Page 37 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

To her husband, everything. The diary, the russet cloak, the morning room, the recorded date. Collins does not know what he has given us. The diary is a contemporaneous record, written by a man who could not invent anything if his living depended upon it. She added the morning's other news. Mr. Bingley has informed Miss Bingley that if she cannot stop undermining this family, he will arrange her separate lodgings in London. Jane heard it. Jane then asked him to tea. I believe we may expect news from that quarter soon. I gather from the same conversation that there is a thing you have known since the summer and have not told me. I shall hear it from you, sir, and not from a parlor door.

And she closed: Come home when you can. I find I am better at this when you are beside me, though I shall not say so in person, as it would make you insufferable. Your wife, who misses you, and who is also making excellent progress as a strategist without you, which you should find both reassuring and slightly alarming.

To Charlotte, three friendly lines: might she put somewhere safe the book Mr. Collins keeps on the third shelf of his study? And give it to no one who did not bring a line in Elizabeth's own hand. No explanation. Charlotte would not ask. She had always helped first and understood later.

Charlotte's went by the afternoon post, where three friendly lines would draw no eye. Her husband's went by hand, with the groom who carried his letters to her and hers back to him. Then she went to look in on Lydia.

The blue sitting room was empty. Lydia was in the corridor outside it, on the floor, back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees. "I cannot do it," she said. Flat. Not crying. Worse than crying. "Kitty is trying to teach me the flowers and my hands will not do it right and I am so angry I could break every vase in this house."

Elizabeth sat down on the floor beside her. The boards were cold. She said nothing.

"I keep thinking about him," Lydia said. "Not missing him! I make up speeches. Whole speeches, Lizzy, very cutting, and I never made a speech in my life. Then I remember he would not care a fig, and I want to break a vase." She thumped her head back against the wall. "He is stuck in my head like a tune I hate. How does one get a tune out?"

"One hums louder ones. It passes."

"When?"

"I do not know. But it will."

Lydia pressed her forehead to her knees. Then she straightened, wiped her face with the back of her hand, and stood. "I am going back in. The flowers are stupid, but they are better than sitting on a cold floor feeling sorry for myself."

She went in. Kitty looked up from the vase and did not ask. She simply held out a stem. "This one next. Cut it here."

Lydia took it. The vase held late chrysanthemums and a dark sprig of holly. Kitty showed her where to cut, and the lopsided arrangement came balanced. Lydia frowned at the flowers with real concentration, not the performed kind.

Elizabeth watched from the doorway and did not interrupt. It was the most hopeful thing she had seen all week.

Back in the study, the other thought arrived.

Collins had told her about Braithwaite's visit in a carrying voice, in a room with open doors. He could not keep a thought inside his head for the time it took to cross a room. And Graves knew the name of a foal in her stable.

She had kept Collins's pen out of the mails, at least. But what of his tongue? By supper he would have told the Lucases. By Sunday he would have told Meryton. The diary sat on an open shelf in a parsonage study in Kent, thirty miles from Graves's chambers.

Elizabeth picked up her pen and wrote a third letter, a short one.

Collins has a parish diary that places Braithwaite at Rosings. Charlotte is keeping it for us. Collins will have told half of Meryton by Sunday. Send a man to Hunsford, and get it to Thornton before Graves learns it exists. I enclose a line for Charlotte. She will give it up to no one without it.

She gave it to the fastest servant in the house. Then she sat listening to her sisters in the next room. We are in a race now, she thought. And how fast was the other side running?

CHAPTER 12

Richard had ridden in from London the day before. His aunt had been asleep, and Anne had not come down to dinner. He had rehearsed the conversation twice in his room that morning and once on the stairs. He had the facts ordered. He had the implications sorted. He had no recommendations worth a damn because the woman he was about to brief was not a subordinate officer, and the operation could not be mapped on paper.

He found Alban in the stable yard first, sitting on an overturned bucket beside Miss Maisie's stall, feeding something to a chestnut filly that stood not quite as high as his shoulder. The filly had a crooked white blaze. Hers was the expression of a young animal that had lately discovered it could bite and had been applying the discovery with enthusiasm.

"That's Nell," Alban said, though Richard had not asked.

"I see."

"She was born while you was gone. She's bit Mr. Pratt twice and Mr. Henson three times, and she ate Mr. Henson's hat." The boy's face was grave. "She dinna mean harm by it. She's young."

"A generous interpretation."

"Mr. Darcy says we must be generous with young things, 'cause they don't know the rules yet."

Richard looked at him. Six years old. A broom beside his bed, a foal in his charge, and a corporal posted at the gate because men he had never met wished to use him as a weapon against the people who loved him. Should he not have been fretting over Latin verbs? "Mr. Darcy is right," Richard said. He did not add the other thing he was thinking, which was that some men never learned the rules and expected generosity all the same.

He went inside. Netherfield was doing its October best, fires in every room, each doorway a border between temperatures, and he did not need directions to the sickroom because all the house's quiet traffic flowed toward it. Mrs. Jenkinson going up with a tray. Jane Bennet on the landing with a hymnal. Servants with linens and broth. They wore the careful faces of people tending someone who frightened them. They had not stopped caring for her anyway.