Page 9 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

He was good. That was what turned her stomach. Charming without being florid. Warm without presuming. He praised Lydia's beauty, naturally, but also her wit, her spirit. Spirit! A more honest man would have written recklessness. He told her droll little stories of camp life. He built her a future one letter at a time, and he made it specific, a cottage in Surrey, a modest income, a happy small life, because specific things seemed real. He never mentioned money. He never asked for a single thing. He only offered himself, patiently, letter after letter, until a girl half in love with the idea of him was wholly in love with the fiction of him.

It was the same method. The very same that Fitzwilliam had described at Ramsgate. The false modesty, the careful ear for what the girl most wanted to hear. Georgiana had wanted rescue from loneliness. Lydia wanted rescue from being the youngest and the silliest. Wickham had learned what each girl wanted and promised her exactly that.

Twelve letters. Elizabeth set them aside, and looked at what lay beneath, and went still.

A single sheet. Heavier paper than the letters, cream, no watermark. A different hand entirely, small, controlled, angular. Older than Wickham. More careful than Wickham.

Your officer will find these rooms adequate and discreet. A friend.

Below it, an address. Cheapside. Lodgings.

She turned the paper over. Nothing. She brought it to her nose.

Bay leaves.

Faint, and unmistakable, and the floor of Lydia's bedroom tilted toward a cellar in Hastingleigh. That scent lived in her nightmares alongside smoke and damp stone and the cold bite of iron at her ankle.

Her hands shook. She pressed her palms flat on the coverlet and breathed the way Jane had taught her in the bad nights in the spring. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. She was at Longbourn. The chain was gone. Her ankle was bare. Braithwaite sat in irons.

And from that cell, the man was still moving pieces. The lodgings arranged. The note written. A friend! The man who had branded her called himself a friend.

Would she ever be free of him?

Elizabeth packed the letters, the note, and the key back into the box and carried it down.

Fitzwilliam stood in the hall, come fresh from the study, wearing the stillness that meant the conversation had been hard. Through the open door her father stood at the window with his back to the room, shoulders bowed.

"How did he take it?" she asked.

"Badly. Which is to say, honestly." His eyes went to the box. "You found the key."

"Sewn into the lining of a new bonnet." She opened the lid on the hall table. "Twelve letters from Wickham. Patient, charming, relentless. And this."

He read the note. His eyes moved to the address. Then he turned the paper over as she had done, and she saw the scent reach him. His nostrils flared. His fist closed on the edge of the paper. "Bay leaves," he said.

"Braithwaite arranged the lodgings. He gave Wickham the very rooms to take her to."

"Yes."

"He is directing this still. From a cell. Through someone."

"His solicitor, most likely. A man called Graves. I have heard the name in connection with certain aristocratic scandals. He works at the edge of the law, and over it, when the fee suits."

Elizabeth took the note back and folded it with care. "This is evidence. For the trial."

"Yes."

"Good. Then something useful has come out of this wretched box."

Her father appeared in the study doorway. He looked ten years older than at her wedding. Gray-faced, cravat loose, his spectacles dangling forgotten in one hand. "I heard," he said. "Braithwaite. The address."

"Papa."

"I let her run wild." His voice was flat and showed himself no mercy. "I let her giggle and flirt and throw herself at every officer in the county, because correcting her required effort, and I preferred my library. I watched her grow into exactly the sort of girl a man like Wickham feeds upon, and I made a joke of it, because a joke was cheaper than a conversation."

"Papa, you could not have known⁠—"

"I knew she was foolish. I knew she was vain. I knew she trusted anything in a red coat, and I found it amusing." He put on his spectacles. "I am going to London."