Page 42 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Bingley went white.

"Or Louisa. One of them." Hurst waved a hand. "No, Caroline, I think. Said a friend of a friend was in town, a very agreeable man, who had never seen the inside of White's and wanted to, and would I be a good fellow and sign him in one evening. So I did." He looked from one grim face to the other, and some faint alarm penetrated the claret. "What? What's the matter? There's no harm in it. Fellows do it every night of the week."

"Which friend?" said Darcy. "Whose friend was he?"

"No notion. Didn't ask. You'd have to ask Caroline." Hurst reached for his newspaper again. "Never ask Caroline anything, myself. Takes too long."

They walked back along Pall Mall in silence. It was raining a little, the fine cold drizzle of a London March, and the lamplighters were out early.

"It cannot be," said Bingley at last. His voice was not steady. "Darcy. She is my sister. She is proud and she is sharp and she has never forgiven Elizabeth for being loved by you instead of her. I know all that. I have always known it. But she would not do this. Not the paper. Not Wickham. She would not."

Darcy said nothing.

"She would not," said Bingley again, more quietly, as though he were trying to believe it. "She would not do this to Jane."

"She knew about the inn at Whetstone," said Darcy. "And the builders, and the green room. She knew what Elizabeth wore at the Pemburys' though she was not there. And she asked Hurst to take a fair-haired friend of a friend into White's the very week somebody wrote won in the margin of the book." He stopped walking, and turned, and put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I do not say she did it. I do not know. But I must ask her, Charles. And I would rather you were there when I do."

Bingley looked at him for a long moment in the rain. Then he nodded, once, the way a man nods when he has been told a limb must come off.

"Thursday," he said. "Louisa's musicale. She will be there. She will be in her element." He tried to smile, and could not. "God help us, Darcy. I hope you are wrong."

So did Darcy. He found, walking home alone through the wet streets, that he hoped it very much. Not for Caroline's sake. For Bingley's, and Jane's. And because something about it all felt too tidy, like a stage set with every piece arranged just so, and he could not shake the feeling that the person who had arranged it was standing somewhere in the wings, watching him walk into place.

#

The Hursts' house, Grosvenor Street. Thursday, 26th March

Mrs Hurst's drawing room held forty chairs and a harp, and on Thursday night it held forty people who had very plainly come to see whether Mrs Darcy would dare to show her face.

She dared. She sat in the second row between her husband and her sister, in dark blue silk, and listened to a young Italian soprano sing three arias very sweetly and a fourth rather flat, and applauded all four with exactly the same pleasant smile. She did not look at Miss Bingley, who sat at the end of the front row in apricot satin with an ostrich plume, turning now and then to glance back over her shoulder with an expression of the most lively satisfaction.

In the interval, while the company rose and drifted towards the tea room, Bingley went up to his sister and said something in her ear. Elizabeth watched Miss Bingley's plume stop moving. Then Caroline rose, with a look of faint surprise, and followed her brother out of the room and across the landing, and Elizabeth and Darcy and Jane followed after.

Mr Hurst's library was small and brown and smelt of cigars, and had evidently never been used for reading. Bingley shut the door. Caroline turned round in the middle of the carpet, looked at the four of them, and raised her eyebrows.

"Well," she said. "This is very mysterious. Have I won a prize?"

"Caroline," said Bingley. His voice was not quite steady. "Did you ask Hurst to take a man called Wakefield into White's, at the end of February?"

Caroline stared at him. "What?"

"A fair-haired man. Very pleasant. Hurst says you asked him to sign him in."

"I—" For the first time since Elizabeth had known her, Caroline Bingley looked genuinely at a loss. "Yes. I suppose I did. What of it? Why on earth—"

"His name is not Wakefield," said Darcy. "It is Wickham. George Wickham. And while he was there, he found an old joke in the betting book, and three days later it appeared in The Tattler's Glass, dressed up as a scandal. And copies of it were sent to my wife and to me, sealed, with the paragraph marked."

There was a silence.

Elizabeth watched Caroline's face, very closely, because she had come here to watch it. She had expected guilt, or fear, or a flash of triumph quickly hidden. She saw none of those. She saw Caroline Bingley's colour drain slowly out of her cheeks, and her lips part, and then, rising up from underneath like a flame, a look of pure, blazing, affronted fury.

"You think I did it," said Caroline.

Nobody answered.

"You think I wrote to a scandal sheet." Her voice climbed. "You think I, Caroline Bingley, sat down with pen and ink and composed a paragraph for The Tattler's Glass, which is printed on paper I would not use to line a birdcage, and read by milliners' girls and footmen, and sent it off with a shilling to some grubby little printer in Fleet Street." She laughed, a high cracked laugh. "I have been called many things. I have never been called vulgar."

"Caroline—" said Bingley.