A/N: More of our story.

Keep in mind that this is a distribution of Pride and Prejudice into the dramatic reality of a modern spy world. The latter is meant chemically to alter the former, changing it in various important ways, although variations on many nodal events will occur.

Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense

Chapter Three: Knots

We all tie ourselves in knots, sometimes
How often do we count the cost of all the knots we tie?
They're playing a game called Not Playing a Game
I play at not seeing its a game
Nobody wins a prize or a crown
Only dismay at the ups and the downs
The harder you pull, the tighter the knots become.

"Knots", Matt Stalker and Fables, Knots

Lizzy had a backpack on one shoulder, her go bag, and a large purse on the other. Since the October day was chilly, she had put on a leather jacket.

She had pulled her hair up and concealed it under a plain black ball cap.

She had texted Bingley and asked him to meet her behind her apartment building, further minimizing the chance she would see anyone she knew, anyone who might ask about her hair. It wasn't that it would be hard to explain exactly, but as she found as she looked at herself once more in the bathroom mirror before leaving her apartment, the hair made a statement. It was memorable. Her naturally brown hair, while not mousy, also did not, just by its color, compel attention. Now, blonde, Lizzy felt like a mobile lighthouse. But the cap helped; she'd put her candle under a bushel. She smiled at her own phrasing: that English degree hadn't been a waste of time; she did have remarkable expressive resources. They'd been of use a number of times on missions.

A car pulled around, the standard, dark SUV the Company used, and Lizzy saw Bingley inside, at the wheel. He was wearing a blue sweater and a black knit cap. He waved at her, leaning forward as he did, trying to get a better look. Some of Lizzy's blonde hair had strayed from beneath the cap, alerting Bingley to the L'oreal fait accompli.

She ignored him and opened the rear passenger door, tossed her backpack inside. She shut the rear door and opened the front door, placed her purse on the floor, then climbed inside. Bingley was smiling at her, amused, a smile twitching on his face.

"So, you really did it, went blonde."

"You doubted me?" Lizzy asked, tempted both to smile and to frown. Instead, she yanked off her cap with her right hand and let her blonde hair tumble to her shoulders.

Bingley's face froze for a moment; he seemed not to know her. Finally, he jerked himself into recognition, response. "Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Let down your hair!"

Lizzy punched Bingley hard in the shoulder with her left hand. "Ouch! Hey, that hurt. I thought you were right-handed."

Bingley rubbed his shoulder for a moment before he pulled away from the curb.

Lizzy glared at him. "I am. And enough of the Grimm humor. My prince, you aren't."

As Bingley drove them toward the airport, Lizzy put her hat back on, tucking her hair under it as best she could, then she settled back in her seat, hoping to take a few minutes and enjoy the developing fall colors on the trees.

But she had no more than gotten comfortable when her personal phone rang in her bag. She cursed under her breath and bent down, digging the phone out of a side pocket. She looked at the screen and sighed.

Mom

Lizzy had been deliberately dodging her mother's calls, knowing, among other things, that he mother was undoubtedly trying to arrange a Thanksgiving visit. But she would also be calling, as she always called, to nag Lizzy about Lizzy's life, and to whine and complain about her own. Mrs. Bennet was not a person who could suffer in silence or suffer alone. Her pain demanded noisy vocalization and compliant commiseration.

"Shit," Lizzy said, putting the ringing phone on her knee and staring at it as if it were poisonous.

"Who is it?" Bingley asked innocently, noticing her odd reaction.

"My mother." Lizzy had never talked to Bingley about her mother, so she knew that the answer was unlikely to help explain her reaction. But she couldn't take any time to elaborate with the phone continuing to ring.

She picked it up, answering the call. She gave Bingley a be quiet look as she spoke. "Hey, Mom. How are you?"

"Eee-lizabeth? Is that you?"

Lizzy blew out a silent breath, hoping that Bingley did not notice, and would not be more curious.

Whenever her mother elongated the 'E' at the beginning of 'Elizabeth', it meant she had been drinking. In this case, day drinking. It had been getting worse. Her mother rarely drank to drunkenness, but she was now hardly rarely awake without being tipsy. Lizzy's father had half-listened to and ironically pitied her mother for years. He paid exactly enough attention to and offered exactly enough sympathy for her mother — who was unable to believe anyone could half-listen to her and who was tone-deaf to irony — to keep her from detecting the steady, tranquil contempt her felt for her. Lizzy understood her father's feeling and sometimes shared it — although she fought against it. But after he died, she sympathized with him even more, as the weight of her mother's needs settled on her.

"Yes, Mom, you called me."

"Oh, yes, I did. Why are you always so hard to reach?"

"We've talked about that, Mom. My job." Lizzy had never told her mother what she did, about the CIA. She only talked about her work in generalities. Not in lies exactly, vaguenesses. Her mother's self-absorption kept her from asking Lizzy for specifics. "It's government work, you know, and lots of travel. In fact, I'm going to travel again soon." Not a lie but not quite in focus. "I don't know when we'll be able to talk again. You'll have to wait for me to call you. — Are you okay?"

"No, Elizabeth," at least the 'E' had shortened, "I'm not okay. I'm never okay. Enervated, I'm enervated. Always." Lizzy's mom could never get that word right. She always thought it meant extremely nervous. "My damn nerves are ringing like fire bells. No one understands the torment…"

"Are you taking your meds, Mom?"

Her mother halted for a second, which meant the answer was no, of course. She was self-medicating. Scotch.

"Yes, I am. It's just work, there's too much pressure and I can't get good help."

Lizzy's mother owned a bridal shop in Rochester, New York, where Lizzy had grown up. Her aunt, Christine Gardiner, had managed the shop for years and did most of the work, but somehow Lizzy's mom never acknowledged the fact. She always claimed, and seemed to believe, that she was running the shop, present daily, taking care of the details, when the truth was that she swooped in once or twice a week, usually late in the day, and stayed long enough only to leave the window display in disarray or to offend a customer.

"But isn't Aunt Gardiner there? Let her handle the hiring if you need someone."

"What I need is for you to come home." The abrupt shift was typical of her mother. "It's been ages without end since you've been here, since I've seen you in person."

"I know, Mom. If this trip doesn't take too long, I promise I'll be home around the holidays." More vagueness, conditional promises. But Lizzy did need to go home; it had been too long. "I want to see you and Aunt Gardiner, Uncle Gardiner. How's he doing?"

Her uncle was the one of the three who was actually in delicate physical health. Lizzy's mother's health problems, despite her frequent complaints of aches and palpitations and whirrings (whatever those are) were all mental. But her uncle's heart, like her father's, was problematic. He had several stents put in a few months ago, and it seemed to have made a real improvement. He was retired but he had returned to work — international banking — a few days a week, riding the rising tide of renewed energy.

"Oh, he's fine, always mucking around with other people's money," her mother reported peevishly. Although Lizzy's father had left her mother ample money, and although Aunt Gardiner made the shop profitable, her mother always thought of herself as scraping by, to use the phrase she liked. She resented the huge house and the fine cars the Gardiners could afford. She liked to sniff about her mere Honda. "I can never seem to get him to take my money on, make my money work for me."

"Mom, you know that the work he does isn't really for individuals. He has clients like Exxon, China…His firm begs to keep him around because he's so good at that sort of corporate work. He's not what you need. Go to see a banker and get some advice."

Her mother huffed. She had long ago decided she had a just complaint against her brother-in-law and she was not about to yield it now.

"So, you will be home around the holidays?" Her mother, this time, had caught the vagueness, the imprecision.

"I will, Mom. If work allows it, I promise."

Her mother was silent. Conversations between them usually went in this meandering way, punctuated for sure only by complaints about her mother's nerves and the Gardiners. "Alright, sweetheart, I will hold you to that."

Lizzy thought she could hang up, but then her mother interjected: "Are you seeing anyone? Met anyone?"

This was the other reliable punctuation of their talks. Lizzy's non-existent love life. Shit. "Anyone? No," Lizzy reported, Darcy inexplicably coming to her mind, an image of him striding down the hallway in Langley, "No one."

"Lizzy!..."

"Look, Mom, I've got to go. Talk to you again when I can. Please don't call me; I'll be busy. I'll call you."

"But, Lizzy, you need to find someone…You know what the Good Book says, 'It's not good for woman to be alone.'"

It doesn't quite say that.

One of the curious features of her mother's recent life was her joining a local Anglican church, singing in the choir. Lizzy had thought it a net positive until her mother had recently taken to (mis)quoting scripture.

It was disconcerting.

"Lizzy, you're not listening."

"I've got to go, Mom. Bye!"

Bingley did not ask anything else about the call, for which Lizzy was glad.

In the hearing of almost any other agent, she would never have answered the phone, but she felt comfortable, comfortable enough anyway, around Bingley. There had always been a sort of sister-brother dynamic between them.

She did notice that his expression had become more serious. She wondered about his family, whether the job had taken a toll on it as it did on almost all agents' families. The sister-brother dynamic was not strong enough for Lizzy to ask without any invitation.

"So," Bingley said after a quiet few minutes of driving, "what did you make of Darcy?"

Lizzy did not face Bingley but she answered immediately. "An ass. Arrogant."

Bingley smiled and nodded his head. "He comes off that way. Did even as a boy. Around strangers, it's like he's a statue. But he's not. At least," Bingley's clear eyes clouded a bit, "at least he used not to be…"

Bingley drove them to the private tarmac used by small government jets. The wind was blowing as they parked. Darcy was standing on the tarmac, large and frowning, dressed in a Bible-black turtleneck sweater, jeans, and black leather boots. It was a change from the black suit he had worn in Langley and made her remember it.

His wavy hair was waving in the wind, and, as Lizzy reached for the door and he stepped toward it, reaching out, she realized that he had not shaved. A heavy blue afternoon shadow subtly colored his cheeks and chin.

She pulled on the handle and he pulled the door open. She stepped out, facing him, and took off her cap.

Darcy blinked as if staring into a sudden riot of white light. He took a step back. Lizzy smirked inwardly. "Told you I would be blonde…"

He stared, dumbstruck. "But — " he started, stopped, "but so blonde. Like Jean Harlow in Red Dust."

That remark drew Lizzy up short. Harlow. Starlet and harlot, at least in relation to that film "You're an old movie fan?"

Darcy just stared at her hair, her. He didn't answer. Bingley had gotten out and was watching the scene eagerly, laughing. Lizzy glanced at him.

After another moment, Darcy looked at Bingley too. "Let's board. I'll brief you on the plane."

He looked back at Lizzy. "Still not voluptuous, though."

The plane was in the air. Chicago was the destination.

Darcy had three files on a small table. He handed one to Bingley and one to Lizzy. "My file on George Wickham," he said. Lizzy took the file and opened it. It was surprisingly not thick. Inside, on the top of the few pages, was a surveillance photograph.

Wickham.

The shot was a good one. It showed Wickham head to toe, walking. He was elegant — elegantly dressed without seeming a dandy, slim, but with broad shoulders. His face was narrow, his features fine. He was handsome and knew it, lived secure in that knowledge. The smile on his face was the smile of a man used to creating responses in others. Artful and masterful.

Lizzy studied the photograph for a few minutes, disquieted by it.

Darcy said nothing, letting her and Bingley investigate the file.

Lizzy put the photograph aside and thumbed through the papers. They detailed the various places Wickham where Wickham had lately been: Berlin, London. The information on his activities in those cities was dense, detailed, and professional. But there was nothing in the file that predated Berlin.

Lizzy was still smarting from Darcy's comment about her not being voluptuous and was in a mood to quarrel. "Why is there so little in the file beyond Berlin? Did he just come into existence spontaneously in Germany? How did you find him there?"

Darcy passed over her question. "We're focused forward. I know where he's heading in Chicago. There's a woman there, fabulously wealthy, and I suspect she may be a crucial part of The Wicker Man's network. Lady Catherine de Bourgh."

For a moment, Lizzy thought Darcy was joking. "Lady?"

"Yes, she's a Brit, her husband, much older than she and now dead, was Lord de Bourgh. After his death, she transplanted herself to the States, to Chicago. Many years ago.

"She has a massive house north of the city, a mansion she calls Rosings. She rarely leaves Rosings, only leaving for selected cultural events, concerts, and operas, music's the centerpiece of her life, her public life anyway, but though she doesn't leave Rosings often, she manages to exert an enormous influence on the cultural life of the city. Her money often leaves Rosings, even if she rarely does.

"Wickham has no notion that anyone is on to him. His confidence is his greatest weakness. He's simply the wealthy playboy on vacation — and takes everyone to believe that. The CIA was able to tap his calls in DC, and, after buying his airline tickets, he made a call to Rosings, and spoke to Lady Catherine, arranging a visit. On the phone, it was all perfectly innocent. They are supposed to have met when she visited England a few years ago, and to have kept up a friendship. People who move in her circles gossip about them sleeping together and call her cougar Catherine, but I don't know whether that's true. She's certainly his type in look but not his type in years, but who knows to what lengths he may have gone to cultivate ties with her, recruit her."

Lizzy was still puzzled about the Wickham file but she let it go. "Okay, so what's our play?"

"Lady Catherine is hosting a party the day after tomorrow. I've been able to get you onto the guest list. Your cover is as Fanny Prince. You're a librarian, working for the Chicago Public Library. Lady Catherine always…condescends…to invite a few folks from the CPL to her gatherings. She's one of the CPL's largest private donors. She likes to sprinkle a few commoners, educated commoners, of course, among her set."

Bingley was laughing in his seat.

"What?" Lizzy demanded.

He pointed to her head. "If you were in a library, you'd have to shush your hair."

Lizzy blushed and glared at Bingley. She had been so focused on the honeypot portion of the mission that she hadn't thought about her cover. And Darcy hadn't helped her.

But when she turned back to Darcy, he was laughing too, but shaking his head. "No, I think it will help. With that hair, she's not going to seem too much like a librarian. There's a suggestion of something else, something…suggestive."

The two men kept chuckling. Lizzy crossed her legs and arms.

Darcy held out the other file. "The information you need on the CPL, your job. I figured, with your background and education, you can sell it. I'll accompany you as your plus one, your boyfriend, Ned Moreland. American."

She nodded, not quite hearing the final words. You can sell it. It was the first time he suggested she might be able to do the job, and she uncrossed her arms and accepted the file from him.

And then his final words registered. "My boyfriend? Won't you get in my way?" she asked, making sure the question sounded professional, not like a complaint.

He shook his head. "No, if I know Wickham, my presence will help, not hurt. He prefers theft to purchase. Taking you from me will…add spice. He likes his women to be, well, dropping their duties with their panties, if you'll forgive my phrasing. He'll want to prove to you — and me — that you're not mine."

His eyes held Lizzy's for a moment, then he turned his gaze out the window.

A/N: So ends the introductory arc of our story. The mission is underway. Next time, the party at Rosings.

From here on, chapters will be longer but they may also post more slowly.