Page 20 of In Want of a Suspect
“Thank you,” Darcy said, gladdened by her willingness to consider other options. If they were lucky, they’d find this villain without having to bother with Josette Beaufort.
Lizzie smiled as if she could read his thoughts. “Half the trouble of finding a good suspect is eliminating the bad ones.”
After seeing Lizzie and Guy off at Longbourn & Sons, Darcy ordered the carriage to take him to the courthouse straightaway.
As it turned out, the paperwork for a search permit took far longer to fill out than he’d anticipated, and then when he finally handed it off to a serious-looking clerk with heavy lines around his eyes from squinting at too many documents, it was past midafternoon. Knowing that it would take a while for his application to work its slow way through the cogs of bureaucracy, Darcy ducked out to a nearby pub, popular with other solicitors, for a late midday meal. By the time he got back, the clerk still had no answer for him, so Darcy paced about for three-quarters of an hour. He’d pay for it later at work, but he couldn’t help it—he was invested in the case now, too. And it was all because of Josette Beaufort.
It had been such an awkward time in his life. He’d barely been out of school and was struggling under the weight of his father’s expectations and his own ambitions. Wickham had been around, making a muck of things, and Darcy had felt stretched in too many different directions. Courting Josette had felt... nice. She hadn’t expected very much of him except for his attention and respect. Proposing had felt expected, even if his heart hadn’t stirred when he looked at her.
Well, to be fair, no lady had ever stirred his heart until he met Lizzie. And even then, he mostly felt exasperation at first.
For Josette to reappear in his life now, after so much time, felt disorienting. He could hardly imagine Lizzie and Josette in the same room, so different they were. And now with Lizzie in his life, it seemed laughable that he’d ever considered marrying Josette. There was nothing wrong with her, of course, and he’d truly never minded her French parentage. But Josette was reserved, proper, and careful to speak. She was rarely animated, although she wasn’t without passion. She bore the injustices that society dealt her with a stoicism that Darcy had admired at the time.
Lizzie, on the other hand, spoke her mind loudly and frequently. Darcy preferred to think of her as unconventional rather than improper because, as it turned out, Lizzie had impeccable manners... just very little patience for foolishness or injustice. Lizzie was like a bubbling brook whose passions burst forth in great spurts; and while he suspected that she didn’t complain nearly half as much as she could about the injustice of being a female in society, she made no secret of how she felt about said injustices.
Lizzie was also incredibly persuasive, which is why he was wearing a rut in the courthouse floor instead of sitting at his desk back at Pemberley. Yet strangely, Darcy found that he didn’t mind very much. She had a knack for picking up interesting cases, that was for certain.
“Mr. Darcy?” a clerk called out, and all heads swiveled in hisdirection. He turned and stalked up to the desk.
“Yes?”
The clerk slid across his application for a search permit. “Denied,” he reported in a bored tone.
“What!” Darcy snatched up the paper and inspected the bottom of the document, where the six-letter word was clearly spelled out, along with the magistrate’s signature. “Why?”
The clerk seemed used to such questions, for he didn’t show any emotion or interest. “Not for me to know.”
Darcy had expected the paperwork to take some time, but he hadn’t expected the application to bedenied. He scoured the bottom of the page for some reason. Had he missed something, some technicality that he’d overlooked in his rush?
But there was no explanation.
“Where’s Lord Templeton?” he demanded.
The clerk gave him a tired look. “No appeals.”
“But...” Darcy looked down at the paper again. “I made no mistakes in this form. This should not have been denied.”
“No appeals,” the clerk repeated, then pointedly looked beyond Darcy. “Next.”
Darcy was forced to step aside, but he wasn’t about to give up. He’d never had a request denied outright without a legitimate reason. Had he inadvertently done something to put himself on Lord Templeton’s blacklist? No, Tomlinson had kept him far too busy rewriting memos and chasing down paperwork lately to get in trouble with any of the magistrates. He could hardly remember the last time he’d stepped foot in a courtroom, and it hadbeen months since he’d appeared before Templeton.
There had to be an explanation.
Darcy pulled out his pocket watch to check the time. He’d already disappeared for nearly five hours on an errand that should have taken one, two at the most. And the workday was nearly over, which meant it made no sense to return to Pemberley’s offices. He could just as easily be lambasted for his disappearance tomorrow morning, although not returning tonight meant he would pay for it.
Darcy snapped the watch shut with a decisive click and thought of Lizzie, of the case, and how much it mattered to her. So be it.
It took him two hours, three bribes, and one very humiliating conversation with Lord Templeton’s butler before he finally tracked the magistrate down at his gentleman’s club. Luckily for Darcy, his name carried enough weight that he was granted entry and shown to a shadowy room with a handful of men quietly engaged in conversation or reading the papers. The magistrate sat before a roaring fire, smoking a cigar while reading theSun. He looked up with heavily lidded eyes to regard Darcy, slightly out of breath and not at all dressed for an evening out. “Mr. Darcy,” the magistrate said, not sounding surprised in the least. “I expected you, although not until tomorrow at the earliest.”
This caught Darcy off guard. “I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Sit,” the magistrate said, setting down his paper. “You look as though you’ve run all the way here.”
Darcy sat, and did not share that he had, in fact, run at leastpart of the way. “I’m sorry to disturb your evening,” he began, trying to hide the fact that he was still panting a bit. “But in regard to my application for a search permit this afternoon—”
The man waved a hand. “Yes, yes. Tell me, Mr. Darcy—why exactly do you want to search that storehouse?”
Darcy paused. “Sir, my application clearly stated—”