Page 54 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Wickham did not look round. He did not see them. He went straight to the settle, and sat down beside the boy, and said something that made the boy grin. Then he took a folded packet from his breast pocket, sealed, and pressed it into the inky hand, together with several coins that gleamed in the firelight. The boy tucked both inside his shirt. Wickham ruffled his cap, laughed, and stood up.

The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

"Now," said Richard very softly, and swung his boots off the bench.

"No." Darcy's hand shot out and caught his cousin's wrist. "Not him. Not yet. He is the messenger. I want the one who sends him."

Richard looked at him for one long second. Then he nodded.

"I follow him," he said. "You take the boy. The printer. Get the paper, whatever it costs. Meet me at home." He dropped a coin on the table and was gone out of the door behind Wickham, a big loose-limbed shape slouching into the dark like any clerk on his way home.

Darcy followed the boy.

Coker's shop was twenty yards down the court, a narrow crooked house with a bow window full of broadsheets and a smell of hot lead and lampblack drifting out of the cellar. The boy darted down the area steps. Darcy went in by the front door, and found himself facing a stout, bald, suspicious man in a leather apron, who took one look at the cut of his boots under Pearce's short coat and his eyes narrowed.

"Shop's shut."

"I have not come to buy a broadsheet," said Darcy. "I have come to buy what that boy just brought you."

There was a silence. Somewhere below, a press was thumping, steady as a heart.

"Don't know what you mean."

"You do. You print The Tattler's Glass. My name is Darcy." He watched the name land. "You have printed three paragraphs about my family in the last month. You are about to print a fourth. I want it. And I want to know who pays you."

Coker licked his lips. "Can't help you, sir. Too late. It's set. Going to press now. And I sold a fair copy to the Post at six, same as always. They pay better than I do for the choice ones." He shrugged. "As for who pays, I couldn't tell you if I wanted to. Comes in a packet, with the money. Same good paper every time, same clerk's hand. I don't ask. I print."

"How much would it take to stop the press?"

"More than you've got, sir, begging your pardon. The Post'll have it in the morning whatever I do." Something that might have been pity crossed the man's heavy face. "I can give you a proof, if you like. Five guineas."

Darcy gave him ten.

He read it under the lamp in the doorway, with the press thumping below his feet, and felt the ground go out from under him.

He walked home. He did not remember the walk. He remembered only the proof in his breast pocket, and the words on it, burning against his chest like a coal.

Richard was waiting in the study, pacing, still in his clerk's coat. He turned as Darcy came in, and his face was grey.

"I lost him," he said. "In Mayfair. He took a hackney as far as Hanover Square and went on foot from there, very fast, down the back lanes, and I lost him in the mews." He stopped. "At the corner of Brook Street."

Darcy looked at him.

"Theo's father's house is in Brook Street," said Richard quietly. "But so are forty others. It proves nothing. I know it proves nothing." He swallowed. "What did you get?"

Darcy took the proof out of his pocket and gave it to him, and watched his cousin read it, and watched the colour leave his face.

#

Elizabeth had not gone to bed. She had told him she would not, and she had not. She was sitting in the green room in her wrapper with a book she had not read a word of, and when she heard two men's footsteps on the stair instead of one, heavy and slow, she knew before the door opened that it was bad.

Darcy came in first. Richard behind him, in a clerk's coat, with his hair on end. Neither of them said anything. Darcy crossed the room and put a long damp strip of paper into her hands, still smelling of lampblack, the ink so fresh it had smudged under his thumb.

She held it to the candle.

A Question for the Drawing Room.

We are informed that among the young ladies to be presented to Her Majesty on Thursday next is a certain Miss D—, sister to that Mr D— of P— whose romantic history has lately so much diverted the Town. The young lady has thirty thousand pounds, and is said to be very shy. She was not always so. Those who were at a certain watering-place upon the Kentish coast last summer recall that Miss D—, then scarcely fifteen, was on the very point of setting out for the North in the company of a young gentleman of no fortune whatever, and was prevented only by the timely arrival of her brother. We make no comment. We only ask, with the greatest respect, whether Her Majesty has been informed.