Page 103 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"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."

The drawing room was perfectly silent.

"And then he turned round," said Aldridge, "and said, Will anybody take it? To the whole room. And nobody moved. Not one man. Nobody so much as breathed. And then old Ashcombe, who is eighty-one and married to the most dreadful woman in London, lifted his stick and said he would take it gladly, only his wife would have his head on a pike in Grosvenor Square." He began to laugh again, helplessly. "And the whole of White's fell about. I have never heard anything like it. Men were crying. Hanley had to be sat down."

Elizabeth did not say anything.

She found that she could not. She stood in the middle of the drawing room with her hands still in Richard's, and her eyes had filled, and her throat had closed, and she could not speak one word. She thought of a paragraph in The Tattler's Glass, in a black box, on a grey March morning at the breakfast table. The gentleman is richer by fifty guineas. Of the lady's feelings upon the matter, if she has yet been told, we are unable to inform our readers.

She thought: He has told them now.

Behind her, somebody made a small choked sound. She turned. Georgiana had both hands pressed over her mouth and the tears were running down over her fingers. Anne, in the window seat, was grinning so widely her thin face seemed about to split. And on the sofa, Lady Catherine de Bourgh had put down the Gentleman's Magazine, and was sitting very still, very upright, looking at nothing, with her mouth pressed into a hard thin line that was trembling at the corners.

"Pemberley," said Lady Catherine, at last, to the room in general, in a voice not quite her own. "He wagered Pemberley. In the book at White's. His great-great-grandfather would rise from the grave." She sniffed, very loudly. "I have never been so proud of anything in my life."

Elizabeth heard the front door.

She did not wait for Pearce to announce him. She did not wait for anything. She pulled her hands out of Richard's and was out of the drawing room and across the landing and flying down the great staircase before any of them could turn round.

He was standing in the hall, just inside the blue door, taking off his gloves. He was a little windblown from the Park, and the May evening light was coming in behind him through the fanlight, and he looked up at the sound of her feet on the stair.

She stopped on the bottom step. They looked at each other across the hall.

"They got here first," he said. "Didn't they? Richard. I told him to let me tell you myself."

"He could not wait," said Elizabeth. Her voice cracked. "Nobody could wait. Lady Catherine is crying on the sofa."

"Lady Catherine does not cry."

"She is crying on the sofa, Fitzwilliam. She says your great-great-grandfather will rise from his grave." She came down the last step. "You wagered Pemberley."

"I did."

"In the betting book. At White's. In front of everybody."

"I did."

"You absurd man," said Elizabeth, and her face crumpled, and she began to laugh and cry at once, the way she had on the bottom stair after the Park. "You absurd, proud, magnificent, ridiculous man. What if somebody had taken it?"

He dropped his gloves on the hall table. He crossed the black and white marble floor in four strides, and took her face between his hands, as he had on the drive at Pemberley in the dawn.

"Then I would have lost a house," said Fitzwilliam Darcy, "and still have won."

#

Saturday, 23rd May

By the next morning, it was all over London.

Darcy had expected that. He had not expected the manner of it. Pearce brought up the Morning Post at nine, ironed, on its salver, with an expression on his long grave face that Darcy had never seen there before and could only describe, on reflection, as smugness. He laid it down beside his master's plate, open, and stepped back, and folded his hands, and waited.

It was not in the Fashionable Intelligence this time. It had a column to itself, on the second page, under a heading in capitals.

THE DARCY WAGER.

The Town has been much diverted this spring by certain reports, now known to have been maliciously invented, concerning a gentleman of ancient family and his lady. It was put about that the gentleman married for a jest. We are now able to inform our readers of a wager which was entered yesterday, at four o'clock, in the book of a certain club in St James's Street, in the presence of some hundreds of witnesses, and which we reproduce entire, with the gentleman's permission.

And there it was, word for word, his own sentence, in the Morning Post, for the whole of England to read over its toast.