Free The Elizabeth Papers by Jenetta James Page A

file. This isn’t one of your Russian oligarchs or your aristos in rehab. Nobody will notice. Nobody would care if they did notice. Think of it as an antiquarian fetish of mine.”
    He shot her a glance, and she closed her eyes in acceptance. He moved his arm closer to hers, knowing that she would feel the silent pressure, the knowledge of their history whispering against her skin.
    “What is the name?”
    “Darcy. Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
    “Fitzwilliam is a funny first name. We definitely still have Darcys on the books—live ones, I mean. Okay, Charlie, I’ll look in the archives, but I’m not guaranteeing anything. It has probably all been chucked out, but I’ll have a look.”
    He kissed the side of her head and said, “Thank you.”
    “I should bloody think so. You owe me, Charlie Haywood.”
    She was a nice girl, and he liked her, but she didn’t really touch him. When lunch was over, he gave her a hug, and she went back to the office, the sun shining on her bare legs, and the remains of the raspberries in a pot in her handbag to brighten the afternoon. Charlie’s mind was buzzing with the Darcys, but he knew that, for all his efforts, Issy might find nothing. The archives of Galbraiths, Flanders & Waites were long and deep, but whether they contained documents from 1860 was a different question. It was a long shot, and only time would tell. So, he headed back to the office. He worked on another case and answered some emails. He talked to a Mr. Trinder about a new instruction. He listened to Simon’s account of having trailed the Lebanese trophy wife through every naughty knicker shop in West London.
    By six o’clock, he didn’t have much left to give the day, and so he left. He sat in the leather driver’s seat of his Porsche, started the engine, and was gone. Imaginary faces of historical Darcys danced around before his eyes, and he played the matter around in his head. Without knowing how or why, his mind returned to her honey-blonde head and her moving hands. He cursed himself again that he had made such a hash of meeting her and thought of all the things he did not know about Evie Pemberton. He probably never would know those things, and it didn’t really matter. But it nagged him, nibbled at his consciousness, intruded on his peace. Who the hell was she, and why did he care?
    He could not have explained to anybody why he did it. The heat was gone from the day, the pavements full of people in suits walking home from the Tube. There was a guy giving away copies of the Evening Standard when Charlie stopped at the traffic lights, and his voice seemed too loud to be real. Charlie grew up in London and knew the way to anywhere on instinct. He had looked at Evie’s card more times than he would care to admit. All of the signs seemed to point and all of the roads seemed to lead to her. Before he knew where he was, he was headed away from home, straight into the heart of Fulham. He knew the street, and the studio was easy to find. Suddenly realising how bad it would look if she saw him, Charlie parked opposite, turned the radio down, and simply looked. The studio was pretty obvious. There was a massive canvass obscuring part of the window from the inside and the broken clay model of a lute in the front garden. Tired, late summer flowers blew against the low, red brick wall, and a black cat lay across the pebbly path. It was a single-story building on the end of a terrace house. There was no reason to think that the house had anything to do with her, of course. It was a strange looking place, and Charlie noticed that, instead of steps, there was an ugly, concrete slope leading to the front door and a series of unsightly, metal bars attached to the wall. The contrast with the other houses—all polished, pastel coloured front doors and gracious bay windows—was striking. He wondered for a moment who lived there. The whimsy of his state of mind and the appalling fact that he had gone to her studio for no good