Page 62 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

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The Park at five o'clock on a fine April afternoon was full of carriages and horses and people who had come to be seen, and Elizabeth walked through the middle of it with her chin up, in her blue-lined straw bonnet, with Hannah at her elbow and a tall footman named James ten paces behind.

She did not look at anyone in particular. She had learned that in the last fortnight. You did not look for the cuts; you let them happen round you, like weather. You walked, and you smiled at the trees, and at the ducks on the Serpentine, and at the children with their hoops, and you kept your eyes on the path. Some people bowed to her today. More than yesterday. Lady Harriet Kerr, the small grey lady from St George's, stopped her carriage and leant out and pressed her hand. The old admiral waved his hat from the rail.

She was nearly at the end of the long walk by the water, where it curved away under the elms, when a gentleman fell into step beside her.

"Mrs Darcy," said George Wickham. "What a very great pleasure."

She did not stop. She did not look at him. She felt Hannah stiffen at her side, and heard James's step quicken behind them, and she lifted her hand, very slightly, without turning her head, and the step slowed again.

"Mr Wickham," she said pleasantly, to the elms. "I understood you were with your regiment in Brighton."

"I was. I am on leave." He laughed, easily, the charming laugh she remembered from Mrs Phillips's card table. He was very well dressed; a new coat, new boots, a gold pin in his neckcloth. "You are looking remarkably well. Marriage agrees with you. Or London does. I hear you have been very much in the public eye."

"I have heard so too."

"And bearing it so bravely. Everybody says so." He matched his step to hers. "I will not keep you long. I have come as a friend."

"You have never been my friend, Mr Wickham."

"Not yet. But I am about to do you a very great service." He reached into his coat and drew out a letter, folded small, a little worn, as if it had been carried about. "I have come into possession of this. I thought you ought to see it before anybody else does. It concerns your husband."

She stopped, then. Not because she wanted to. Because Hannah had stopped dead beside her and would not move.

Wickham held out the letter. After a moment, Elizabeth took it.

It was in Darcy's hand.

Or it was very like it. The same upright strokes, the same long firm downstrokes on the fs and ys, the same small precise capitals. At a glance, from across a room, anyone would have said it was his.

Ned. Very well, I will take your fifty. Find me any girl in England with no name and no money and a pretty enough face and I will marry her within the twelvemonth and bring her to town and set them all by the ears. It will be worth fifty guineas to see my aunt's face. — F. D.

She read it once.

"It was written two years ago," said Wickham gently, at her shoulder. "To Lord Aldridge. After Carlton's dinner. I came by it through a servant of his who was turned off. I have shown it to nobody. Not yet." He paused delicately. "It would be a pity if it were to find its way to the Post. I think your husband's family would find it very painful. And you, of course. Most of all you. But I am not an unreasonable man. I have debts, as you know, and I have been very ill used. Five hundred pounds would put me quite out of reach of temptation."

Elizabeth looked down at the letter in her gloved hands. She looked at it for a long time.

She thought of every letter her husband had ever written her. She had them all, in a box in her green writing desk, ninety-three of them, from the first careful note after the Meryton assembly to the last scrawled line on Twelfth Night. She had read them so often she could have drawn his hand in her sleep. She knew the way he crossed his ts, low and short, never with a flourish. She knew that he signed with his bare initials only to her, and to Richard, and to nobody else on earth; to every other correspondent he was Fitzwilliam Darcy in full. He would never have signed F. D. to Lord Aldridge. She knew he had never in his life called Lord Aldridge Ned; he called him Aldridge, even to his face, even at Cambridge. She knew that he did not write set them by the ears, or any girl in England, or worth fifty guineas to see my aunt's face. He would have been ashamed to.

And she knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that the man who had knelt on the flagstones of Netherfield's conservatory and forgotten every word of his speech had never in his life written a letter like this one.

She raised her head, and looked George Wickham in the face for the first time.

"You have a good forger, Mr Wickham," she said. "But he has never seen my husband write a love letter. I have ninety-three."

And she tore the letter across, and across again, and again, until it was nothing but small cream-coloured scraps in her gloved hands. Then she opened her hands, and let the wind off the Serpentine take them.

Wickham's face changed. It was quick, like a door slamming, and it was ugly, and then it was gone, and he was smiling again. But she had seen it.

"That was rash," he said softly. "There are other copies."

"Then print them," said Elizabeth. "I shall show the Post my ninety-three letters, and they may print those alongside, and all London can judge." She lifted her chin. "I know his hand, sir. And I know his heart. You know neither. Good afternoon."

She turned her back on him and walked on down the path under the elms, with Hannah trotting white-faced beside her. She did not look round. She heard James's heavy tread fall in close behind her, and then, after a moment, Wickham's voice, low and pleasant, pitched just to carry.

"She said you would do that, you know. My patroness. She said you were too proud to pay. She was quite right about you."