Chapter Twenty
The letter that finally brought relief arrived nine days after Elizabeth's return, and its contents astonished the whole household nearly as much as the elopement itself had.
Mr. Gardiner wrote that Lydia and Wickham had been found, that a marriage was to take place, and that the arrangements, somehow, miraculously, required almost nothing of Mr. Bennet beyond his signature.
Wickham's debts, considerable ones, would be settled.
A small income would be secured. The wedding would proceed with a speed that suggested someone, somewhere, had applied a great deal of money and a great deal of pressure to make the whole disgraceful business disappear as quickly and quietly as possible.
"Your uncle has been remarkably generous," Mr. Bennet said, reading the letter aloud at the breakfast table, though something in his voice suggested he found the generosity harder to account for than he let on.
"I confess I do not entirely understand how he has managed it on his own resources.
I shall have to find some way to repay him, though I hardly know how, given the scale of what must have been required. "
Elizabeth's heart had gone very still. She thought of Darcy's face in the inn yard, of his voice saying I blame myself, of a man who did not do things by half measures once he had settled his mind on a course.
She said nothing at the table, but the suspicion lodged itself firmly enough that she could not shake it loose for the rest of the day.
Lydia and Wickham came to Longbourn before their departure north, Lydia entirely unrepentant, chattering happily of her new married state as though the whole neighborhood's scandal were merely a delightful inconvenience she had weathered with great good humor.
It was Lydia herself, in an unguarded moment at the breakfast table some days later, who let slip the detail that finally confirmed Elizabeth's suspicion beyond any reasonable doubt.
"Mr. Darcy was there, you know," Lydia said, buttering her toast with the careless attention of a girl who has never once considered that a piece of gossip might be a secret. "At the wedding. I quite forgot I was not to mention it. Wickham will be so cross with me."
Elizabeth's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. "Mr. Darcy was at your wedding?"
"Oh, la, I should not have said. It was to be such a great secret." Lydia, entirely unbothered by her own indiscretion, carried on regardless. "He was there the whole time, you know, arranging everything with Uncle Gardiner. I supposed you knew, since you are so thick with him and all."
Elizabeth said nothing further, though the whole of the meal passed in a private daze she could not entirely conceal, her mind racing back through every piece of the puzzle now falling, with terrible clarity, into its proper place.
She excused herself as soon as courtesy allowed and wrote, that same afternoon, to her aunt Gardiner, a letter that demanded, with as much dignity as she could muster while her hands trembled around the pen, the whole truth of what had actually happened in London.