Page 106 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

He heard laughter on the landing above, and shrieking, and then his aunt Matlock's voice, very cold, and then silence. Then a long pause. Then his aunt's voice again, not cold at all.

Then they came down.

His aunts first, Matlock and de Bourgh, side by side, in grey and black, magnificent and terrible, their plumes nodding and their trains carried behind them by footmen. He bowed as they passed. His aunt Catherine rapped him on the arm with her fan and said, "Stand up straight, Fitzwilliam, you look like a heron," and went on out to the carriage.

Then Georgiana.

She came down very slowly, one step at a time, with her hand on the banister and her maid holding up the long white train behind her, and her eyes fixed on the stairs in front of her feet. He watched her come, and could not breathe.

He had seen her last as a girl. He realised that now. A thin, shy, frightened child, who hid in the music room and wept on the floor of the blue bedroom and flinched when he came into a room. The young woman coming down his staircase in white and silver, with three tall plumes on her fair head and her shoulders straight and her chin up, was not a child at all. She was seventeen. She was a Darcy. She looked, he thought, suddenly and painfully, exactly like the portrait of their mother that hung at the top of the great stairs at Pemberley.

She reached the bottom step, and looked up at him, and saw his face. And she smiled, a little shakily, and said, "Do I look very foolish?"

"You look," said Darcy, and found that his voice had gone, and had to stop, and begin again. "You look like Mother."

Georgiana's eyes filled. "Truly?"

"Truly."

She put her arms round his neck, very carefully, so as not to crush anything, and held on for a moment. Then she let go, and her maid carried her train out after her aunts, and she went down the steps to the carriage without looking back, and he watched her go.

And then there was a step on the stair above him, and he turned, and there was his wife.

He had seen Elizabeth in a great many things. In a turned muslin at a country assembly. In mud to the knee. In white sarsenet at Longbourn church, in her nightgown on the drive at Pemberley, in nothing at all in the morning sun. He had thought there was no way left for her to astonish him.

She came down the last flight of stairs in white and silver, with her dark hair piled high under three white plumes, and the sapphire at her throat and the sapphire on her hand, and her four-yard train whispering on every step behind her. She did not look at her feet. She looked at him, the whole way down, with her dark eyes very bright and her chin up, and the corner of her mouth beginning to curve.

She stopped on the bottom step, and looked at him in his velvet and silver and buckled shoes and lace, with his sword and his ridiculous hat under his arm.

"Good heavens," said Elizabeth. "You look like a portrait of your own great-grandfather."

"I feel like him. He died of gout."

She laughed, and he held out his hand, and she took it, and came down the last step to stand in front of him.

"And I?" she said. "Do I look like a wedding cake? Georgiana and I agreed we looked like two wedding cakes."

He looked down at her. He thought of a paragraph in The Tattler's Glass: a young person from the country, without fortune or family. He thought of a spyglass trained on his house from a carriage in the square. He thought of a gentleman at Lady Pembury's who would have taken the bet himself for fifty guineas.

"You look," said Darcy, "like the Mistress of Pemberley."

Her eyes filled, suddenly, and she looked away, and then back at him, and smiled.

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It was a short drive from Grosvenor Square to St James's. It took them an hour and a quarter.

The whole of fashionable London was going to court on the King's birthday, and the whole of unfashionable London had turned out to watch it go. Carriages stood nose to tail from Piccadilly to the Palace gates. The pavements were packed with people: shop girls and apprentices and clerks and flower-sellers and small boys up lamp-posts, all craning to see the feathers go by.

Darcy rode beside the carriage on his bay mare, as he had ridden beside it all the way from Derby. And about halfway down St James's Street, opposite White's, he heard it.

A ballad seller was standing on the corner with a sheaf of penny song-sheets over his arm, bawling at the top of his lungs. Darcy did not catch the first verse. He caught the chorus, because half the crowd round the ballad seller were singing it with him, and laughing, and pointing at the Darcy carriage with its crest on the panels.

The Darcy Wager, the Darcy Wager, Pemberley staked on his lady's heart! Never a man in the town would take her, Never a pair so sweet a part!

It was dreadful doggerel. It did not even scan.

Elizabeth, in the carriage, had heard it too. He saw her face at the window: first astonished, and then pink, and then helpless with laughter. Across from her, Georgiana had both hands over her mouth. Beside them, bolt upright, Lady Catherine was staring out of the other window with her lips pressed together and her shoulders shaking.