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“I do not know what to do,” Elizabeth told the forest creatures as she walked, alone, in the wooded park each morning. “I cannot take any risk of offending Charlotte and Mr Collins with a quick departure by asking to leave with her father and sister, who will go in only a few short days. I certainly cannot reveal anything about that long ago day at Carmichael’s warehouse. Miss de Bourgh cannot possibly know what I did or did not see six years ago. Nevertheless, she has discerned that I saw something. And since she is yet unmarried, despite being a great heiress, perhaps she suffers still from whatever ills that monster inflicted upon her. I saw but a few moments of her trial; who knows how long she was in company with the brute!”

Sir William and Maria Lucas departed a week later without ever dining off golden plates. Mr Collins and Charlotte mourned the absence of their usual, twice weekly meals at Rosings Park. Elizabeth glumly awaited the arrival of Mr Darcy.

Darcy could hardly believe the news he was greeted with upon his arrival to Rosings Park.

Elizabeth Bennet, the woman who, try as he might, he could not forget, was here—staying practically on the same property as he and Colonel Fitzwilliam.

At the beginning of their acquaintance in Hertfordshire, Darcy had believed that it was only her name which had caused his striking response to her. Not that a genteel young lady such as herself would ever have even heard of Shoe Lane—and she was much too young, besides. It was simply a coincidence. However, it was a coincidence which caused him to give her a second and third look.

What he saw was…marvellous. There was something about her which made one wish to exist within her orbit, earn her attention. At first, he had not thought her particularly pretty. By the end of her visit at Netherfield, the home where he, also, had been staying, he was dreaming of her every night—the dreams causing restlessness and heat and unrelenting desire. At a ball given by his friend, Charles Bingley, Darcy had danced one set with her, and by the end of it, he had known he had to quit the neighbourhood utterly and immediately. The urge to keep her in his arms, possibly forever, was too intense, too inescapable; of all the things she was, her circumstances and relations were not at all what his family had raised him to expect.

Besides which, that same friend, Bingley, was on the verge of making a fool of himself over Elizabeth’s older sister. Neither young lady possessed a quarter of the settlement that either gentleman might expect of a wife, and the idea of forming a connexion with anyone possessing such wild, flirtatious sisters and uncles in trade was appalling.

“I cannot believe it,” he said to his cousin once they were alone at last. “Of all places on Earth, she is here.”

“Oh?” Fitzwilliam replied, finally rousing from the stupor of the last hour of Lady Catherine’s endless chatter. “She? Who is she?”

“Miss Elizabeth Bennet,” Darcy replied. “Did you not hear? Her ladyship told us both. She is at Hunsford, visiting the vicar and his wife.”

His cousin, a colonel in the King’s army who had spent time of his own searching Shoe Lane, straightened. “In the presence of Lady Catherine, I try to listen as little as is possible. No, I must have been wool-gathering. Is it possible—could this be your father’s ‘Elizabeth Bennet’?”

“No, no, this one is much too young; I do not believe her to be yet one-and-twenty. She is the daughter of a gentleman possessing a small country estate; I met her in Hertfordshire, whilst visiting Bingley. Lady Catherine’s vicar is her cousin. She cannot conceivably be our Elizabeth Bennet,” Darcy said. “Her coincidental appellation is probably the reason why she came to my notice so often. That name.”

Twice a year, every year in the five years since his father’s death, he had held a definitive, intensified search for the missing Elizabeth Bennet in the environs of Shoe Lane, expanded to the Fleet Market area. Mr Barnes said the mystery had come to be known amongst the inhabitants now; they no longer asked the specific questions on coinage or Grosvenor Square. Instead, they asked what might have connected Grosvenor Square to the missing woman, searching for any hint at all. They never found one; it was too broad a question, and the answers they received from it were too ridiculous, too improbable to bear notice. The lady was gone, probably dead, and he was left with assets he could never touch unless he found her.

Fitzwilliam kept looking at him in a sort of sly manner. “That name is the only reason? She is squinty-eyed? With spots?”

Darcy seated himself on one of the two costly chairs in the sitting room shared between his room and Fitzwilliam’s. It managed to be both extremely uncomfortable and exceptionally ugly, and he sighed.

“No. It has been some time now since I have thought her the handsomest woman of my acquaintance. But her family, Fitzwilliam! Her younger sisters could not be more vacuous or less appealing. There was a regiment stationed in the town nearest their estate, and those girls could not be drawn away from flirtations and frivolity by anything or anyone. The idea of them anywhere near Georgiana would make you question my sanity, and their mother does nothing except encourage them, whilst the father closes his eyes to every poor behaviour demonstrated.”

“They sound awful.” Fitzwilliam seated himself across from Darcy, and grimaced. “How does our aunt manage to select the worst chairs in the history of furniture, every single time?”

“That is the trouble,” Darcy muttered. “The absolute, unmitigated, undeniable problem of it all.”

“Lady Catherine’s terrible taste in furnishings?”

Darcy sighed again. “Do not be obtuse. Elizabeth. She may be worth putting up with all the rest.”

Fitzwilliam’s brows rose. “Elizabeth, eh? Not ‘Miss’ but perhaps a future ‘Mrs’?”

Darcy scrubbed his face with his hands. “I left her behind, Fitzwilliam. I did what was proper—made myself do it. By chance, Bingley was days away from making an unfortunate connexion himself. It was best that we go. But I have never felt right since.”

“A pickle indeed. Let us hope our aunt invites the intriguing Miss Elizabeth Bennet to dinner at once, to celebrate our arrival with her usual conviviality.”

It was quite probable that she would, and Darcy looked forward to it with an eagerness he had not felt since a young man. And with a dread he had not experienced in years.

Two days after their arrival, however, not only had Lady Catherine not extended her usual invitations, she did not show any sign of doing so. Even her worshipful vicar was not allowed to visit unless sent for. “Anne’s nerves are not up to having anyone except family about at this time,” she had explained.

“Anne’s nerves,” Fitzwilliam groused. “Oh, to replace all the time, attention, and devotion lavished upon those delicate feelings with a purpose more meaningful—Napoleon would have been defeated years ago!”

“Now, now,” Darcy chided, despite his own impatience. He happened to feel a great deal of pity for his cousin—born under the shadow of a domineering mother who tried to manage her every thought and action, it was no wonder she was collapsing under the weight of a thousand nerves. “I will speak to Lady Catherine. But perhaps, as Miss Bennet is known to me, it would not be irregular to pay a call?”

Fitzwilliam grinned widely. “Not too irregular, no, not at all.”

“I am glad you find my feelings so humorous.”

“I am certain that once I meet her, I shall be able to lend you that advice, that wisdom, that good judgment upon which you depend. Sadly, it will likely take several private conversations, at least a few of which must be conducted by moonlight. There is nothing so revelatory as a Kentish moon.”