Page 23 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

They reached Netherfield at half past twelve, under a brief wash of pale-gold autumn sun, and Jane was down the steps before the coach had properly stopped. Her face was composed. Her eyes were not. She swept Elizabeth once, checking for damage, and then turned to the coach door.

Lydia stepped down and stood blinking on the gravel in her borrowed dress, and her chin trembled. "Jane."

Jane opened her arms. Lydia walked into them.

Elizabeth watched from the coach step. There it was, without honesty or guilt. Jane's arms came around her with no questions asked.

When Jane finally drew back she smoothed Lydia's hair and said, "Cook has made your favorite. Bread-and-butter pudding, with custard."

Lydia almost smiled, a watery echo of the old grin. "Do the servants know?"

"The servants know you were ill at Aunt Gardiner's and have come to Netherfield to recover. That is what everyone knows."

Lydia nodded, and Elizabeth saw the understanding flicker through her. She was being protected. The protection required her silence. She was accepting both.

Kitty appeared in the doorway, white-faced, hands clasped, come over from Longbourn that morning on the strength of Darcy's note. She looked at Lydia and did not come closer. At their last meeting, they had both been different people.

Lydia's face crumpled. "Kitty! I was such a fool."

Kitty crossed the threshold, and they held each other on the front steps. They were two girls who had shared a room, a wardrobe and a hundred whispered conversations about officers. Now they held on over something heavier than gossip.

"I knew about the letters," Elizabeth heard Kitty whisper. "I should have told someone."

"I would have hated you if you had," Lydia said into her shoulder.

"I know."

"I would have been wrong." Then she pulled back, and the grief flashed over into fury. "And I hate him. I hate him, Kitty! I want him to rot in whatever hole they put him in, and I want him to know that I know. That every word was bought and paid for. I want to scream it at him until my voice gives out."

"I know."

"Everyone keeps saying I know." Lydia scrubbed her face with the back of her hand. "You do not know. You were not there. I sat three days in horrid rooms looking at brick walls, and I told myself he was out buying the license. I practiced writing 'Lydia Wickham,' Kitty. On the back of a playbill!"

"You are not a fool."

"Then why do I feel like one?" Her voice cracked, and she pressed her face back into Kitty's shoulder. The fury folded down into something smaller and younger. A girl who had been made a fool of, and could not yet forgive herself.

Elizabeth turned away. That reckoning belonged to the two youngest and no one else. She stood on the gravel, breathing air that smelled of wet grass, woodsmoke and windfall apples. None of it smelled like London, and all of it smelled like home.

A small body collided with her legs. "You came back!"

Alban, at full tilt from the house, boots unlaced, coat half on, grin showing the gap where the tooth had gone. Elizabeth knelt and caught him. Hay and horse and biscuit, and three days of a small boy's worry breaking apart all at once.

"Mr. Henson said you always come back," he said into her neck. "But it was a long time."

"Three days."

"That were a very long time." He pulled the wooden duck from his coat pocket and held it up. Its chipped red bill had lost more paint. "Duck kept count. You owe three stories. One for each night."

"Then you shall have all three, and a fourth for interest!"

She held him out and looked at him. Brown from the stables, hair wanting a cut, something that had once been porridge on his collar. Six years old, and shining with the plain uncomplicated joy of a boy whose people had come home.

"Mr. Henson is right," she said. "I always come back."

Fitzwilliam appeared and set his hand briefly on the boy's head. Alban squinted up at him. "Did you find the lost girl?"

"We found her. She is inside with her sisters."