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Bingley was a master of the drawing rooms and widely considered an amiable man, which most of us considered the same as a chucklehead, but I can tell you this. When he set his mind to it, the man could spread balderdash with the best of them. Talking for a half hour without coming within a league of the truth was no harder for him than discussing the previous winter’s hunt or the quality of his new shooting rifle.

“Say, Bingley, I heard you sold your townhouse.”

“Yes, cursed nuisance, these townhouses. You know I have been planning to buy an estate, and now seems a good time.”

“Jolly good show. Where exactly is this estate?”

“Well, you see, I have my eye on several and am just greasing the skids, so to speak.”

On and on it went like that. He never overplayed his hand, never said things that were not to his purpose, and never got caught out. I was introduced as a gentleman of some standing from a vague and ambiguous direction, somewhere that had odd manners and odd ways of speaking, but not an accent so heavy you could make no sense of it. Passing me off as a Scotsman or Irishman might have be amusing but much too difficult. Best to keep your lies simple and as close to the truth as you can. Manchester was mentioned, as well as a few places in Derbyshire, or even occasionally Cornwall and other counties I had never heard of that I suspect Bingley had just heard in some other wild stories.

By the end of a fortnight, the circles he travelled in knew about the sale of his home, and a hint here, a sour look there, and he was considered on the slide to ruin. I had a bit of a chuckle to think about how this was to affect his sister, but he seemed to have put her out of his mind entirely. She was now so unimportant to him that he gave not the slightest thought to her, which I thought would pain her much more than if he had deliberately decided to ruin her. It served her right. She should have married when she had the chance. Oh, she was not destitute. Her dowry was still far more than I, my children, and my grandchildren would ever amass, but she would have to learn to live with the idea of being what she actually was, rather than what she dreamed she was.

“Did you hear about Bingley? I heard it in the greatest confidence, so keep it to yourself. Had to sell his townhouse, you see. Big debts. Gambling. Mistress on the side. Man will be destitute.”

“Hardly surprising for a man with roots so close to trade. Should never have let him into the club.”

With the story in the upper circles in place, we started our hunt for our quarry in the, ah, shall we say, lower circles. As with any hunt, the hounds had to make a lot of noise and circle around mostly aimlessly trying to cover the area before they could get the scent, and that is where we started.

We began in Rat’s Castle with a series of card games. The secret to this type of hunt is that you have to be able to move in the circles the hounds must search, and to do that you have to fit in. For the gentry, that meant you were either well off and in it for the sport, which usually ended with your throat cut, or you were on your way down and desperate to make a soft landing or claw your way back up. We chose the latter.

Walton let it be known that he was a man with money, enough to cover his wagers at least, but that he was somewhat in desperate need to win more often than to lose. He also occasionally let it slip that his name may not be precisely ‘Walton’, so that he could leave enough scent of blood to bring out the predators. That was the dangerous part of the game. We understood there was not the slightest chance we could actually find our prey. He knew the area better than even I did, he spent as much of his life lying as I had, and he seemed at least as good at it from the stories I heard. Besides that, he was a man who did not want to be found. Bingley’s idea of sending a hundred men with piles of money to find him was laughable. No, we had to ensure that the man would find us!

Of course, nobody ever learns to cook without getting burnt, and Bingley had overplayed one hand, which earned him a good beating but not a knifing. It could have been worse, and St Giles was likely to be, once we got there in a few days or weeks.

He replied surprisingly calmly, “Not that good of a show there, old chap, but I know not whether it helped our cause or hurt.”

I thought about it a moment. “We need to show weakness. I suspect it helped, but you may want to find a better way to appear weak.”

He thought about that for a while, then shrugged his shoulders and grimaced at the pain. “I have an idea.”

I helped him to his feet and dragged him off to the less-than-reputable boarding house where we kept lodgings. It was all part of the act, but he certainly was not acting. He would look the part of a man who had been given an education via fists tomorrow, and the story would get about. The beating would serve its purpose.

On the morrow, we would begin our campaign in yet another gambling den, with yet another bunch of disreputable men and the women that hung about with them. More stories would be spun, more balderdash, more blood on the water, more confusion about whether the two of us were confederates or enemies.

Our man would hear about us sooner or later, and we had laced just enough truth into Walton’s balderdash to make us a tempting target, or at least, that was our design. We did not appear to have ready cash, but we tried to make it seem as if we had ready information for the type of man that was just enterprising enough to understand it. The specific names and facts that were let loose into the wind would mean nothing to anybody in the slums except our quarry, but we hoped he would smell the profit and come running for his share.

In the meantime, we would continue to water our gin, lose steadily but not remarkably, move from place to place like ghosts on the wind, and hope our little friend picked up our scent. As I said, it was just like a hunt, except the fox and the hounds would have to trade places from time to time.

I only hoped that when it finally came time for the hunter to pull the trigger, I was not taking the role of the fox.

Frozen

Fitzwilliam

Bloody Bollocks, it was cold! I looked over at Darcy and wondered how he was doing. For my part, my leg hurt abominably, but I had no notion that it had been fatal. The bullet had gone cleanly through and through, so there was no inconvenient need to go digging about with a scalpel, or more likely the army’s favourite tool for injured limbs: the saw. I had been given a dose of laudanum and a liberal dose of gin—part in my mouth and part on the open wound—and stitched up. It would heal, but I would never walk as well as I once had.

We were on our sixth day of travel since leaving Kent, and did not expect to arrive at Pemberley until late afternoon. The carriage had become untenable on the icy roads two days earlier, so we exchanged it for two enormous but placid plough horses with winter shoes to combat the snow and ice. Darcy and I were connoisseurs of horseflesh, but in such conditions, a skittish horse with ordinary shoes would be as certain to cause death as returning to the army to let them take another shot at me.

I was tired, sore, cold, and bored to death, so teasing Darcy seemed the only remedy. We were walking at a pace a grandmother could beat on a normal day.

“Darcy, explain to me again why I am here in this plough beast suffering when every delightful female we know is sitting in Rosings, and this is your estate, not mine.”

Darcy just grunted. “It will build character.”

I snorted in return. “I always believed the time to build character is when there are no further options.”

He slowed the monster he was riding to come beside me. “All right, there are two reasons.”