A/N: More of our spy tale.

Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense

Chapter 6: Checkers

Lizzy struggled to sleep.

The party had required such intense concentration — being someone else (Fanny), and tailoring that someone else to other people's expected or apparent expectations (Lady Catherine, George Wickham), and all the while trying to also track herself (Lizzy) and her own reactions to what was happening. It had been exhausting, but it had also required such a pitch of exertion that now she could not let go of the party. It replayed in her head, lights and music and conversation.

But there was also that kiss at the door. It had surprised her and, evidently stirred her, because it too kept replaying, a brief leitmotif between the longer, heavier replayed conversations.

She tossed and turned.

Maybe part of it is the strange bed? Maybe the kiss only surprised me? Everything else stirred me. Really, it's all an understandable reaction to a honeypot mission so soon after my last mission, no time to recover, to reset myself.

She had almost convinced herself of that when her phone, Fanny's phone, beeped.

Lizzy had spent a few minutes with the phone after Darcy left, tailoring it to the cover and had put it on the nightstand beside her bed. Her agency phone was in the nightstand drawer, out of sight.

She rolled over, wrestling for a moment, disentangling herself from the boa constrictor of her blankets. Huffing, she reached for the phone and looked at it. There was a text from Ned.

Ned. Darcy.

Forgot to say how much I liked the fresh red pedicure

Lizzy inhaled in the dark, then laughed, delighted.

With so much on the line at the party, she had temporarily forgotten about getting the pedicure, finding a nail salon a short walk from her apartment, and using the walk to acquaint herself with the immediate neighborhood. She had gotten the pedicure, deciding on red for no good reason she could offer other than liking the shade the nail tech had suggested. And then, she had been dressed when Darcy, Ned, picked her up for the party, her black, closed-toe heels on her feet.

But, after the party, she had taken off the party dress and her heels and returned to Darcy barefoot. He had noticed, and noticed the red polish.

She supposed he had sent the note just to establish a Ned/Fanny text history. It was the kind of small but intimate thing a boyfriend might text to his girlfriend.

An attentive, thoughtful boyfriend. Lizzy couldn't help herself. Smiling in the dark, Fanny texted Ned.

Thanks, Ned, nice of you both to notice and to say so

She expected that to be the end of the exchange, so she put the phone back on the nightstand. But then it beeped again. She retrieved it, curious.

All-day permanent red?

Lizzy boggled for a minute, then remembered an old advertisement — maybe for lipstick? — all-day permanent red. As if the phrase were at once the name of a shade and a promise of long-lastingness.

She stared at the question. And then she decided to boggle Ned in turn.

All night too

For a long time, there was no response, only the promise of three dots flashing, then Ned sent her a smirking emoji. There was a moment's pause, then Ned's smirk was followed by:

Night, again XOXO

Fanny texted back:

Night XOXO

The XOXO was a good touch, Ned, and good for our cover, the text history.

The kiss crossed her mind one last time, lingering in memory much longer than it had in fact. Lizzy rolled over and smiled herself into a swift sleep.

Lizzy woke up the next morning and began to make breakfast.

She had slept later than usual, certainly later than she expected. But she wrapped a new, short robe around the large T-shirt she slept in, found good coffee in the pantry, and started the coffee maker. She found eggs in the kitchen and a small block of cheddar cheese. So she sliced the cheese thin and whipped the eggs side to side in a bowl, making a simple omelet, toasting a couple of slices of bread, buttering them, putting the omelet and toast on a plate, and sat down on a stool after pouring a large mug of steaming coffee.

She was about to take her first sip when she heard a soft knock at the door. She walked to it and peered through the small opening,

She wasn't sure who she expected, but it was Darcy standing in the hallway, a grocery bag in each arm. Ned.

"Hey, Fanny, it's me!" He said, loudly enough to be heard through the door but not loudly enough for his voice to carry farther. He didn't expect anyone but her to hear him but he was taking no chances.

Lizzy pulled the belt of her robe tight. The robe was no shorter than the black mini dress she wore the night before, but it felt more revealing somehow. She opened the door.

Darcy looked her in the face, and she could tell he was resisting the desire to let his eyes drop. "Sorry not to have called first, Fanny."

She stepped aside to let him in and then closed the door.

Darcy sniffed the air. "Is that coffee? Eggs?"

Lizzy walked past him to the counter and gestured to a stool. Before he sat, he placed the bags on the couch and took off his jacket. He was wearing a sweater and jeans. She circled the end of the counter and got another dish. She slid it in front of Darcy and got silverware from a drawer. She sliced her omelet in two, put half on Darcy's plate along with one piece of the toast. After that, she took a mug and filled it with coffee, and gave it to him.

"Would you rather have tea? There may be some in the pantry?"

He waved his hand. "When in Rome."

She came back around the counter and sat down beside him. He took a bite of the omelet and hummed his approval. "Good!"

She looked over her shoulder at the bags. "What did you bring?"

He smiled at her. "A little sunrise shopping in the windy city. Couldn't sleep. Housewarming gifts. I'll show you when we finish."

"Okay." She started to mention the text from the night before but stopped herself. She would let him mention it if it was mentioned at all. Her bare feet, her toenails, were available as a conversation starter.

But Darcy kept his eyes on his food, eating with a real appetite. Lizzy ate too, without talking. When Darcy finished, he made a cross of his knife and fork on his plate and sat back, picking up his coffee and sipping it slowly as Lizzy finished.

He turned to her. "I thought I'd come by and keep you company this morning. Bingley seemed desperate to talk to his lady friend, up early to do so, but also desperate for me not to be there. Something must have kept them from talking last night." He shook his head in disapproval. "So, I took a walk. Lovely day but cool."

"You don't seem happy for Bingley. He's a good man, amiable, gregarious; you know that. Why not be happy someone's making him so excited, so happy? It's sweet that he misses her, and wants so much to talk to her."

Darcy looked at Lizzy for a moment as if her words might have a subtext, but she had intended none. Then Darcy shook his head again. "I gather it's a novelty, a new thing. They haven't been together long. Given that, he should have put it on hold until we finished with this mission. What matters is Wickham, the Wicker Man, the network. We don't need Bingley distracted."

Darcy seemed especially adamant. Lizzy paused for a moment to see if he was going to add anything else, but he didn't. He just stared at his used silverware.

"Look, Bingley's our backup, mostly he's managing tech, doing behind-the-scenes work. It would be different if he were undercover himself and still trying to keep open communication with his girlfriend back in DC, but he's not. Unless it becomes a problem, what's the use of making it one? He's a good agent. He knows his job."

Darcy seemed disposed to grumble. "I suppose but if they want to keep their relationship a secret, why not take a break until he finishes here? The best-kept secrets are those that are non-existent."

Lizzy shook her head. "Spoken like a man who has never been in love."

Darcy looked up at her. "You judge me quickly and absolutely, Agent Bennet."

She looked back at him. "Am I mistaken?"

He stared at his utensils again. "No. You're right, not that it matters." His tone became professional as he faced her, lecturing. "Spies ought not to fall in love. It creates misery all around. What we do, and the life we lead, melts every promise into a compromise. Best to leave all of that alone and simply do the job."

Lizzy swallowed despite the tightness in her throat. Although she had been in love once at Haverford, that had ended and she had not been in love since.

Agent Bennet had reasoned with herself in terms similar to Darcy's on many lonely nights in deep cover. It wasn't clear Agent Bennet had won those arguments with Lizzy, but they had inhibited Lizzy, making her slow to respond to male advances and even slower to initiate advances herself. Darcy was right: promise melted into compromise. There had been a couple of flings, affairs, whatever, since then but they had been short and finally unsatisfying. She was not the sort of woman who could separate sex from deep emotion, not effectively. And without emotion sex reduced to companionate self-pleasure, since the other person did not matter to her as he should. For Lizzy, sex was a way of showing that you cared, not of finding out if you cared. Other agents, different sorts of persons, rotated unfeeling bedfellows with no trouble or twinge of conscience. Lizzy wondered about them but never envied them. On her lonely nights, she wanted love, not simply sex, and she was happy she acknowledged the difference — even if acknowledging it came at a steep cost to her. What's that line in King Lear? Edmund — "I will teach you differences."

Strange that books are coming back to me now, on a mission.

"I understand," Lizzy said, "but he's not officially breaking any rules by staying in contact. I know you're running the mission, but can't you let him have this — her, whoever she is? Why cause friction between you or between them? He'll be professional."

Darcy listened and nodded. "We'll see. I wish I hadn't found out, and that he then felt like he was at liberty to tell me as much as he has. The professional thing would have been to hide the personal."

Lizzy decided to change the subject. "So — we didn't talk about Wickham specifically last night, other than to gauge…the first returns of my interaction with him. What did you make of him, up-close?" Lizzy wasn't simply changing the subject; she'd been wondering about Darcy and Wickham since she had seen Wickham's file on the plane.

Darcy's face darkened. "He's all he seemed to be through a camera or binoculars, only more loathsome. It's obvious why he's been able to do what he's done: he's handsome and he's charming." Darcy glanced at Lizzy but she kept her face expressionless, herself still. "In that white tuxedo coat, who would imagine him to be who he really is. He seems like a gentleman. But, when you're near him for long, if you pay close attention, his gentlemanliness is a veneer. A gentleman makes others comfortable; he does that by careful attention and an amiable manner, not by flattery or ingratiating himself."

Gentleman? Amiable? Lizzy asked herself, Does anyone still talk that way? She understood Darcy but he was all House-of-Lords again.

"What did you think?" Darcy asked. He was studying her face.

"Like you said, handsome and charming. Very charming. But there is something subtly manipulative about him. Talking to him was a little like sharing a scene with him, a scene in which he was acting, a scene that he was also directing."

Darcy nodded once, emphatically. "Exactly."

"The file you gave us actually had surprisingly little on Wickham's history. Is there more that I can see, so as to get a better idea of him?"

Darcy glanced away. "Yes, there's more. But it won't help you much with the man. Until I identified him, we only had records of various incidents attributed to The Wicker Man. We now know he did them or orchestrated them, but we don't know any real details as to how."

"But why? Are his only motivations money and cruelty?"

Darcy shook his head at her. "Aren't those enough, especially when you can combine them as he has?"

Lizzy felt like there was something in what Darcy said, some slight revelation, but she was unsure what.

He went on: "I would've thought your time at the Agency would have shown you the reality that there are people who are evil. Wickham is one of them."

"Okay," Lizzy responded, "but that doesn't mean there's not a story about how he came to be that way. Unless you think he was, I don't know, hatched as a demon."

Darcy glared at her. "No, he is a demon born of a woman, a human demon. And perhaps he has his story — but whatever it is, that story does not excuse him for what he's done, not for one measure of the pain he's caused." Darcy's face had turned red by the time he finished.

"Can you get me the other information? Maybe it won't help me understand him from the inside, his backstory, so to speak, but at least it will give me his basic biography."

Darcy's nod was reluctant. "I can get it. It may take a day or so to get MI-6 to send it. The bureaucracy there's moves like Dicken's Circumlocution Office."

Lizzy chuckled. "Little Dorrit. That's my favorite of his novels."

"Mine too," Darcy said, smiling, his anger cooling, the redness in his face disappearing. He turned on his stool and pointed to the bags. "Speaking of…I went for a walk this morning as I said and I found a tiny newspaper and magazine shop. Covers, that was the name. Really. They sold coffee so I went inside to buy a cup. But as I stood waiting in line, I noticed that the back wall was covered with tall bookcases, stuffed with old hardbacks. So I bought you some. No self-respecting librarian should live in an apartment without its proper share of moldering classics."

He reached into one of the bags and pulled out a couple of used books. Wordsworth's Poetical Works, A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick. She took them, looked at them, then placed them on the counter. His smile had grown. He reached into the bag again and held up a thick blue-bound book, waving it proudly like a trophy. "Wives and Daughters. Gaskell. It was on the shelf. We didn't need to mention it at the party, but I thought finding it there was a good sign. And it's in very good condition."

He handed it to her along with his excitement at finding it. She smiled at him. "That's funny, finding a copy of that. Did it cost much?"

He shook his head. "Not much more than the others. There are more in the bag, but I'll let you discover them later. Oh, and I bought some other things. That place was like a shop in a Dicken's novel, crammed with curious things." He reached into the other bag and lifted out a small cactus in a tiny terra cotta pot. "A succulent friend to keep you company, although he's slightly prickly. And…" he reached in again and produced a long, thin box, "something to pass the time: Checkers!"

It was indeed a box of checkers, a cheap set. "Checkers? You play checkers?"

Darcy laughed out loud, maybe the first time she had heard it, a deep chuckle that reverberated through her whole body. "Yes, Bingley taught me when we were boys and I've loved the American version of the game since. It's deeply instructive, I think. Do you play?"

"Yes, I suppose. I learned it as a child. My dad taught me and we used to play. But I haven't played in years and years."

His smile was boyish. "What do you say to a post-breakfast game, a way to pass some time? All we can do now is wait for Wickham to make some move. I can freshen your memory of the rules, strategy."

Lizzy laughed. This was an unexpected turn to the morning. "Okay, open the box and set them up. I'll go and get dressed."

She was dressed.

On the coffee table between the sofa and an armchair, Darcy set the checkers, red and black, on the board, also red and black. Once the board was ready, he turned it, so that he was black and she was red.

He stared at her for a moment as if suggesting the orientation of the board had another meaning but he said nothing.

"Since you're out of practice, I'll move first," Darcy said. "Black, or the darker side, moves first." She nodded and he slid a piece forward. She examined the move for a moment, then looked at him. "Forced jumps, captures, right? If I have one, I have to take it?"

"Yes, that's right. That's one of the fundamental, somewhat counter-intuitive aspects of the game, especially if you've played chess."

He looked at her questioningly, and she shrugged. "A few times, also with my dad."

"In chess, people often become too consumed by defensive strategies, including, but not limited to, castling. But checkers is different; it's an offensive game. You can defend here and there, in particular situations, but there's no generally defensive way to win. No defense you build can stand up over time." He gestured for her to move and she did, more or less mirroring his move.

"Ok, good." He sat back and looked at her, his gaze warm and amused. He really was enjoying himself. She began to enjoy herself, the spectacle of MI-6's best agent enjoying checkers. And of course, he was playing the CIA's best.

"Now, remember, the game is like chess in one important respect: control of the center of the board is crucial. It can seem like you ought to position your pieces at the edges of the board, but that's a mistake. Yes, they're protected from being jumped, but you limit their power."

He made another move. She studied it for a minute. Then she moved again. So far, there had been no forced captures.

He leaned down, thinking. She looked at him. His stubble was back, heavier, darkening his jaw. Looking at it, she could feel it again as she had felt it last night. She liked how he looked when he thought.

He lifted his head without making a move. "It's important to remember that advance en masse is best, allowing some of your pieces to protect others. But you have to advance. And that brings us to the most fascinating aspect of the game," his tone grew more serious, "the one that keeps me playing the game. To win, you have to sacrifice pieces. Winning the war requires losing battles. You have to pick the battles, of course, and you can't lose too many and still win the war, but I find that feature of the game deep, vexing. I want to win without sacrifice; I believe that should be possible, but it isn't, not really, not against any competent player."

Lizzy thought about what he said. It was true. She could remember that feature of the game bothering her as a girl, playing with her father, especially the way the mandatory capture rule forced you into using a piece to make a capture that then required that piece's capture by your opponent. But she had never really reflected on it as Darcy just had, thinking about it in terms of sacrifice, of lost battles and won wars.

"That's interesting. I hadn't ever thought about it like that, not really. It is perplexing, especially in those terms."

Darcy nodded, still lost in his thoughts. "I hate the principle that the end justifies the means. I always have; I don't believe it. The way I was brought up, my father…Anyway, I later came to realize that I've always believed in another principle, one that, at Cambridge, I was taught to call the Pauline Principle, since St. Paul formulates it in Romans, if I recall correctly: Do not do evil so that good may come." He sighed.

"But I've ended up a spy, living my life in a shadow world where evil is routinely done so that good may come. Even worse, if good does come, then the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, my boss, or the Director of the CIA, yours, Kellynch, will tell you that the evil you did was not, after all, really an evil, since good came from it." Darcy shook his head and stopped talking for a moment.

Lizzy thought about her past honeypot missions as Darcy paused. The Pauline Principle.

He glanced at her, looking as if he had just realized how much he'd said, how long he'd gone on. "Sorry, I guess checkers provides me an opportunity for musing about all that, trying to understand it. Maybe to reconcile myself to the decisions my profession requires of me."

Lizzy did not respond. They sat in heavy silence for a long moment, then Darcy finally moved a piece.

They were tied at one game apiece and playing a third, decisive game when Darcy's phone rang. He took it out of his pocket to answer it. "Bingley, it's Darcy. What?"

He listened carefully for a moment. "Who? When?"

More listening. "Why?"

Bingley went on for another minute or two, then Darcy said goodbye and ended the call. He gave Lizzy a puzzled look.

"There's been a move, but not from the player we expected."

"What do you mean?"

"The priest, Collingwood, was at the security desk downstairs."

Lizzy and Darcy were seated at the counter again, the unfinished checkers game on the coffee table. Lizzy's computer was open and they were talking to Bingley.

"So, the security guard said that a man walked up and asked about you — if you lived in the building. We've paid the guards handsomely and they know more is coming when we finish, and they know to tell us whenever anyone asks about you or your apartment. Only Darcy and I can go up without a prior word to them," Bingley explained.

"The guard on duty called just after Collingwood left. Collingwood wasn't exactly sneaking around, though. He was in his priestly get-up. What do you call it, the dog collar? He gave the guard his name and his business card — if that's the right thing to call it for a priest. He asked if you lived in the building. The guard told him that he could not say, that building policy was to protect the privacy of tenants."

Lizzy looked at Darcy. "I told him my name and that I worked at the CPL. But he wouldn't have gotten my address from my personal page, would he?"

Bingley broke in. He was shaking his head, embarrassed. "No, but I had to supply an address to the library when they gave your name as the winner of the invitation to the party. There wasn't time to mail an invitation, so I didn't think it mattered, so I asked them to send the invitation to Fanny's personal email. They did. I printed it off from there."

"Fanny has a personal email?" Lizzy asked.

Bingley nodded, glancing nervously at Darcy. "Yes, but I'm monitoring it; you don't need to. If you want to use it to send something, just go to Gmail. Your computer's set up already. I intended to tell you all that later in a brief video conference. I didn't think Lady Catherine would contact the library about your address, or that she would be able to get it if she did. But it must have been her. She must have given it to the priest."

Darcy's lips were compressed, and Lizzy could feel his annoyance. "It's not a big deal in one way, since our hope is that Wickham eventually comes here, and meets with Fanny, but we need to be in control of the mission information. We need to know exactly who has access to exactly what at all times. Success — and Agent Bennet's safety — depend on it."

"Right, sorry," Bingley said, apologetic and cowed.

"It's okay, Bingley. He didn't make it to my door unannounced or anything."

"I'll be on top of things from here on," he promised.

"We'll talk later," Darcy said, and shut the computer. He looked at Lizzy. "I'm sorry about that. It shouldn't have happened. I understand what Bingley was thinking, but it was sloppy. He either should not have supplied the address or made sure we knew he had."

"C'mon, Darcy," Lizzy said, entreating him, "it isn't a big deal. I'm far more interested in why Lady Catherine's priest came here, hoping to see me."

Darcy did not comment again on Bingley's mistake. He stood for a moment, pondering the question about Collingwood.

As he did, Fanny's phone rang from the bedroom.

He looked at Lizzy and she looked at him, then she hurried into her room. Darcy followed to the door and stopped. The phone displayed a number that Lizzy did not know. She answered the call.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Fanny, this is George Wickham. We met at the party last night." She turned and pointed at the phone. "Wickham," she said soundlessly to Darcy.

"Oh, yes, George, I remember."

"Lady Catherine told me how to reach you. I hope you don't mind, that I'm not intruding."

"No, you're not. It's fine. What can I do for you?"

He laughed. Rich and confident. "Lady Catherine mentioned to me, after the party, that Ned was going to have to leave town. Is that right?"

Lizzy made sure she sounded disappointed. "Yes, he's flying out soon, in just a little while, back to New York."

"She also told me you had taken some time off, anticipating that you would spend it with him."

"Yes," she said, "that's true."

"I'm going to be in Chicago later today. I'm not Ned, of course, but I was planning to tour some of the architectural sights and I wondered if you might want to come with me? Maybe we could get dinner?"

She paused deliberately, holding her peace for as long as she could, hoping to wait him out. "It would be something to do," he added, "and just as friends, of course."

She had done it, her skill and talent, and appearance had been enough to hook Wickham. But she again felt no particular sense of accomplishment. The difficult work, the tricky work, was all ahead of her. She let another beat pass. "I suppose that'd be okay. Ned and I canceled our plans and I don't have any others."

"Wonderful," he said, no surprise in his voice. From his point of view, he was succeeding too. "I'll have a car, should I pick you up?" Darcy had moved to stand beside her and she was holding the phone so that he could hear, although she knew Bingley should be recording the call. Darcy nodded when she looked at him. "Yes, that will be fine. I'll text you my address."

"Good. Say 3 pm? That'll give us two or three hours of daylight to see some sights, and we can decide about dinner as we do. You're sure it won't be any problem, I mean with Ned?"

"No, I'll tell him. He knows you — and he hates that our plans had to be canceled."

"Brilliant. Be sure to bring a jacket, we may be outside, do some walking."

"Okay. I'll text the address soon. I'll be downstairs. Text me when you arrive."

"See you soon, Fanny."

"Bye, George."

She ended the call. Darcy looked flushed beneath his stubble but he smiled at her. "Kellynch was right. You were the woman for the job," he said in a low voice as if his words were both verdict and sentence.

He turned and walked into the living room. She followed. He stopped and stood, staring down at the checkerboard.

A/N: Next time, sightseeing with Wickham. We're entering the thick of it now. Love to hear from you, if you'd take a moment to review.