Page 45 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

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The chair had been a small one, a spindly gilt thing that had stood by the study window for twenty years, and which his father had never liked. It lay in three pieces on the hearthrug. Darcy looked at it, and felt neither better nor worse, and rang for Pearce to take it away.

Then he sent for Mrs Dawes.

She came at once, in her black silk, with her keys at her waist and her mouth set in a hard straight line, and he saw that she had seen the Post. Of course she had. The whole servants' hall had seen it by now. Pearce ironed the papers every morning before they went up.

"Mrs Dawes," he said. "Sit down."

She did not sit. She stood in front of his desk with her hands folded at her waist, very upright, very pale.

"You will want to know, sir," she said, before he could go on, "whether it was one of us."

"I must ask."

"You must, sir. I know it. I have been asking myself since seven o'clock." Her voice was quite steady. "I have been in this house thirty years. I came as a kitchen maid when your mother was a bride. There are two-and-twenty of us under this roof, and I have hired every one of them but Pearce, and I would stake my life on nineteen. The other three are new since Christmas: a boy in the stables, the second laundry maid, and the girl who does the fires on the second floor." She drew a breath. "The fire girl goes into madam's green room every morning at six to lay the grate. I have already spoken to her. She cannot read, sir. Not a word. I have tried to teach her myself."

Darcy looked at her. She looked back, unflinching, and he saw that her eyes were wet.

"And madam's maid?"

"Hannah would cut off her own hand first, sir. She thinks madam hung the moon. She has been crying in the linen room this hour."

Darcy sat back in his chair. He thought of Mrs Dawes giving Elizabeth her keys on the first morning, and saying she would have liked you. He thought of Hannah, a plain freckled Hertfordshire girl whom Elizabeth had brought from Longbourn because she was a friend of Mrs Hill's niece, and who looked at her mistress the way Georgiana did.

He did not know how to be certain. He only knew that if he began suspecting the people who lived under his roof, the person who had written that paragraph would have won something far worse than fifty guineas.

"Thank you, Mrs Dawes," he said. "I believe you. Tell Hannah to stop crying. Tell the whole hall, if you like, that I do not suspect them. And tell them that if anybody from outside this house tries to talk to any of them about my wife, or my sister, or anything that happens under this roof, for money or for anything else, I want to know. There will be a reward for it. A large one."

Mrs Dawes's mouth trembled, just once. Then she dropped him a curtsey, deeper than any she had given him since he was a boy, and went out.

Pearce came in with the second post a quarter of an hour later. There were four letters on the salver. Three were bills. The fourth was from Matlock House, in his aunt's small upright hand.

Fitzwilliam,

Your uncle has seen this morning's Post. He is extremely displeased, and I am obliged to tell you that he thinks it best, in the present state of the town's talk, that the dinner we spoke of for Sunday next should be postponed. I will not pretend I agree with him in every particular. But I must live in his house, and he is not a man who changes his mind in a morning.

I will say this, since I think you will not hear it from anyone else. Somebody is very well informed about your household. I should look to it, if I were you.

Georgiana's presentation is not affected. I shall call for her on the ninth as we arranged.

A. M.

He read it twice, and put it down, and sat for a long time looking at the fire.

It was the first door to close that he truly minded. Not Lady Castlereagh's, or Lady Pembury's, or White's. His own family's. And the worst of it was that his aunt had been trying, in her own cold careful way. She had opened a crack. And somebody had seen it, and reached through, and pulled it shut again.

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It was nearly midnight before they were alone.

The day had been long and hateful. There had been no callers, not one, which was worse than a room full of people staring. Georgiana had cried twice, once over the paper and once over nothing. Jane had come at three with Bingley and sat with Elizabeth in the green room holding her hand, and Elizabeth had watched her sister's eyes go, once, to the little brown book on the desk, and had felt sick at herself for noticing.

Now the house was quiet. The fire in her bedroom had burned down to a red glow. She lay on her side in the big bed with the curtains drawn back, in the dark, and listened to her husband moving about next door, and then his step in the doorway with no lock, and then the bed dipping as he got in beside her.

He did not say anything. He only put his arm over her, and drew her back against his chest, and buried his face in her hair, and lay there breathing.

After a while she said, into the pillow, "You broke a chair."