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They walked home before anyone could arrange another scene.

CHAPTER 21

Three days after the engagement, the express arrived at breakfast. Elizabeth recognized Jane's hand before Charlotte passed it across the table. Jane had left Kent the morning after the dinner at Rosings and reached Longbourn late on the second day of her journey. Charlotte had asked Elizabeth to stay on a little longer, and Elizabeth had agreed. The express had traveled overnight. Elizabeth had expected her sister's first letter to concern their mother's wedding plans; this one had no greeting beyond her name.

Lydia had gone with Wickham. Their father was in London. No one knew precisely where the pair could be found.

Elizabeth read it again, as if the second reading might uncover a qualification she had missed. Her toast cooled beside her. She had spent weeks anticipating this event and had still imagined, without admitting it, that anticipation might prevent it.

"Lizzy?" Charlotte asked.

"It has happened."

Charlotte took the letter when Elizabeth offered it. She read to the end before putting it down.

"Jane says Mama will not leave her room."

"I know."

Elizabeth tried to summon the old ending: money, marriage, everybody safe. It came readily enough. So had the appointment at Pemberley which they had already broken. A remembered plot was not a search party.

Darcy arrived from Rosings while she was still staring at the untouched toast. The news had reached him through the express messenger, who had been directed there after Hunsford. He entered without his usual pause to arrange himself.

"May I read it?"

She gave him Jane's letter. He stood by the window, turning the sheet once, then back again to check the address at the top.

"I shall go to London," he said.

"Because it is pulling you there?"

"That too. But I should go if it ceased this instant."

Elizabeth reached for the toast and offered it to him. "Then eat something before you do."

He looked at the slice, which had acquired a formidable quantity of butter while her hands sought work. "Thank you."

"I have prepared you for a prolonged siege."

He took a bite. Charlotte fetched his tea, and for a few moments the absurd business of feeding a man who might find her sister kept Elizabeth from coming apart.

Darcy told her what he had tried before the elopement: a warning to her father which would not emerge, an inquiry about Wickham's debts which dissolved into inconsequential conversation, an offer of money to leave England which Wickham declined to discuss. He did not present the failures as proof that further effort was pointless.

"I know some of his former associates. Your uncle will know where your father has searched. Between us we can proceed with better information than a chapter forecast."

"If you find her, please ask whether she wishes to come home. Before anyone tells her what she must do to put us all right."

Darcy set down his cup. "I will."

Charlotte folded Jane's letter along its original creases. "And let her answer without Wickham beside her."

He nodded. Elizabeth could not tell him enough, could not travel quickly enough, could not make this frightened waiting into something useful by naming its narrative function. She could give him Lydia's habits, the little clues a stranger might miss: the trinkets she would stop to buy, the places she had heard officers praise, the cousin she might write to if she wanted to boast. Darcy listened and wrote them down. She was grateful for his notebook without qualification.

When he rose, she went with him to the door.

"You need not purchase my gratitude," she said. "You have it already."

"I am not going to London to earn a wife."