Page 17 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

"Yes. But Elizabeth goes up first. Alone."

Elizabeth met her father's eye, and no more needed saying. Lydia needed a sister before anyone else.

"Wickham," Fitzwilliam said.

"Downstairs. He does not know I am here. He is playing cards." Mr. Bennet's voice went flat. "My daughter is upstairs with her heart in pieces, and the man is playing cards."

"I will handle Wickham."

"We will handle Wickham," Mr. Bennet corrected. Quietly. Without heat. Without the smallest possibility of argument.

Whatever Fitzwilliam saw in his face, he accepted it. "Both of us, then."

"Uncle," Elizabeth said, "will you wait outside? If we want a constable, you can fetch one faster than any of us."

Gardiner nodded, already reading the street, counting the men at the door.

Elizabeth went in.

The Bull and Bell was dark and smelled of spilled ale, tallow, and sawdust gone sweet with rot. From the public room came the murmur of cards, a laugh, the click of coin. She did not look in. She climbed.

Third floor. Narrow stairs, creaking, the walls stained by a hundred transient lives. Halfway up, her body remembered another staircase. Stone, and going down, with iron waiting at the bottom. Her breath went thin. These stairs went up. She was the one doing the finding this time. She climbed faster.

A closed door at the end of the corridor.

She knocked.

"Go away." Thick and nasal. The voice of a girl who had been crying a long time.

"It is Elizabeth."

Silence. The scrape of a chair. The door opened.

Lydia looked wrecked. Hair loose and tangled. The sprigged muslin with the green sash, packed so carefully for her great elopement, creased and stained at the hem. Face swollen and blotched, nose running, a handkerchief crushed in one fist and used far past its usefulness.

Sixteen, and she looked twelve. "Lizzy." Her voice broke on the second syllable.

Elizabeth stepped in and shut the door. A small grimy room. A bed with a gray coverlet, a chipped basin, a window facing brick. On the floor, a new straw bonnet with yellow ribbons. Elizabeth looked at it and thought of the box. She thought of twelve letters tied in blue ribbon, every letter a step nearer this room.

Lydia sat on the bed and pulled her knees to her chest, making herself small. When had Lydia ever made herself small? Lydia always filled a room with noise. This girl on the bed was trying to disappear. "Papa told me," she said. "About the money. He said Mr. Wickham was paid to take me. Like a, like a job. Like I was a delivery."

Elizabeth sat beside her. The mattress sagged. "That is what happened."

"George said he loved me." Small, small voice. "He wrote me letters. He said I was the cleverest girl he had ever met, and the prettiest, and we would have a cottage in Surrey, and everyone would see that Lydia Bennet was not just the silly sister. That she was somebody's wife."

Not just the silly sister. So that was the wound Wickham had found and pressed. How could she not have believed him?

And who had taught her to tell charm from truth? Nobody. Elizabeth herself had believed that easy smile once, and been wrong. She had paid nothing for it, because she had not been the target. "He said the same things to someone else," Elizabeth said. "Before you. A girl your own age. He told her she was special too."

Lydia looked up. "Who?"

"I cannot tell you. It is not my secret. But she was young and lonely, and he told her exactly what she needed to hear. When he was found out, he went looking for the next girl who needed to hear it."

Lydia's face crumpled. It was nothing like the theatrical collapse Elizabeth had seen a hundred times at Longbourn. "I am so stupid," she whispered.

"You are not! You are young, and a practiced liar made a study of you. Trusting is not stupidity. Nobody ever taught you the difference, and that is our failure as much as yours."

"Papa tried. He said I was too wild, that I would land in trouble. I laughed at him." She wiped her nose with the ruined handkerchief. "I laughed at him, Lizzy. And he was right!"