Chapter Seven
Lydia got her way in the end, as Lydia generally did.
Colonel Forster's regiment removed to Brighton in the second week of February, and Mrs. Forster, newly married and eager for a companion nearer her own age than the officers' wives twice her seniority, renewed her invitation with enough persistence that Mrs. Bennet took up the cause as her own.
"It will do her good," Mrs. Bennet declared, over Mr. Bennet's silence and Elizabeth's open objection. "A little society. A little gaiety. She is young, Mr. Bennet, and young girls want gaiety."
"She wants sense a great deal more than gaiety," Elizabeth said, "and Brighton, from everything I have heard of it, offers a great deal of the one and very little of the other."
"You are jealous," Lydia said, delighted with herself, "because Mrs. Forster did not ask you."
Mr. Bennet, from behind his book, said nothing at all, and it was this silence, more than any argument Elizabeth made, that ought to have frightened her.
Her father had never been a man to refuse his daughters much of anything that saved him the trouble of a scene, and Lydia's departure, three days later, was accompanied by nothing more than his usual dry farewell.
Elizabeth watched the carriage go with a knot of unease she could not entirely name, and told herself it was nothing, and was wrong.
Captain Denny followed the regiment to Brighton within the fortnight, which surprised no one who had watched him circle Lydia through the winter like a man taking careful aim, and it was Denny's name, three weeks later, that arrived in a letter to Mr. Bennet written in a hand Elizabeth did not recognize.
She learned of its contents secondhand, from her mother's shrieking in the hallway, from Kitty's white face at the breakfast table, from her father's uncharacteristic haste in calling for his horse.
Lydia had not eloped. That much, at least, was true, though it had come very near enough to frighten everyone who heard it.
Denny, it transpired, had persuaded her to a late supper at an inn some miles from Brighton, with promises Lydia had been foolish enough to believe and Mrs. Forster too inattentive to prevent, and had been intercepted, by pure chance, by a gentleman traveling the same road who had recognized the girl, recognized the danger, and taken it upon himself to see her safely returned to Colonel Forster's house before the evening ended in ruin.
"A gentleman," Mrs. Bennet kept saying, wringing her hands. "What gentleman? Who was it? We must write and thank him at once, whoever he was."
No one could say. Colonel Forster's letter named only the fact of the intervention, not the man behind it, and Lydia, brought home in disgrace three days later and confined to her room by a father angrier than Elizabeth had ever seen him, would say only that it had been a tall gentleman she did not know, who had spoken to Denny in a voice that had made the captain go quite pale, and had put her bodily into his own carriage without waiting for her consent.
"He knew my name," Lydia said, sullen and frightened in equal measure. "He said, Miss Bennet, you will come with me now, and I was too startled to refuse him."
Elizabeth sat very still at this, some cold certainty settling into her chest.
"Did he give his own name?" she asked.
"No. He said it did not signify." Lydia scowled. "He was very rude about it, considering he had no business interfering at all."
Elizabeth found her father alone in his library that evening, the account books spread before him unread, his face grey with a fatigue that had nothing to do with the hour.
"Papa."
"Not now, Lizzy."
"I only wished to ask whether you have any notion who the gentleman was."
Mr. Bennet looked up at her, something sharp and searching in his expression that she had not seen from him in a long time. "Have you a notion yourself?"
She did not answer directly. "It seems a great deal of trouble for a stranger to take."
"It does." Her father closed the account book, set down his pen.
"Colonel Forster writes that the man asked, above all things, that his name be kept from the family.
Struck me as a curious request, for a man who had done nothing to be ashamed of.
" He studied her a moment longer. "You have gone very pale, my dear. "
"I am only tired."
"Mm." He did not press her further, though something in his face told her he had drawn his own conclusions, and was choosing, for now, to keep them private.
Elizabeth left the library with her pulse unsteady and her mind circling a single thought she could not yet let herself finish. Miss Bennet, you will come with me now. A voice that made a young officer go pale. A man who asked for nothing, not even his name.
It fit a pattern she had spent all winter refusing to see clearly.
Wickham's debts, cleared without explanation.
A transfer arranged for a troublesome officer, with no gentleman willing to claim the credit.
And now this, a girl pulled back from the edge of ruin by a stranger who vanished before he could be thanked.
She thought of Bingley, easy and open and utterly incapable of secrecy, and knew, with sudden and complete certainty, that she had been crediting the wrong friend all along.
She wrote nothing of her suspicion to anyone, not even Jane, because to put it into words felt like a kind of trespass on a privacy Darcy had clearly gone to great lengths to protect.
But it sat with her through the following weeks, through Lydia's chastened silence and her father's grim new watchfulness, a small hard certainty that would not be dislodged.
He had saved her sister. He had done it without a word, without a claim, without so much as a name left behind for gratitude to find. And she had spent the whole of the winter believing him cold.
In London, Darcy received Colonel Forster's letter of thanks, addressed care of his club, three days after the fact, and read it standing in the hallway with his coat still on, his jaw tight with an anger that had not fully cooled since the inn yard.
He had been three hours from Brighton on unrelated business, a chance he did not examine too closely for fear of what it might mean about the frequency with which his errands seemed to bring him within reach of the Bennet family's troubles, and the recognition, when it came, had struck him like cold water.
Denny's hand on the girl's wrist. Lydia's bright, foolish laugh, not yet understanding what she had agreed to.
The particular quality of a young man's confidence when he believed himself unobserved.
He had not been gentle with Denny. He found, reading it back, that he did not regret this.
I would ask, he had told Colonel Forster, in the single line he permitted himself before turning the matter over entirely, that my name not attach itself to this business. The girl's family need only know she is safe.
He had told himself, riding back to town, that this was wisdom. That any connection between his name and the Bennet family, surfacing now, would hand Lady Catherine precisely the ammunition she wanted, at precisely the moment the committee's patience had grown thinnest.
He had not told himself, because he did not yet wish to examine it, how much it had cost him to hand Elizabeth's sister into a carriage and drive away without a word of explanation, knowing she would never learn who had come for her, knowing that whatever gratitude the family felt would land, once again, on Bingley's undeserving and entirely unwitting shoulders.