The first letter was to Colonel Fitzwilliam, and was the easiest, because soldiers like their orders plain. His cousin had gone that same afternoon with the Matlock carriages, hours before there was any campaign to put to him, and knowing only what the whole house had known by dusk, which was nothing yet. So it would be paper, and not the table he would have preferred; and paper traveled, and leave took getting, the army that summer grudging every officer it owned, so that Darcy would be in London well before his cousin could follow.

Come to town as soon as your duties can spare you, Darcy wrote. Bring all the leave they will give you. A matter has arisen which cannot keep and must not be talked of, at Matlock House or anywhere; I will tell you the whole of it across a table. Say only that I asked.

He read it through and sealed it. His cousin would grumble, and come, and ask his questions with his boots already on; that was the whole virtue of the man.

The second letter was to Mr. Gardiner of Gracechurch Street, and he sat over it the better part of an hour.

The matter itself wanted no art. A girl gone from Brighton in the night; a man whose price Darcy knew to the shilling; a trail bending toward London; a family with nothing in town to meet it but an attorney’s letters and a name about to be spent for them. All that could be set down in a few lines and was.

The asking was another matter. He was asking, of a man in trade whom he had met across a winter drawing-room and liked better than half his acquaintance, the loan of his house, his discretion, and his standing in the City. And he was asking it for a campaign that could never be acknowledged by anybody.

What I know of the gentleman in question I will tell you when we meet, he wrote at last. It is not a matter for paper. It is enough that I know where men of his habits go to ground, and that I have means which your family could not accept from me and shall therefore not be offered to them. I offer them to you, sir, who may use them without owing me anything.

One condition, and it is absolute. Your niece — Miss Elizabeth Bennet — is to know nothing of my part in this. Not the search, not a shilling, not my name in the same breath with her sister’s. Whatever is recovered, your family recovered it. If that condition cannot be kept, burn this letter and forgive the liberty of it.

He read that letter twice and sat a while with it unsealed.

She had released him in plain words, for a reason he could not fault without lying. He had taken it standing. The alternative was to argue her out of her own judgment, and he had lately had a thorough education in what his arguments did to people who had not asked for them. Very well. But a man whose help has been put off may still help, provided nobody is made to carry the weight of thanking him. Service that is known is a claim. Service that is secret is only service.

He believed that the way a man believes what he has decided at one o’clock in the morning: wholly, and with a sensation of having signed something away unread.

He sealed the letter to Mr. Gardiner. The third, to his steward in town, took no time and no feeling at all: the house to be opened quietly, the holland left on the state rooms, no knocker hung, the kitchen stocked for a small establishment that asked no questions and answered fewer; post-horses bespoken on the road south; and a list, by Friday, of which of the Pall Mall houses still held paper of a certain officer’s, against the day it might want buying.

Say nothing of my coming. I am not in town this summer. The house is shut.

There was a fourth letter he did not write.

His aunt had a daughter, and a doctrine. The doctrine held that his mother had wished the cousins joined; had settled it, with her sister, over the cradles. Lady Catherine had recited it on every visit of his boyhood, in front of his mother’s portrait, as though the painted face were a witness who could be made to nod by repetition. His mother, who was chiefly accustomed to being obeyed, had never to his knowledge obeyed anybody on the point, and had died without subscribing to it. The doctrine had only grown the stronger for that, the way claims do when the one party who could contradict them is gone.

His aunt did not yet know there had been an engagement. She would learn of it; the family had watched it made. And the unforgivable part would not be the Bennet name. The unforgivable part would be Anne, thrown over without ever having been taken up. There was no letter that could spend that powder safely, and he did not try. He set the case on the shelf of things that would burn in their own time, and noted, with the cold half of his mind, that the shelf was filling.

And there was a fifth letter, which his hand began without him.

He had drawn a fresh sheet to cover the steward’s, and the pen had set two words at the head of it before he caught it: Miss Elizabeth. He sat with them some while. The hand that had written them was perfectly steady; it had simply gone on ahead of its orders, as it had done once before in a corridor, and been court-martialed for it, and apparently learned nothing.

There was no letter to her. Everything he could put under those two words was either a plea, which he had no right to make, or an accounting, which would convert his service into exactly the claim he had forsworn an hour ago.

You shall have no burden added by me.

He had said it. The saying was the whole estate he retained in her.

He fed the sheet to the candle and watched his name for her go up the chimney in a thread of smoke, and then he put the wax and the seals away, squared the three letters on the desk, and gave his hands the rest of the night’s work, the lists and the maps and the road-book.

He meant to be gone before the house was awake. He had written a sixth letter after all — a short one, to Georgiana, to be given her with her chocolate at nine, by which hour he intended to be fifteen miles south of anything she could do about it. It explained nothing, promised a letter from town, and commended her to Mrs. Annesley with a tenderness that had cost him more revision than the steward got. He left it propped against the breakfast urn like a man laying a false trail, and went down to the stable yard in the chill before the sun found the cobbles, with his conscience arranged.

Georgiana stood by the carriage.

She was cloaked to the chin, and her breath showed in the lantern-light. Behind her, with the serene finish of a woman who had completed her packing some hours earlier, stood Mrs. Annesley. Behind Mrs. Annesley, corded and strapped and already aboard, were two trunks that had no business there. His coachman was examining the off horse’s harness with the absorption of a man determined to be elsewhere without moving.

“You found my letter,” Darcy said.

“Mrs. Annesley found it at half past four. She had gone down to see whether the breakfast room had been laid.” Georgiana’s chin was not quite steady, but her voice was. “She is a very thorough woman. It is why you engaged her.”

“It was to be given you at nine.”

“Yes. I read that part.” She stepped nearer, into the lantern’s circle. She had been up all night; the sight of it cost him. “Fitzwilliam. Take me with you.”

“Georgiana—“

“Take me with you. You left me behind once.”

Once. She did not say more than that, and did not need to. The off horse shifted; the harness rang and settled. Neither of them would say what the word carried, not here, not in front of the man at the harness and the dew still hanging in the lantern light; but they could both read the date on it, and the date was enough. Darcy had left her behind for her protection, in the care of excellent people, with every arrangement made; and the arrangements had nearly been the end of her.

He had arguments. Good ones. The roads, the company he must keep this summer, the parts of town his business would take him through, the plain fact that the safest place in England for a girl of her name was the house he was leaving. He had had arguments yesterday morning too, in a library, and had set them down; and the discovery met him there in the cold, at five in the morning: the setting down was becoming a habit, and he could not quite regret it.

“And you, madam?” he said, over his sister’s head. “Have I any say in your arrangements, or are those also concluded?”

“I have packed for a month, sir,” Mrs. Annesley said. “If it proves longer, we shall contrive.”

So he had been outgeneraled in his own stable yard, by his sister and her companion, before that hour; and the man who had spent the night assembling a campaign nobody was to know of handed his first recruits into the carriage, because there was nothing else to do with them, and a man does what there is to be done.

The road south took two long days. He passed the most of them with the country going backward at the glass.

Georgiana did not chatter and did not pretend to sleep. Somewhere past the first change of horses, she said to the window, “You will not send me back from town. I want your word.”

He gave it. It was cheaper than the argument, and besides, he meant it. After that she let him alone, and the carriage filled with the kind of silence that is a conversation conducted at leisure, and Mrs. Annesley read her book and missed nothing.

They came into London at evening on the second day, down through Barnet and Islington while the lamps came alight below them; and the town they came into was leaving.

It was true before he could have proved it: the traffic ran easier than it had any right to, and house after house had its eyes already half closed. The Season was at the turn of its tide. A fortnight more of dinners, and it would all be carriages on the north roads, knockers coming off the doors street by street, great rooms going under their covers for the summer.

His own knocker was off already; it had been off since March. The footman who admitted them had his coat half-buttoned, and somewhere below stairs a single lamp burned in a kitchen built to feed forty.

His housekeeper appeared in the hall, took in the party with one measured sweep — master, sister, companion, two trunks that had not been mentioned in any letter — and said, “The blue room will do for Miss Darcy, sir. Mrs. Annesley I can put in the room above it, if she does not mind the back stairs.”

“You were expecting one,” Darcy said.

“I was expecting one, sir. I am now expecting three. Will there be others, or may I tell the kitchen?”

“Three,” he said. “For the foreseeable.”

“Very good, sir.” She took Georgiana’s cloak from her with the practiced tenderness of a woman who had known the girl since she was ten, and went to make two beds exist that had not existed ten minutes ago, and did not ask a single question that was not about linen.

The state rooms stood sheeted. The hall smelled shut up, all cold stone and old cleaning vinegar. It was a house in its summer graveclothes, and he had raised it like a ghost, and it would keep his secret because it had not been told anything to keep.

The London he knew was leaving for the country. The London that kept Wickham never left.

He did that sum at the long window of his mother’s morning room, facing east. Mayfair would empty by inches and think the town empty because Mayfair was.

But the lamps went on past the lamps he could see, down past the City churches, down to the river and over it, into parishes that no Season had ever touched and no summer thinned: courts and stairs and sponging-houses and streets of small credit and long memory, where a man could owe money in perfect comfort the year round, and where a girl of fifteen was at this hour believing herself nearly married. The hunt lay there.

And between here and there, a half-mile east of the lamps, lay Gracechurch Street, where the Bennets must come. So the work of his summer would keep him, week upon week, inside a city that held her, under an obligation never to be seen.

He drew the curtain on it himself, the servant being elsewhere, and turned up the lamp, and sat down to the lists.