper in her hand. "You asked me to watch her," she said, without greeting. "I watched. She wrote letters after evening prayers and burned her blotted attempts in the candle. I recorded the dates." She held out the paper. "Eleven evenings. I never saw a letter itself. She locked them away too quickly, and I could not contrive a reason to enter her room. Contrivance is a form of deceit in any case."