The Road to Pemberley by Marsha Altman

him of my strange dream, and we’d laugh about it.
    â€œPlease don’t call me that. I will give you a note now, and you will cash it—I’m sure you have gambling debts aplenty, not to mention payments to many tradesmen’s daughters—and then you will consider all our acquaintance at an end.” He wrote as he spoke, with large, vivid flourishes. “Will ten thousand be enough? Surely, ten thousand will be enough. Good Lord, fortunes have been made on less. You will take ten thousand, and you will leave my home. We shall meet again only as common and indifferent acquaintances.”
    Numb, not believing any of this could be happening, I received the slip of paper with a hand that felt frozen.
    â€œI…I suppose I could study law,” I said. My voice cracked and failed.
    Will looked up, looked at me. There was not in his eyes any friendship, any hint of concern, though my pain must have been vividly etched on my face. “I do not care how you live or what you do,” he said. “So long as you be gone.”
    I don’t know how I stumbled from that office. I do not remember. I do remember standing in the vast, marbled hall. Darcy had my things packed. Smithen waited with them. He handed me my
cane, my hat, and my cape, all curtly and without emotion. “You must know, sir,” he said. “You must be gone. He’ll have the law on you otherwise.”
    â€œThe law? For what?” I asked, bewildered.
    â€œWhy, sir, that note he gave you. Surely you know he’ll change his mind long before you cash it. He’ll say you extorted it.”
    â€œWhy?” It was the question I kept asking and to which I got no answer.
    Smithen sighed. “I tried to tell you, sir, in Cambridge, but you would not believe me. Mr. Darcy has fallen in with an unsavory set. All those tradesmen’s daughters, the men demanding payment for gambling debts…”
    I remembered. There had been women running from our quarters as I approached. There had been men coming to look for me, asking for payment for gambling debts incurred in some drunken game. There had been men demanding I marry their daughters. In that regard, Darcy was right. I owed money everywhere. Save for one thing—I hadn’t done any of it. My days were spent studying or walking, my evenings often praying in the Cambridge chapel. I had no carnal knowledge of anyone and I certainly had never gambled.
    â€œ He,” Smithen said, filling the word with meaning and significance, “gave your name when he went about his exploits.”
    And that I could see, suddenly. The whole thing became clear in my mind. Oh, Darcy and I look nothing alike. Not in a family type of resemblance. But we are, both of us, fairly tall men and dark haired; both of us have blue eyes. Similar enough to look the same in the darkened gambling dens around Cambridge, and to men too intent on their pleasure to care to fix a face in their memories. Similar enough to sound the same in the description a daughter gives her irate father.

    â€œBut why would Darcy do that to me?” I asked Smithen. It was an innocent question, as of a child to an adult.
    His blue eyes looked sad, just like the eyes of an adult who has to explain a painful truth to a child. “Don’t you know, sir? Have you never suspected? Why, sir, he’s always resented the interest and kindness his father showed toward you, of course. Very proud, Mr. Darcy is.”
    And Smithen had to be right, though Darcy could only have become proud after arriving at Cambridge. But such things happened to people as they grew up. I should not think on it anymore.
    My heart broken, all of my worldly possessions in a small bag, I started making my way down the long drive of my childhood home for the last time.
    And then I saw her.
    At first, I thought that in my pain and grieving I was hallucinating an angel to console me. It was only on looking again that I realized