Page 24 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

"Good." Alban weighed this. "Miss Maisie missed you too. She bit Mr. Henson twice."

Fitzwilliam's mouth twitched. "I shall apologize to Mr. Henson."

"He said he didn't mind. He said she's got good teeth."

Elizabeth laughed. It surprised her, coming up from somewhere beneath the tiredness and the stone, real as anything. Alban beamed, because making a lady laugh was, at six, among the finest accomplishments available to a man.

Inside, the house was warm and smelled of beeswax and rising bread, and Mrs. Bennet descended upon them in the front hall in full sail. "My poor Lydia! My poor, poor girl! Three days of fever! She might have died! She might have been carried off by the influenza, and then where should we all be?"

Mama had taken to the cover story at once. She had been born for it. Jane reported she had already told Mrs. Long, Mrs. Phillips, Lady Lucas, and the apothecary's wife. By tomorrow it would be all over Meryton. By Sunday it would be established fact.

"Mama," Lydia said, small.

Mrs. Bennet swept her into an embrace that was all bosom, perfume and magnificent suffocating love. "My baby. You shall have broth and blankets, and I shall sit with you and read to you, and you shall not lift one finger until the color is back in your cheeks."

Lydia closed her eyes and leaned in, too tired to do anything else.

Then Mrs. Bennet pulled back, held her daughter at arm's length, and studied her face. And the study was not fluttering nor theatrical. "This is not a fever," she said quietly. Her eyes came up to Elizabeth's over Lydia's shoulder, and they missed nothing. "I have nursed five daughters through fevers. A fever makes the skin hot and the eyes dull. This girl has been crying for days. Her heart is broken, not her health."

The hall went still. Elizabeth opened her mouth.

Mrs. Bennet lifted one hand. "I do not need to know. I do not want to know. Whatever has happened, Lydia is home, and she is mine, and I will tell every soul in Meryton it was a fever, and I will believe it myself, for that is what mothers do when their children need them to." She smoothed Lydia's hair. "But do not insult me by thinking I cannot see my own daughter's face."

And she gathered Lydia back against her bosom and resumed the fussing without another word on the subject.

Heavens! Elizabeth stood on the stair and revised twenty years of assumptions. Had her mother always known more than anyone credited, and simply chosen not to say?

Fitzwilliam caught her eye across the hall and tilted his head toward the corridor. She followed him into the small study, where he took a folded letter from his coat. Jane's hand, hurried and slanting, the ink blotted twice.

"Jane's. You read it in London. Read it again here, where he meant it."

Elizabeth read it twice, and the homecoming warmth went out of her. "Graves?" she said.

"Almost certainly. He sent a man for Lydia. He sent a man for Alban. He is testing our gates."

"Alban is six years old!"

"Alban is a witness. Braithwaite does not see a child. He sees a loose thread."

She set the letter down. The fear was there, cold, old and familiar. But something sat beside it now, something that had been building since the cottage, the cellar and the chain. A clean fury that cleared her head. "Then we stop him. Not Wickham. Not the distraction. The source. Graves. His offices, his letters, whatever he carries out of that cell into the world."

Fitzwilliam looked at her, and she knew the look. It was the one he wore when she said aloud the thing he had been thinking. "Richard returns within two days," he said. "Then he and I will go to London. Gardiner's contacts, Gill's intelligence. We find Graves, and we cut the hands off the man in the cell."

"Good." She folded Jane's letter into her pocket. "And Fitzwilliam."

"Yes?"

"When you find Graves, remember that he sent a man to ask after a six-year-old boy who sleeps with a broom beside his bed, because it is the only weapon he knows."

Something hard settled in his face. "I will remember."

She rose on her toes and kissed him, brief and fierce, in the half-dark of the little study with Mrs. Bennet's fussing coming through the wall. His hand found the small of her back and kept her there a moment, grateful. Not because she was fragile but because she was tired, he was warm, and the next fight had not started yet.

"Now," she said. "I am going to eat whatever Cook has made, and sit with my sisters, and sleep twelve hours." She sighed. "In another life I would walk two miles in the morning without a word to anyone to ease my spirit. In this one I shall go twice round the shrubbery, with a groom twenty paces behind me. Then we begin."

"Tomorrow," he agreed. "And when this is over, I will walk every mile of Derbyshire with you, and no one twenty paces behind."

Word came up from Longbourn with the afternoon: Mr. Browne was sitting up in bed, eating broth with his good hand and demanding of Hill when he might see his horses. And Fitzwilliam gave a sealed note to a servant for the London post, addressed to Mrs. Sophia Fitzclarence. A small debt of honor, paid.