Page 98 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

He was looking at her now. It was far too late, and she knew it.

The music began. She turned away, and curtseyed to her partner, and began to dance.

Darcy felt a hand slip through his arm. He did not need to look down.

"She knows," said Elizabeth softly.

"Yes."

"She is dancing anyway."

"Yes." He watched the white and silver go down the set, and turn, and come back up it, graceful and light and perfectly controlled. "She was always very brave. I never noticed that either."

Elizabeth's hand tightened on his arm, and she said nothing more. But she stayed beside him at the top of the stairs through the whole of the first set, and did not look away from the dancers once.

#

Lady Matlock's small sitting room was a pretty, square, yellow room off the first landing, with a fire, and a round table, and a window over the square, and a door that shut out the music from the ballroom so completely that you could hear the clock tick.

They were all there when Theodosia came in: Lady Matlock in the chair by the fire, and Lady Catherine beside her like a black granite pillar. Darcy by the window. Georgiana on the sofa, very pale, with Anne beside her holding her hand. And at the round table in the middle of the room, in a gown of apricot satin with a single ostrich plume, sitting very straight with a small wooden box on the table in front of her, Caroline Bingley.

And Elizabeth, standing by the door, which she closed behind Theodosia with a small quiet click.

Theodosia stopped in the middle of the room.

Elizabeth watched her look round at them, one face after another. She watched her see Caroline, and the box, and falter for the first time, just for a moment, the way a dancer falters on a turn. Then she recovered. She smiled, a little puzzled, a little amused, and turned to her godmother.

"Godmama? What is this? What friends?"

Lady Matlock did not answer. She only looked at the round table.

On it, beside Caroline's box, were eleven small half-sheets of good cream paper, spread out in a row. Beside them, a bundle of letters tied with a faded blue ribbon. Beside that, a single sheet of heavy cream paper folded in three: the letter from Rosings. And beside that, eleven pages in an easy slanting hand, signed at the bottom by George Wickham and witnessed by Mr Fenwick, justice of the peace for the county of Derby.

Theodosia looked at them for a long time.

Elizabeth watched the colour go out of her face. It went slowly, from the brow downwards, like water draining from a basin, until the perfect English complexion was as white as the gauze of her gown. But her voice, when it came, was perfectly steady.

"I do not know what these are."

"They are your letters, Theodosia," said Lady Matlock. "To George Wickham. From the twentieth of February to the twentieth of April. Every one. He kept them."

"Wickham." Theodosia's lip curled, very slightly. "Godmama. The man is a liar and a forger and a thief. Everyone knows it. Fitzwilliam knows it better than anybody. He could forge any hand in England. He forged Fitzwilliam's, did he not? In the Park?" She turned to Darcy, with a look of wide hurt appeal. "You have always disliked me. I have never known why. And now you have found a way—"

"He did not forge these," said Caroline Bingley.

Everybody turned.

Caroline had not moved from the table. She sat very upright in her apricot satin with her plume trembling, and she opened the lid of the little wooden box in front of her, and took out a small packet of notes tied with pink ribbon.

"Eleven," she said. "From you to me, Lady Theodosia. Over six years. Thanks for flowers. Regrets for dinners. All very pretty and very distant. And one, in February, that I burned, asking me as your particular friend to have Mr Hurst take an agreeable young man of your acquaintance into White's." Her voice shook, very slightly. "I kept the others. I used to take them out and look at them. I have never been so ashamed of anything in my life." She untied the ribbon, and laid the pink-ribboned notes on the table, beside the eleven cream half-sheets. "Look at the gs."

"I have been reading your letters since I was twelve years old," said Anne de Bourgh quietly, from the sofa. "You make them like fishhooks. You always have."

"So does half of London," said Theodosia. But her voice had gone thin.

"Theo."

It was Georgiana. She had not moved from the sofa. She sat with her hand in Anne's, very white, with her eyes on Theodosia's face, and her voice was so soft it was barely more than a breath.