What he believed to be a particularly harmonious denouement to a particularly sticky subject was not yet at hand. Fortune had not allowed her to forget the two simpering chattermags remarking upon his “blade” at the ball. Once the fact of Mr. Darcy’s encounters was unkenneled, specifics seemed fair game to his wife. It took not a day before she made a frontal assault.

“Am I to be advised of whose charms you have known?”

“No.”

“I know ’tis ungentlemanly to repeat such things, but certainly you can understand I choose not to sit next to a lady of your intimate acquaintance at a dinner party quite unenlightened. If I am to be thought a fool, I prefer my own confidence.”

He knew well he was again entering territoire dangereux, for she had an uncanny ability to winnow information from him that he knew he did not wish to confide. Independent decision of what it best to reveal and what not to inevitably fell to naught.

“I would never invest in such a conspiracy against you,” he assured her. “I would never allow you to find yourself in such a position.”

As he said this, he took a mental inventory of the guest list of the ball to reassure himself he was speaking truthfully. Once absolutely certain of that, he sighed in silent relief and vowed to himself what he had promised Elizabeth. Because he had so naïvely expected this moment not to come, he had no plan. However, he recognised the foundation when he saw it. With all due diligence, he would make quite certain that no woman whom he had “known” would be invited to their home. (Not a problem in Derbyshire, but London might be a bit of a dilemma. Diversions abounded; he could account for his own guest lists, but not that of others.)

Thinking the matter at last closed, he shut his eyes as well. They stayed resolutely thus, however she inveigled him.

“I would not ask you to name names—that would be insupportable,” she persisted. “Perhaps you could tell me how many.”

“I could not do that,” he announced rather snippily.

“That frightfully many?”

“That is not my meaning,” he declared in exasperation. “I should have said, ‘I choose not to say.’”

“Less than five?”

As this interrogation took place atop their bed, he rolled upon his stomach and, in vain hope it would impede her, finally did draw a pillow over his head. Alas.

“More than five, but less than ten?”

The pillow groaned.

She pulled up a corner and said under it, “I am full curious is all.”

Her words elicited another groan from her encased husband. Quite abruptly, her manner changed from playful to astonished. Releasing the entreated pillow compleatly, she uttered the unspeakable thought that had just come to her.

“You had a mistress!”

In his pillowed cave, he was trying most determinedly not to listen, but he heard that. She laid back, her arms folded across her stomach in apparent readiness to accept this undeniable and painful truth. Detecting something even more amiss, he pulled the pillow from his head and looked to her. Again, she did not return his gaze.

Unhappily, he understood this must be addressed. He would rather say “more than five” than have her think he had kept a woman—and he most decidedly did not want to say “more than five.”

“I did not have a mistress.”

“You no longer have to shield me. I am not compleatly naïve. I know men have mistresses. What is the word? Inamorata? I understand they wear a great deal of rouge.”

Repeating again, with uncommon firmness, “I did not have a mistress,” he managed to encroach upon her self-martyrdom.

Elizabeth had already conjured a picture of the fancied mistress in her mind, flaxen-haired, rouged, and buxom. Her imagination had endowed this mistress with every disreputable quality one woman could possibly entertain; hence she was reluctant to abandon the idea. Nevertheless, she soon did, finding more happiness in it not being true than pleasure in assigning the nonexistent mistress poor habits.

Offering her logic for examination, she said, “You said you favoured no women of our acquaintance. What other conclusion could one draw?”

Knowing just how deep and wide the tide-pool of opportunity for carnal embrace was, he thought it best not to share that information with her just then. He chose his words with extreme caution.

“If you know men have mistresses, you must know too that there are houses where men go that harbour women with whom to…(he struggled for a non-active verb)…associate.” (Not entirely inactive, but benign.)

She sat up.

He cringed.

“A house? You mean a brothel?” she asked.

“Of sorts.”

Now, thoroughly fascinated, she exclaimed, “You visited a brothel?”

Her exclamation, however, he interpreted as contemptuous.

“What would you have had me do?” he responded sharply. “Deflower shop girls as did Wickham?”

At this, she retreated in confused surprise (thus sparing him the retorted detestable suggestion that he could have remained chaste until marriage). Upon understanding his interpretation of her remark, she hurried her reassurance.

“I did not speak to reprimand you, but in amazement. For I have heard of such places.”

Although he had a sudden, horrifying vision of Elizabeth scurrying about a bawdy-house, asking all manner of questions about the goings-on there, he was chastened. He realised his outburst was not a result of her remark, but due to his long-held contrition for not keeping his baser needs under better regulation. He had exposed this flaw to the very person whose admiration he most desired. Upon this internal revelation, his countenance reflected repentance. Discerning this, she drew to him.

In eager confidentiality, she bade, “Were there harem girls?”

“Just where have you learnt of harem girls and brothels, pray tell?”

Avoiding his gaze, she made great work of picking imaginary lint from the bedcloth.

“My father had a book, actually two books, he thought well-hidden in his library. One had illustrations. I was but a girl of no more than four and ten when I discovered them.”

“Illustrations too?” he smiled, thinking of her surreptitiously reading her father’s risqué books.

Thereupon he admitted, “This place was not so exotic.”

Not really wanting to think much more of Darcy mingling intimately with the English incarnation of harem girls, she teased him, “So you did not deflower any shop girls?”

“No, I did not. The only woman I have deflowered is you, Mrs. Darcy.”

She thought of herself as deflowered for a moment and did not find favour in the term. Then she wondered about the entire devirgination process.

“What are men called after their first act of love, husband?”

“Spent.”

At this, she laughed, deciding she had questioned him enough for one sitting. So little did she like him to have gone to such a place, yet she wanted to know it all. However, she knew it unwise to over use her “wheedle.” She had the notion that this “house” he visited must be in town. They would leave for London after Easter.

Darcy would learn by spring he was not yet out of the woods of enquiry upon this subject.