Page 83 of The Fee Entail

That was hardly an explanation, and everyone talked at once, so it took Jane’s command voice to calm us all down. “Where did you actually find him?”

He replied casually, “St Giles eventually. He is the sort of man you have to hunt like a chicken hunts a fox. I had to set myself up as tempting bait and let him find me.”

Richard and Fitzwilliam gasped alarmingly. “St Giles!” But of course, the rest of us had never heard of the place.

It took a few minutes for the description to sink in, and I had to look at Mr Bingley with a newfound sense of appreciation and respect. It was not a place a gentleman like him went without considerable risk to life and limb. In fact, it was a place a rich gentleman like him did not go at all… ever.

Jane asked, “Is that where you got that old bruise on your face, or the damaged left leg, or that sore right shoulder?”

So, she was not so indifferent to the man after all.

“Not at all. That was in the rookery before… I think… or perhaps the third. I cannot recall the exact place anymore. It has been a few months.”

He had been hunting Wickham in the worst rookeries in London for months, not days. That was fascinating, and I could feel Richard tensing up more and more as the story continued, so I squeezed his arm to calm him down. Where I got the instinct, I have no idea.

That unleashed a torrent of questions, with Bingley simply telling every new facet of the story with a matter-of-fact nonchalance as if he were describing the most recent ball or race, and every new question generated an even more startling new answer.

Richard finally asked, “A rich man like you in that place must have been a very tempting target. How did you pull it off?”

Mr Bingley just laughed. “Oh, I was not rich at the time. I sold my townhouse and let it generally be known that I was on my way down. Rumours like that are frightfully easy to spread. I may have pretended to be a drunk and an opium eater in the process. And of course, I had Stockton to teach me the tricks, so it was all relatively simple, really.”

Jane just stared at him in stunned disbelief, as we all were doing. Sold his townhouse? Destroyed his reputation? Opium eater? There was no place you could even take hold of that narrative to begin.

Jane finally asked, “Did this mysterious letter writer tell you all this? Tell you the details of how to accomplish the task? He sounds like—well, I do not know what he sounds like—either heartless and cruel, or a genius, or both.”

Mr Bingley just grinned, but it seemed to have more substance than what we had seen last year in Hertfordshire. “Not instructions per se. Just a few guesses about where he would hide and some things to motivate me—”

He stopped in consternation about what he might say.

“Pray continue, Mr Bingley. I shall not be distressed.” I pointedly looked up at the smoke still billowing into the sky.

He stared at me for a moment. “The letters told of… a supposition… of what happened with you, Miss Lucas.”

I looked at him with true respect. “The suppositions were correct. I owe you my thanks. I owe you a life without fear, and I shall not forget it.”

Richard added, “You have my respect and thanks as well, Bingley. I would have been afraid to go there myself.”

He knew what he was about, and I determined I would learn more about the particular risks Mr Bingley had endured for our sake… but stopped and stared at him. How had that thought flitted so easily through my mind? That I would be having a private conversation with him, and that I did not mind the idea. Perhaps Lizzy was not the only stubborn one who spent all her time arguing with herself in a hopeless match.

Fitzwilliam added, “I too owe you Bingley. I had a dozen men hunting him with nothing to show for it, and I frankly would not have known where to begin.”

Mr Bingley seemed uncomfortable with the praise. “I was not alone. I had Stockton. You could not have done it, Darcy. It requires a new-money man on his way down. It was my task. There was also—”

Mr Bingley looked even more sheepish and stared pointedly at Elizabeth.

“You knew?” Elizabeth said.

He nodded. There was no need to enunciate what he knew, and I saw Lizzy, quite unable to actually speak, just mouth the words, “Thank you.”

The exchange was not lost on Jane, and she looked at him with what she probably did not realise was a proprietary look of her own.

“If Fitzwilliam did not set you on this path, who was it?” she asked.

Mr Bingley looked uncomfortable and paused at least half a minute.

“Before I tell you, I must say that this person sent me off on a hopeless chase, and would have been happy for either me or Wickham to come to harm—for good reason. This person held Wickham at gunpoint, locked him in a cellar with Mr Collins and oddly enough, two fire irons, and let them engage in a peculiar sort of ‘sport’ until they reached the inevitable conclusion, while this person sat and had tea with me, listening to the mayhem with hardly a concern in the world. This person deliberately encouraged the fire you see behind you. This person is an implacable and formidable person, though possibly a bit heartless as well. Are you certain you want to know?”

Jane stared at him for a moment, probably wondering if she truly wanted to know someone who could do something at the same time so noble and so heartless, so wonderful and so terrible, so valorous and so despicable.