A/N: Shorter than usual chapter, but I'm working my way up to the finish. No spoilers, but there is a clue hidden in this chapter. I think the reveal is coming next. Wade

Charles Bingley was beginning to wonder if all of his choices in life had been bad up to this point. His sister Caroline was a harridan of the worst order, and he just kept giving her more money and made no effort to check her, or even foist her off on one of his other relatives. His other sister Louisa married a dissolute and indolent man who while a gentleman, was indolent, dissipative and probably nearly bankrupt. He allowed them to leech off him for months at a time. His best friend kept giving him bad advice, and he just kept following him like an {insert overused metaphor preferably non-puppyish as our dogs are really annoying me at the moment}.

First off, he falls in love with the loveliest of the Bennet sisters; then abandons her; then thinks she might take him back; then gets diverted to Hertfordshire; all at the advice of his bossy friend and frankly malicious sisters. Any two of the four would paint him as a chuckleheaded Clodpole, and he'd managed to do all four in a row. Classic! Now he was up to seven serious errors, just this half-year.

Then he found that he had completely ignored the smartest of the Bennet sisters, only to find his formerly derisory friend swooping in to snatch her up right from under his nose. Not that he was attracted to Elizabeth Bennet… she actually frightened him a little bit, but he could have used some advice from someone who was clever and intelligent, as opposed to the sapskull he had relied on. Let's make it eight in a row.

Then he found he didn't pay even the tiniest slightest bit of attention to the most clever and practical of the Bennet sisters… well, technically she was a Lucas and was now a Collins, but she may was well be a Bennet sister, as close as they were, and make no mistake about it… Charlotte Collins was sharp as a whip.

So that left nine in close order, not even counting whatever Cork-brained things he'd done in town these last four months or so. Now it was time to repent, time to change his ways.

Charlotte Collins was no doubt really something. Where Georgiana had to scream like Caroline, bad enough to scare the horses and the footmen to quiet down the youngest Bennet sisters, Mrs. Collins simply had to give them a particular look. Her husband was generally a long-winded obsequious fool, but when she wanted him to settle down to business, a single glance was enough to send him scurrying.

It took Bingley nearly a whole day to ask the butler what happened, and would have taken a week to get moving, and then he probably would have gone to the wrong place. Mrs. Collins within five minutes had interrogated Darcy's footmen within an inch of their lives and knew where they planned to go, exactly where they had been stopped, and the situation they were facing. Granted, as far as he could tell, it was going to be him, Mr. and Mrs. Collins, the two silly sisters and Georgiana against fifty or sixty armed ruffians which weren't good odds, but he had faith in Mrs. Collins. Yes, Charles Bingley had found his leader and he would follow here anywhere. He even started surreptitiously giving Mr. Collins the stink-eye to see how his health looked. He wouldn't mind all that much if he didn't survive the encounter.

Once Mrs. Collins was done, he saw that the odds weren't quite as unfavorable as he might have thought. Charles Bingley didn't actually understand the logistics of his own station, because people always just did what they needed to do. He had no idea how many servants he employed, how they got from place to place, how dinner was cooked, or any of the other minutiae of his daily life.

It turned out that the day after he arrived at Rosings, his baggage train showed up. They would have been along straightaway, except he neglected to tell them where he was going… oops. With said baggage train, he had all of his best shooting rifles, and while he wasn't completely sure, he suspected they would be as effective against pirates as they were against birds. Getting shot couldn't possibly be very pleasant, no matter how fancy the gun. They probably weren't very good for a long distance, and the pirates almost certainly wouldn't conveniently fly up into the sky as birds did, and he didn't have any hounds to flush them out, but other than that, he thought it should be nearly the same.

He also found that Darcy's baggage train had returned to Rosings, and it contained his fencing equipment, which was obviously worthless, but it also had one of Colonel Fitzwilliam's swords. Now that he could use… well, technically he had never swung a sword in his life, but he had seen Shakespeare on stage, and they used a sword, and it didn't look all that difficult. He as just eyeballing the sword, when like a hawk swooping down on a rabbit, he found it snatched out of his hand by none other than Lydia Bennet.

"Miss Lydia, what do you plan to do with that sword?"

"Why, rescue my sister of course."

"You do realize there will be fifty or sixty armed men, and you only have one sword?"

"Of course! Do you think I'm stupid? No, don't answer that. I will obviously have to distract some of them before I attack."

"How do you plan to do that?"

"Oh the usual. Dancing. Flirting. Annoying. Distracting. You men are notoriously easy to manipulate. I'll get a couple of them to fight themselves to save me the trouble, and save the actual sword for when I get to one who's more stubborn than usual."

"I take offense to that statement. We are not all so easily led."

"Who climbed out the window of the coach, moved hand-over-hand up the side of a moving carriage, risking life and limb just to give me more breathing room in the coach?"

"Take the sword."

And with that, the issue was settled. Lydia Bennet was a genius. Call that ten.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Collins had gathered her troops and her weapons. Darcy had four able‑bodied armed men she could claim, and Bingley had another three. Rosings unfortunately didn't claim a single servant under fifty, and the tenants were curiously disinclined to risk life and limb for Lady Catherine's nephew, so no luck there. Mrs. Collins graciously tried to find the most senior man among them and offer leadership of the group. This resulted in a lot of inspection of shoes, trousers, dirt, bugs, the sky and anything else that didn't involve making eye contact with the scary parson's wife, and all happily settled in behind their natural leader to set off for Gretna Green.