Page 35 of Pride and Prejudice Resolutions

Darcy smiled. It was a small, dry thing, but it was real.

"Farewell, cousin."

The carriage rolled away, carrying the son and the godson back to the cloisters of academia.

Robert stood on the pavement, watching it disappear around the corner of Grosvenor Square. Richard mounted his horse, gave a salute, and trotted off towards the barracks.

Robert was left alone.

He stood there for a moment, listening to the London traffic. A coal wagon rumbled past. A street seller shouted about fresh oysters.

It was all so terribly mundane.

He turned to go back inside, intending to bully Mostyn into finding him a better brandy, when he spotted something on the ground.

It lay in the gutter, near where George Wickham had stood moments before. Robert walked over. He poked it with his cane. It was a playing card. The Knave of Hearts.

Robert frowned. He bent down, pinching the corner of the card between his gloved fingers. It was clean. Crisp. New. It must have fallen from Wickham's pocket.

"The little weasel," he whispered.

A laugh bubbled up in his chest. It started low and built until he was chuckling openly in the street, ignoring the stares of passersby.

Wickham had not learned. Not really. The shock would fade. The itch would return. The Scoundrel was not a coat one could take off. It was the skin beneath.

Robert looked at the card. He thought of Darcy's relief. He thought of the "perfect" lesson. He could chase the carriage. He could wave the card in Darcy's face and scream that it was all for nothing, that the tragedy would repeat, that the man was flawed beyond repair.

He hesitated. Then, he flicked his wrist. The card spun through the air, landing back in the mud.

"Not today," he decided.

Let the Prig have his victory. Let him have his peace. There would be time enough for reality later.

He straightened his cuffs and adjusted his new hat. He tapped his cane on the stones. He walked away, leaving the Knave of Hearts to rot in the gutter, perfectly content to wait for the next act.

Chapter Twelve: The Mask of the Master

Cambridge in the spring smelled of wet stone, freshly cut grass, and the aggressive optimism of young men who had not yet failed their exams.

Darcy sat in the window seat of his rooms, a leather-bound volume ofLockeopen on his knee. He was not reading. He was watching the courtyard below.

A group of undergraduates chased a cricket ball across the lawn, shouting with a boisterous energy that he found exhausting. They wore their gowns carelessly. They laughed too loudly. They looked, to his discerning eye, childish.

He turned a page, the parchment crisp against his fingertips.

A week ago, he had been one of them—a man worrying about essays and allowances. Now, he felt separated from them by a chasm of experience. He had sat across from a crime lord in Covent Garden. He had snatched a family heirloom from a table of green baize. He had watched a duel at dawn.

He was no longer merely a student. He was a survivor.

"Childish," Darcy murmured, watching a future Bishop trip over his own feet.

He took a sip of tea. It was lukewarm, but he drank it with the stoicism of a man who had tasted the bitter dregs of fear and found he had the stomach for it.

The "Prig," as Robert affectionately called him, had hardened. The anxiety that used to plague him—the terror of saying the wrong thing, of disappointing his father—had calcified into armour. He had learned the great secret of adulthood: authority was a performance. If you glared hard enough, the world flinched.

He adjusted his cuff. It was perfectly starched.

He felt powerful. He felt in control. He felt that he had solved the puzzle of human nature.