They walked over to the carriage, where ColonelFitzwilliam shifted beneath his hat and Elizabeth suspected that he had not been asleep at all.
“My cousin is occasionally useful,” Mr. Darcy said, sounding amused. “In matters involving officers, debts, and men without honour, I have learned not to travel without him.”
“I am constantly useful,” said the colonel, sitting up, “but only occasionallythanked. It is a hard life, Miss Bennet, but I bear it with fortitude.” He leaned back into the corner of the carriage, offering them as much privacy as an open door and his complete enjoyment of the situation allowed.
Elizabeth’s smile came then, small but real. There was nothing more to say, and still she could not bear to part from Mr. Darcy.
“I shall bring her home,” he said.
She squeezed his hand. “I know.” She had faith.
He released her at last and entered the carriage as she stepped back. She watched as the colonel shifted his legs to make room, and Mr. Darcy leaned forward to where the colonel sat on the rear-facing seat.
Elizabeth heard nothing, but she saw Mr. Darcy’s mouth as he said the word.
Wickham.
The teasing went out of the colonel at once, as did the idleness. For one moment she saw the military man, solemn, alert, already measuring the road ahead.
Then the step was raised, the door closed, and the wheels began to turn.
The carriage rolled out of the yard, carrying with it her family’s hopes, her own good name, and the man she most trusted to defend them both. She stood in the bright cool morning and watched the dust settle where he had been.
Aunt Gardiner came out to stand beside her and put a handon her arm. The church bells were tolling a quarter hour. A lame horse was being led off to be looked at. The day went on around them, ordinary and enormous.
I shall be Mrs. Darcy, Elizabeth thought,if the world holds together long enough.It was the strangest thought she had ever had. She was, despite everything, delighted by it.
She let her aunt take her in so that she could pack.
EPILOGUE
Even with Richard’s help, they were three full days in London before Darcy had any word of where Miss Lydia might be, and more than once in that time he feared he would fail Elizabeth. But by week’s end, he had found Miss Lydia, just as he had promised.
He had travelled to London intending to do the obvious thing: find Wickham, pay his debts, and make him marry the girl. But by the time the carriage reached the second posting inn, Darcy understood that the obvious thing was also a cruelty. To bind a girl of sixteen for life to the man who had seduced her was not a rescue. It was a sentence.
And that girl, foolish as she was, would be his sister. She was owed the same protection he had given Georgiana.
So he had done the harder thing instead.
He had found them. He had forced Lydia to return to the Gardiners and her angry father. He had paid Wickham, not to marry her, but to go away.
He knew Wickham—his debts, his habits, his vanity, and the people in London who would shelter him. Chief among them was Mrs. Younge, who had once helped Wickham attempt to elope with Georgiana and now let lodgings to the sort of guests who paid not to be found. She knew where Wickham was. She named her price for it, and Darcy paid it without a word.
His focus was locating Miss Lydia. Richard’s was containing Wickham.
Richard had installed himself in the carriage and firmly refused to be left behind. It was a good thing, too, for it was Richard who knew which regiments needed bodies and were not terribly particular about where they came from.
Richard wrote it out in stark detail. Ensign Wickham could sit a horse, wear the uniform well, and make himself agreeable when it profited him. He could also run up debts faster than a mess could hear of them, charm tradesmen into ruinous credit, and leave behind angry fathers, brothers, and husbands if given the leisure to do so. He would be useful if kept busy, watched, and sent abroad at the first respectable opportunity, but could be rather expensive if permitted to be idle.
The northern colonel, being a sensible man who was in London recruiting men to fill his regiment, took the warning as intended. Wickham went north under orders and observation, with no illusion that Colonel Fitzwilliam or Darcy would ever forget where he was.
And Wickham, who had at last in his life met a commanding officer he could neither charm, frighten, nor outwait, counted his five hundred pounds with exaggerated care and went.
Darcy was glad that Elizabeth had accepted him before her letters came, and not only because he had longed for her for so long.
Elizabeth’s acceptance of his hand had also given him standing in the family. He was no longer a stranger thrusting himself into the Bennets’ private disaster; he was to be their son, their brother, their ally. If Miss Lydia Bennet needed to be forced from Wickham’s keeping, he had the right and the duty to see it done.
And he had.