Page 100 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Darcy felt Elizabeth's hand find his on the balustrade, and hold it hard.

Then his aunt Matlock came past them both, and went down the stairs.

She went very slowly, in her grey silk and her diamonds, with her head up and her face like stone, the Countess of Matlock descending her own staircase into her own ballroom, and the whole room turned to watch her come. She walked across the silent floor until she stood in front of her goddaughter. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. In that silence, the smallest word would have carried to the gallery.

"Theodosia," she said. "Your carriage is at the door. I have sent to your father. You will go home now. And in a week, you will go to your aunt in Wexford, and you will stay there." A pause. "You will not come to this house again."

Theodosia looked at her. For one moment her lips moved, as though she were going to speak, to plead, to explain. Then she looked round, slowly, at the ring of still faces, and something in her seemed to go out, like a lamp.

She turned, and walked towards the far doors.

And the crowd parted for her.

Not rudely. Not much. Only a small shifting of shoulders, a gathering-in of skirts, as though everybody in her path had all at once decided to look at someone on the other side. A space opened round her as she walked, a foot wide, like the space round a stone in a stream.

Darcy had seen that space before. He had seen it open round his wife on Lady Pembury's stairs in March, and felt her hand shake on his arm, and wanted to kill every person in the house.

He did not feel triumphant. He had thought he might. He had imagined this moment, more than once, in the long weeks of papers and whispers, and in his imagining it had been sweet. It was not sweet. He stood at the balustrade with his wife's hand in his and watched a woman of four-and-twenty in white and silver walk alone the whole length of a silent ballroom between two walls of turned-away faces, and felt nothing but a great heavy tiredness, and underneath it, very faintly, pity.

The doors closed behind her.

For a moment longer, nobody moved. Then, in the gallery, somebody coughed. Somebody else laughed, nervously. And down on the floor, in the middle of the room, Lady Matlock turned her head, and looked up at the landing, at her nephew and his wife standing hand in hand at the balustrade.

"Fitzwilliam," she said, in her clear cool carrying voice. "The next set is forming. I believe you are engaged to Mrs Darcy."

She lifted one hand, very slightly, to the musicians in the gallery.

They began to play.

Darcy looked down at Elizabeth. Her face was pale and her eyes were very bright, and she was not smiling; not yet. But when he held out his hand, she put hers into it without a word, and they went down the staircase together, slowly, into the ballroom, while two hundred people watched.

Nobody turned away from them. Nobody gathered in their skirts. As they reached the floor, somebody near the stairs began, quite quietly, to clap. It was the old admiral, Sir Hugh Ferrers, on his wooden leg. Then Lady Harriet Kerr beside him. Then Lady Sefton. And then, one after another, all down the long room, the rest.

They took their places at the top of the set. Across from him, in the candlelight, his wife looked up at him, and at last, slowly, she smiled.

"Is it finished?" she said, very low, under the music.

Darcy looked at her for a long moment: at the sapphire at her throat and the sapphire on her hand, and the face that had looked round a pillar at him in Meryton and seen him.

"Nearly," he said. "There is one thing left. And it is mine to do."

Chapter 27: The Darcy Wager

Darcy House. Friday, 22nd May 1812

The Morning Post came up on Pearce's salver at nine, as it always did, and for the first time that spring, Elizabeth reached for it without her heart in her mouth.

It was all there, in the Fashionable Intelligence, between a notice of the Duchess of Devonshire's breakfast and a new bonnet at Madame Devy's. It was very discreet. It named nobody. It did not need to. A certain lady of rank, long a favourite at a great house in Grosvenor Square, had been so unfortunate as to lose her composure at her godmother's ball, and had said a great deal more than she intended in the hearing of two hundred people. The lady was understood to be leaving town for Ireland. The Town was said to be in a ferment. And it was now generally supposed, the paragraph concluded with great delicacy, that certain recent reports concerning a family of the first consequence in Derbyshire may be entirely disregarded, their author being at last known.

Elizabeth read it twice. Then she put it down beside her plate, and found that she did not want to read it a third time. She had thought she might feel triumph. She felt only a great quiet emptiness, like a house after the guests have gone.

Across the table, Georgiana was eating toast and honey and humming. Anne, who had stayed the night rather than cross the square in the small hours, was reading her mother's copy of the Post aloud to nobody in particular, with enormous relish, in a voice still slightly hoarse from Pemberley. Lady Catherine had gone up to bed at two in the morning, declaring the evening the most satisfactory she had spent since 1774, and had not been seen since.

Her husband was not at the table.

She found him in the study, standing at the window with his back to the room and his hands behind him, looking out at the square. He was fully dressed, in his best dark blue coat, and his hair was brushed, and there was something in the set of his shoulders she had not seen since Pemberley: a kind of stillness, gathered in on itself, like a man about to jump a very high fence.

"You said last night," said Elizabeth, from the doorway, "that there was one thing left. And that it was yours to do."