Page 90 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"I kept her letters," he said. "All of them. Every note she ever sent me. Eleven. I never trusted her further than I could throw her. I knew she would leave me to hang the moment it suited her, and I wanted something to take her down with me, if it came to that." He shrugged. "They are sewn into the lining of my saddle, in the stable at the Green Man. The left flap, under the girth strap. Give me pen and ink and I will write you your confession, Darcy. And then you may go and fetch them."

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Wickham wrote for an hour and a half, at the library table, with his wrists unbound and a constable at each shoulder and Mr Fenwick in the window seat watching him like a hawk. He wrote fast, in his easy slanting hand, without stopping to think, as though he had been composing it in his head all night in the ice house. Eleven pages. At the end he signed it, and Mr Fenwick signed it, and the two constables made their marks, and Darcy read it through once, standing, and put it inside his coat.

Then he rode to Lambton with Mr Fenwick and James in the long gold evening, to the Green Man.

The landlord was a round red nervous man named Budd, who had heard by now, as all Lambton had heard, that the pleasant fair gentleman who paid in gold had been taken up by Mrs Reynolds at the ice house, and who seemed to feel that this reflected very poorly on the Green Man. He showed them to the stable himself, wringing his hands, and stood in the doorway with a lantern while Darcy knelt in the straw beside a good leather saddle on its tree, and turned back the left flap, and found under the girth strap a neat row of new stitches in the lining.

He cut them with his penknife. Inside, flat against the leather, wrapped in a piece of oiled silk against the damp, there was a packet of letters.

He did not open them there. He rode home with the packet buttoned inside his coat against his chest, beside Wickham's confession and Elizabeth's two letters, and did not say a word to Mr Fenwick the whole two miles.

He opened them in the study, alone, at nine o'clock, with the lamp lit and the curtains drawn.

There were eleven, as Wickham had said. Half-sheets of good cream paper, folded small, every one in the same pretty sloping hand, with the small gs hooked like fishhooks. None of them signed with more than an initial. None of them needed to be.

The first was dated the twentieth of February, while he and Elizabeth were still in the little white house by the sea. It began, Mr Wakefield, a mutual friend tells me you have reason to dislike a certain family in Derbyshire as much as I do. It went on to name a sum.

He read them all. He read them in order, slowly, one after another, the whole plan laid out before him in her own hand, week by week, like the pages of a play. The betting book: Mr Hurst will take you in if Miss Bingley asks him. She will ask him if I ask her. She would walk into the Serpentine if I asked her. The first paragraph. The inn at Whetstone: his wife's father is so proud of her letters he reads them aloud at table; the Bingley woman was there and repeated it to me word for word. The door, and good-morrow: the dear little sister chatters to me of everything, and I have been in the room. A boast about the letter that had sent Lady Catherine into Hertfordshire at Christmas. Ramsgate.

He had to stop at Ramsgate. He sat for a while with his hand over his eyes.

The child told me everything, in October, weeping on my shoulder. I swore on my mother's grave. My mother would have laughed. She never cared for Georgiana either. Print it on the Tuesday before the Drawing Room, so that she has time to hope first.

He went on. There was Hyde Park, and the forgery: his hand is easy enough; he writes like a clerk. There was Pemberley, the last: she will be in the country with only servants and an invalid. Take the girl to Gretna. Marry her if you like. I do not care what becomes of her, only that it is in every paper in England by June, and that he knows it happened because he chose that woman over me.

Over me.

He read that line several times.

Then he turned over the last letter, and found that there was something written on the back of it. It was not addressed to Wickham at all. It looked like the draft of something, crossed out and written over, in the same hand but faster and more careless, the way a person writes when they are writing only to themselves.

I waited six years. I sat at my godmother's table every Christmas and every Season and waited for him to look at me. I learned to ride because he rode. I read his books. I never once asked him for anything. I thought that was what he wanted: a woman who asked for nothing. And he walked into a country assembly in a county he had never heard of and gave everything to the first impertinent little nobody who laughed at him.

They say he built her a door.

Darcy sat in the lamplight with the letter in his hand for a very long time.

He tried to remember Theodosia Rowe. He tried to remember her face at his aunt's Christmas table, and in the hunting field at Matlock, and across the ballroom at the Matlocks' spring balls, year after year after year. He could barely do it. He could remember a fair head, and a quiet voice, and a grey silk gown. He could not remember one single word she had ever said to him.

She had waited six years for him to look at her. And he had never once looked.

He did not feel sorry for her. He found that he could not, not after Ramsgate, not after so that she has time to hope first. But he felt something else, heavy and cold, lodged under his breastbone like a stone. It was very like shame.

The study door opened, very quietly. He did not have to look up to know who it was.

Elizabeth came across the room in her wrapper, and stood beside his chair, and looked down at the letters spread across the desk in the lamplight. She did not ask what they said. She only put her hand on his shoulder, and waited.

After a while, without a word, he handed her the last one, turned over, so that she could read the back.

She read it. He watched her face in the lamplight, and saw it go very still.

"They say he built her a door," she said softly.

"I never looked at her," said Darcy. "In six years. I do not think I ever spoke ten words to her. I did not know she was there."

Elizabeth put the letter down on the desk, very gently, face down. Then she sat down on the arm of his chair, and took his head against her breast, and held it there.