Page 107 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

The ballad seller saw the crest, and saw Darcy on his horse, and swept off his battered hat and bowed low in the gutter, and the crowd round him cheered.

Darcy, who had once been the proudest man in England, and who had spent his whole life dreading nothing so much as being laughed at in the street, found that he was laughing too. He took off his ridiculous hat, and bowed from the saddle to the ballad seller, very gravely, and tossed him a guinea.

The crowd roared. The carriage rolled on towards the Palace, with Mrs Darcy's laughter coming out of the window, and his sister's, and, unbelievably, his aunt Catherine's.

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The Queen's Drawing Room at St James's Palace was the hottest, most crowded, most uncomfortable place Elizabeth had ever been in her life, and she would not have missed it for Pemberley itself.

They waited for two hours. They waited on a grand staircase so crammed with hoops that nobody could move up or down it, only shuffle sideways, a few inches at a time, like crabs on a rock. They waited in a long gilt gallery hung with crimson damask, under chandeliers that dripped hot wax onto the plumes of the ladies beneath. They waited in a second gallery, and then a third, each hotter and more crowded than the last, in a slow shining river of white satin and silver and diamonds and nodding feathers, while the gentlemen in their velvet and swords stood against the walls looking like men waiting to be hanged.

Elizabeth had thought she would be frightened. She found that she was not. She was too interested. She looked at everything. She looked at the painted ceilings, and the gilded chairs nobody was allowed to sit on, and the Yeomen of the Guard in their red and gold, and the old dowager in front of her whose plumes had caught fire slightly on a candle and been beaten out by a page, and who was pretending nothing had happened.

And everywhere she looked, people were looking at her.

Not the way they had looked at the Pemburys' in March. Not the way they had looked from the carriages in Grosvenor Square, with a spyglass. They looked the way people look at someone they have been reading about, and have made up their minds to like. Ladies she had never met smiled at her over their fans. Gentlemen bowed as she inched past. A very young girl in the crush behind her, in her first white plumes, whispered to her mother, not quite quietly enough, "Mama. That is her. The Darcy Wager." And her mother said, "Hush, Louisa," and then, after a moment, leaning forward: "Mrs Darcy. I do beg your pardon. My daughter has been reading the Post. May I say, ma'am, how very glad we all were."

Elizabeth, astonished, said thank you.

Georgiana, beside her, was white to the lips, and her hand on Elizabeth's arm was shaking. But she did not let go, and she did not turn back.

At last, at a little after four o'clock, they came to the door of the Presence Chamber.

It was a long crimson room, even hotter than the rest, and at the far end of it, under a canopy of state, stood a small, plain, elderly lady in grey silk and a great many diamonds, with a pair of very shrewd, very tired dark eyes. On either side of her, and behind her, stood a crowd of princesses and ladies-in-waiting and gentlemen of the household. And one by one, the ladies of England were walking up the long crimson room towards her, to make their curtsey and be named.

A gentleman at the door took Georgiana's card, and read it, and called out her name in a voice that rang to the ceiling.

"Miss Darcy! Presented by the Countess of Matlock!"

Elizabeth felt Georgiana's fingers tighten on her arm, once, very hard. Then they let go.

She walked up the room.

Elizabeth watched her go. She did not think she would ever forget it. A slim white figure with three nodding plumes, walking up the length of that long crimson room, alone, with her four-yard train flowing out behind her and her aunt Matlock a step behind at her side. Everyone in the room was watching her. Everyone in the room knew her name. Six weeks ago, the Morning Post had asked in print whether Her Majesty had been informed.

Georgiana did not look at any of them. She looked straight ahead, at the small lady in grey under the canopy, and walked, and did not falter once.

She reached the foot of the dais. She sank into her curtsey: all the way down, in a great soft collapse of white and silver, until her plumes were bowed almost to the carpet. She held it. One, two, three.

And the Queen, looking down at her, said something.

Elizabeth was too far away to hear. She saw Georgiana lift her head, startled, from the curtsey. She saw the Queen's tired shrewd face, and her mouth moving, and then, astonishingly, a small smile. She saw Georgiana answer; saw her lips move, and her cheeks go pink. Then the Queen inclined her head, very slightly, and Georgiana rose from her curtsey, slowly, without wobbling, and began to walk backwards down the room. Three steps. Kick the train aside with the heel. Three more.

She did not tread on her train.

She reached the door, and turned, and her face was pink and shining and quite dazed, and she caught Elizabeth's hands.

"She said," Georgiana whispered, "she said, I am told you play the pianoforte very well, Miss Darcy. I am very fond of Handel. And I said, so am I, ma'am. And she said, then you must play him loudly. He was never meant to be played softly."

Elizabeth did not know whether to laugh or cry. She thought of Mary at the pianoforte at Longbourn, playing too loud because nobody had ever listened.

Then the gentleman at the door took her own card, and read it, and called out, in the same ringing voice:

"Mrs Fitzwilliam Darcy! On her marriage! Presented by the Countess of Matlock!"

And Elizabeth Bennet, of Longbourn in Hertfordshire, the granddaughter of a country attorney, with an uncle in trade in Cheapside, walked up the long crimson room towards the Queen of England.

She did not look at her feet. She did not look at the people watching. She looked at the small tired lady in grey at the end of the room, and walked, and thought, absurdly, of a muddy lane, and a stile, and a hawthorn, and a tall man on a grey horse laughing at her.