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“THERE YOU ARE !” said Mr. Simmons as Elizabeth and Caroline were coming down the stairs. “I have been looking all over for you. I told you to stay where you were.” Then, he cringed. “Oh, apologies, ma’am, but if anything happened to you—”

“Mrs. Younge knows where both my sister and Miss Darcy are,” Elizabeth interrupted. “Mr. Wickham has them both here somewhere.”

“Oh, she knows something,” agreed Mr. Simmons. “She is holding tight to her loyalty to that man for some reason or other, however. She will tell me nothing.”

“Allow us to speak to her,” said Elizabeth.

Mrs. Younge swore up and down she had no idea about either of the girls and it wasn’t until she had confirmed that Mr. Wickham wasn’t in his room and that he had taken his horse from the stables and that Elizabeth and Caroline had both indicated to her, again and again, that Mr. Wickham had told them to seek the girls’ location from her, that she finally caved to their requests and took them to two separate rooms and retrieved both Lydia and Georgiana.

Lydia was animated, boisterous, demanding to know what had become of her husband-to-be, and Georgiana was quiet, but through a long and convoluted questioning, much of which took place in the carriage ride back to the Darcy town house, they got the way of what had happened .

Neither of the girls had been aware of the other.

Mr. Wickham had done it all without involving the other girl in the scheme.

He had taken Lydia yesterday morning, promised her that they would be going to Gretna Green, and indicating they would stop over for the night in London at the boarding house.

He’d deposited her there and then apparently gone directly to seek out Georgiana.

Georgiana had taken some convincing.

He had not seen or spoken to her in over six months, after all. Georgiana explained that he had met her after she was leaving the day school she attended. They had spoken, but she’d ultimately left him to come home.

Then, he’d come back that evening, while Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were at the ball, sneaked into her bedchamber and tried to get her to come. When she had adamantly refused him again and again, he’d said the final thing that had convinced her.

“He said I was already ruined,” said Georgiana.

“He said that, if he wished, he could spread the tale far and wide, tell everyone I was already his. He said that when he was done, he would demand that my brother pay him to take me off his hands and end the scandal. And he said that it didn’t matter what I did, that it was already finished.

I had no say. After I had agreed and was with him, I began to realize it must not be true, but he has this way about him when he is talking.

It becomes ever so hard to think for oneself. ”

“I suppose that’s true,” Lydia said quietly. She had taken the news that Mr. Wickham had some other girl in another part of the boarding house rather hard. Her boisterousness now was quite subdued. “He could talk you into doing nearly anything, couldn’t he?”

But he had done nothing to either of the girls, not so much as kissed them, it seemed, and they both agreed this was true.

Elizabeth thought that it had never quite been about that for Mr. Wickham. It had been about the challenge, as he said. He simply wanted to convince the girls to come with him, to see if he could. Once he had them there, both of them, he didn’t seem to quite know what to do with them.

However, she wasn’t entirely sure if it mattered or not. If the story got out, it would be very damaging to both girls’ reputations and it would affect both families. She was sick about that.

After they had gotten back home, fed both Lydia and Georgiana and sent them off to rest, it was only her and Caroline, sitting together in the downstairs sitting room, both drinking port to calm their frazzled nerves.

They had sent servants after Mr. Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam, sending word for them to come home, that Miss Darcy and Miss Lydia had been recovered.

A servant had also been dispatched with word to the Bennet household.

But this, Elizabeth said, clutching her wine glass, was the real problem. “We are reliant on the servants to hold their tongues, I think. And we cannot control that.”

“We are reliant on servants for all manner of things,” said Caroline. “It is true what Mr. Simmons says, that preserving the good name of Darcy reflects well on them as well. It’s possible this all blows over. After all, no one knows of what befell Miss Darcy last summer.”

“True,” said Elizabeth. “But this, twice now, it is tempting fate. I can hardly think that nothing comes of it a second time.”

“It is not only their tongues that must stay still,” said Caroline. “Mr. Wickham has simply disappeared. We do not know what has become of him or what tales he may tell or spread. Why did you let him go?”

“Well, you and I had no hope of physically stopping him,” said Elizabeth.

“We had some hope,” said Caroline. “The two of us together might have fought him, you know. We’re not entirely helpless.”

Elizabeth considered that, her and Caroline working together to subdue the man. She began to laugh. She almost wished they had attempted it. It might have been a good bit of fun, at that.

Caroline laughed too. “I just don’t like it, his getting away. He should be held to some sort of justice.”

“Hmm,” said Elizabeth, her laughter dying out. “I think he has already suffered, though. I think he has been warped by the amount of suffering he has gone through.”

“But that doesn’t excuse his behavior.”

“No,” agreed Elizabeth. “However, I don’t know that making him suffer more will ever do anything to curb his behavior. He did choose to leave, not to do anything worse.”

“Well, we had caught him! What other choice did he really have?”

“He could have hurt us,” Elizabeth said, dolorous. “He could have kept us at that boarding house somewhere and done awful things to all four of us. If he prevented Mr. Simmons or the footman with us from returning here, perhaps no one would have even known where we were.”

Caroline shuddered. “We didn’t think of any of this before we left here.”

“Yes, it was foolhardy,” said Elizabeth. “I doubt my husband will be pleased.”

The two women sat in silence for some time.

Caroline finished her glass of wine and set it down, sighing. “You must know, what Mr. Wickham said about our matchmaking, Eliza, it is not true.”

“I do,” said Elizabeth. “We never harmed anyone with what we did. We never set out to do the kind of trickery that he was attempting.”

“And even what Colonel Fitzwilliam said last night at the ball,” said Caroline. “I don’t think he can quite understand. What can a man like the colonel know of the plight of women like us, how much hangs in the balance in making the right marriage, how it can change a woman’s fate entirely?”

Elizabeth picked up the bottle of port, poured more into Caroline’s glass and topped off her own. “He cannot,” she said.

“If we have behaved as if we were desperate, Eliza,” said Caroline, “it is because, in some ways, we have been desperate. What I said before, the night before your marriage, about women being pitted against each other? Is that not what happened to us both at the ball, with Lady Matlock working against you? And then also me, by extension? For the colonel to call us Machiavellian, well… I don’t agree. ”

Elizabeth sipped at her wine, thoughtful. “Will you tell him that?”

Caroline considered. “I don’t know. Maybe if it works out between us and I do marry him, maybe then. But until then, I think I’d be foolish to do anything that I think might displease him. And that, you see, makes my point.”

“It rather does, I’m afraid,” said Elizabeth. “But I think you can trust the colonel.”

“I hope I can,” said Caroline with a little smile. “It warmed me that he cared enough to send a message that he would not call. That, even when he was concerned with the wickedness of Mr. Wickham, he was thinking about me.”

“Yes, it speaks well of him,” said Elizabeth. “Dare we even hope that everything works out well for us all? That we escape unscathed into a genuine happy ending?”

“Oh, nothing’s ending, Eliza,” said Caroline. “We have our whole lives ahead of us.”

MR. DARCY AND Colonel Fitzwilliam both returned in time for dinner, though there was no formal dinner in the house that night.

Food was delivered to Lydia and Georgiana in their rooms, and Elizabeth and her husband ate together.

Both Caroline and the colonel had returned to their respective homes by that point.

If she had expected recriminations for her actions from her husband, she was relieved that he had none for her.

He only blamed himself. He felt abundantly stupid not to have thought of the boarding house, and he kept saying that if he had only thought of it, he could have gone straight there in the morning, and everyone would have been saved so much heartache and effort that day.

He was tired, though, smelling of horse and sweat and the road. She stroked his arm and his hair and soothed him, and he said that he was the luckiest man in the world to have a wife such as her.

She had done it again, she supposed, assumed that her husband would take her to task, but he did not do that, it seemed. It was because he trusted her. He knew her heart and her intentions, and he thought the best of her.

“Perhaps I put us needlessly in danger,” she finally allowed. “I am sorry for that.”

“Well, what else could you have done at that point?” he said.

“You could not wait for my return, and it would not be like you to sit about waiting for someone else to take action when you could do it yourself. And, in the end, I think it was likely better. If I had burst in there and threatened him, it may have turned quite ugly. Your approach, talking to him, getting him to give the game up, it was likely the better way of it.”

“I didn’t have an approach,” she said. “And he is simply gone now, and we don’t know where he is.

He has shown that he is quite willing to go after your sister, and he seems to have some fascination with me as well.

I’d like to say that I made some impression on him, that he saw the error of his ways, but I am not sure he is quite capable of that.

He seems twisted in some way, damaged inside. ”

Mr. Darcy raised his head to look at her. “Ah, he told you, did he? About my father?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t have to speak of it.”

“I don’t know either,” Mr. Darcy muttered. There was a long pause. “He isn’t entirely wrong, I suppose. When we were quite young, I think I was jealous.”

“Quite young?” she said. “How young was he?”

“It probably started when he was seven years of age,” said Mr. Darcy.

“And I don’t know what was done, but I know this.

My father treated him like…” His lip curled.

“Like a mistress, truly. They would go places and share a room and he gave him gifts and he would stroke Georgie’s ch eek and go on about how George was his pretty boy.

And what I like to think is that he didn’t actually touch him, though I can’t say, and no one can except George himself. ”

“What does he say?”

“That my father never touched him,” said Mr. Darcy with a shrug. “That it was all very proper.”

“That’s what he said to me,” she said quietly.

“But regardless, that kind of intensive attention given to a child, whether there is touching or not, it is not something a child is prepared for. Not to be adored singularly in that way by an adult, and not to feel as if one has the burden of being responsible for another grown person’s emotions.

Being loved in that way, that kind of way, a child isn’t—can’t—be ready for it. ”

Elizabeth nodded slowly.

“And when I was young, I was jealous of it, of the way my father doted on him and coveted him and… and then one day, I realized it wasn’t love, it was control.

I began to see the way my father was, the way he controlled everything and everyone around him, and I was only glad that he had never done it to me. ”

Elizabeth started. “You don’t think he…”

“It’s crossed my mind,” said Mr. Darcy with a nod.

“It’s crossed my mind that George was a substitution, so that he didn’t have to hurt me.

Yes.” He gazed across the room, his expression blank.

“If that’s the case, perhaps my father had some shred of decency in him somewhere, or he did love me in some way, I don’t know.

And I suppose sometimes when I think that, I’m grateful to him, to Wickham, for bearing the brunt of all of it so I didn’t have to, and this…

this is why I don’t go after him and I don’t punish him and I give him money and I let him make off with my sister, and I… ” He clenched his hands into fists.

She settled her hand on his shoulder. “This is not your fault, Fitzwilliam. This is not your responsibility.”

“It is, though,” said Mr. Darcy in a very soft voice. “He is my responsibility. The sins of the father shall be visited on the child and all of that. ”

“Well, that’s not entirely fair.”

“Perhaps not, but it doesn’t matter.” He looked up at her. “He took your sister, too. He hurt your family. Richard thinks we must do something about him, something final. If you say you think we should, I shall carry it out.”

“You mean kill him.” She recalled he had said it that morning, in fact.

He nodded, turning again to stare blankly into space. “Yes.”

“No,” she said. “Not for me. Not on my account. Not on Lydia’s either. I don’t know what must be done about Mr. Wickham, in truth, but I don’t want his blood on my hands.”

“It would be my hands, Elizabeth.”

She considered. “Do you wish to do it, but wish to have someone else to help shoulder the blame? If you need that from me, then I am here for it. I can help bear it. Would you like me to tell you to kill him?”

He let out a long and shaky breath. “Thank you for that, but no. No, I want him to live. I want him to live somewhere where he is untouched and unharmed, actually. But I should also like him not to touch or harm anyone else.”

“Yes,” she said. “It seems he hasn’t.”

“Well,” said Mr. Darcy, smiling mirthlessly, “everyone involved in this claims it was all so very proper, don’t they? But perhaps they just can’t give it words. And we shan’t force them to, not if they don’t wish it, for that would be monstrous in its own way.”

She swallowed, not liking the implications there.

“But my sister never has to get married,” said Mr. Darcy. “And your sister, if she needs my support and doesn’t wish to be touched by a man ever either, I shall provide that.”

“Fitz, I believe them both,” she said. “When we found them, they did not behave as if they had been…”

He met her gaze. He nodded, drawing in a breath. “Good. I want to believe that. I want to believe that very much.”