Page 102 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Aldridge drew his pen through all three. One straight black line through each, firmly, from end to end. And underneath, in a hand that was not quite steady, he wrote:

Withdrawn, with the most humble apology of the writer to Mr and Mrs Darcy. It was never accepted. It was never a wager. It was a drunken jest, and the writer is ashamed of it. — E. Aldridge, 22nd May 1812.

He straightened up. There was a faint murmur in the room, like wind in grass, and then silence again.

Then Darcy took the pen.

He did not turn to a new page. He wrote on the same one, directly underneath, in his own small, firm, upright hand, the hand Elizabeth had ninety-three letters in, slowly and clearly, so that every man who came to the book after him for the next hundred years would be able to read it.

Mr Darcy of Pemberley wagers Pemberley, and everything that belongs to it, that there is no man in England who loves his wife as well as he loves his. He invites any gentleman who believes otherwise to take the bet.

Fitzwilliam Darcy.

He drew the short firm line beneath his name that he drew beneath it on every letter he had ever written to anybody but her. Then he laid down the pen, and turned round, and faced the room.

Nobody moved.

He had wondered, walking down St James's Street, what it would feel like to stand here. He had thought it might feel like standing on the edge of a cliff. It did not. It felt like standing on the top of the rise above Pemberley in the morning, looking across the valley at the house.

"Well, gentlemen?" said Darcy. His voice carried to the bow window without his raising it. "Pemberley is a very good estate. Ten thousand a year. I am told it is a great deal more than that, in fact, but I have never liked to boast. Will anybody take it?"

The silence went on.

He let his eyes move slowly round the room: over Sir Charles Hanley, scarlet to the ears, pressed into a corner by the card-room door; over the two young men from the bow window who had looked so carefully at the street in March; over Lord Ashcombe in his chair by the fire; over Hurst, who had signed in George Wickham and never remembered it, and who was staring at him with his mouth open. Not one of them spoke. Not one of them came forward.

"Nobody?" said Darcy.

It was old Lord Ashcombe who broke it. He was eighty-one, and deaf, and had been married for fifty-six years to a lady famous throughout London for her temper, and he lifted his stick from where he sat by the fire and pointed it at the book and said, in a high cracked carrying voice:

"I would take it, sir, gladly. Gladly. But my wife would have my head on a pike in Grosvenor Square before I could sign my name."

And White's, which had stood in St James's Street for more than a century and had never, in living memory, seen such a thing, burst out laughing.

It went up like a wave. It went from the fire to the bow window and back. Aldridge was laughing so hard he had to hold on to the book stand. Richard, by the door, had thrown back his head and was roaring. Somebody in the card room began to clap, and somebody else, and then the whole long room was clapping and laughing and shouting at once, and men who had not spoken to Darcy since March were pushing through the crowd to shake his hand, and somebody was calling for champagne, and Hurst was saying over and over to nobody, "I signed him in, you know. The fellow. I signed him in. Never knew."

Darcy stood by the book in the middle of it, with his hand being shaken by a man he had never met, and found that he was laughing too.

He did not stay for the champagne. He looked across the room at Richard, over all the heads, and Richard grinned and jerked his chin at the door, and he went.

He walked home. He did not remember a single step of it.

#

At twenty minutes to six, a hackney carriage came round the corner of Grosvenor Square so fast that it nearly overturned, and drew up at the blue door with its horse in a lather, and Colonel Fitzwilliam and Lord Edward Aldridge fell out of it together, hatless, and came up the steps two at a time, shouting for Mrs Darcy.

Elizabeth was in the drawing room. She had been in the drawing room since a quarter past four, not reading, not sewing, not playing the pianoforte, walking up and down between the windows until Georgiana begged her to sit, and then sitting, and then getting up again. Anne was in the window seat. Georgiana was at the pianoforte, not playing. Lady Catherine had come down at five, declaring that she happened to be passing the door, and was sitting bolt upright on the sofa pretending to read the Gentleman's Magazine upside down.

They all heard the shouting in the hall. They were all on their feet by the time the door burst open.

"Where is he?" said Elizabeth. "Richard. Where is he? What has happened?"

"He is walking," gasped Richard. "Home. The long way. Round by the Park. He said he wanted air. We came ahead. We could not wait." He was scarlet in the face and grinning like a schoolboy, and he took both her hands and shook them up and down. "Oh, Cousin. Oh, Cousin Elizabeth. You should have been there. You should have seen it."

"Seen what?"

It was Aldridge who told it, in the end, because Richard kept stopping to laugh. Aldridge told it standing in the middle of the drawing-room carpet, pale and unshaven and shining, with his hands moving, the way a man tells the story of a battle he has been in: the packed room, the silence, the book on its stand. The three black lines through his own disgraceful wager, and the apology underneath. And then Darcy, taking the pen.

He recited it. He had it by heart. He had, he confessed, read it eleven times before he left the club.