Page 83 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"I know, James. Five minutes. Stay by me."

She went up to the heavy oak door, and stood in front of the grille, which was a small square of iron bars at the height of her face, and set the lantern down on the step so that its light fell through.

"Mr Wickham," she said.

There was a rustle of straw in the darkness beyond. Then a pale shape came up to the grille, and she saw his face: the handsome easy face of the card table at Mrs Phillips's and the path under the elms in Hyde Park, gone grey and pinched with cold, his fair hair full of straw, the blanket clutched round his shoulders.

"Mrs Darcy," he said. His teeth were chattering. "Come to gloat?"

"No. Come to ask you a question."

"I might answer it," said Wickham, "for a cup of that cider."

Elizabeth turned her head. James, after a moment, very reluctantly, filled a tin cup from the jug and passed it through the bars. Wickham drank it in one long swallow, and leant his forehead against the iron, and closed his eyes.

"Ask," he said.

"Who sent you?"

He opened his eyes and looked at her, and something that was almost a smile moved on his grey face.

"You know who sent me."

"I want to hear you say it."

"Why? It will not help you. I am a deserter with three thousand pounds of debts. My word is worth nothing in any court in England. She will say I am a liar and a thief who bore a grudge against your husband, and every word of it will be true, and they will believe her." He laughed, a short cracked sound. "She told me so herself. She said, nobody will ever believe you, George, over me. That is why I chose you."

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment.

"Then there is no harm in saying her name," she said.

Wickham looked at her through the bars for a long time, in the lantern light, with the straw in his hair and the cold coming off the ice behind him in a pale mist.

"Lady Theodosia Rowe," he said at last. "There. Are you satisfied?"

"Yes," said Elizabeth. "I am. Thank you."

Something in her voice seemed to catch him. He frowned.

"You knew already."

"We have known for a fortnight. We have her handwriting on a letter to Lady Catherine at Christmas, and on thirty letters to Georgiana, and on a note to the printer in Salisbury Court, very likely, by now. And on a letter that was slipped into Georgiana's music case this morning by a boy with a basket of eggs, telling her to come alone to the ice house at six." She paused. "You should not have let her write that one herself, Mr Wickham. It was very foolish of her. She has never been used to being careful. She has never needed to be."

He stared at her. Then, slowly, he began to laugh again. It was not a pleasant laugh, but it was, she thought, the first honest sound she had ever heard him make.

"She was so sure," he said. "So very sure. She said you were a country nobody who would break in a week. She said Darcy would never stand the laughing. She said the girl would come running the moment she saw that handwriting, the way she always has. She said Mrs Reynolds was old and deaf and there was nobody at Pemberley but servants." He shook his head against the bars. "She was wrong about every single one of you."

"She was," said Elizabeth. "What was she paying you?"

"Five hundred to get the girl as far as Gretna. Another five hundred when it was in the papers." He shrugged under the blanket. "I was going to marry her, if you want to know. The little Darcy. I would have had her thirty thousand as well. Theo did not care. She only wanted it in the Post." He looked at Elizabeth through the bars, and for one moment his face was quite naked. "I would not have hurt her, you know. Georgiana. Not really. I was fond of her once. When she was small."

Elizabeth looked at him for a long time.

"I think you believe that," she said at last. "I think you have always believed it, whatever you were doing. That is the saddest thing about you, Mr Wickham. Good night."

She picked up the lantern, and turned away, and walked back up the long lawn towards the house with James beside her. She did not look back. Behind her, in the dark, she heard him call something, but she did not catch the words, and she did not stop.

She did not go to bed. She went up to her blue room and sat in the window seat with her knees drawn up, in her shawl, with his mother's Cowper beside her and the door into his empty room standing open, and looked out across the valley, past the silver sheet of the lake and the black line of the wood, to the pale thread of road that came up through the trees to the turn at the top of the rise.