Page 11 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"I did not lose it."

He came forward, and crouched by the bottom shelf, and ran a finger along the spines. She held the candle for him. The small circle of light made the room beyond it very dark and very quiet. She could hear the fire settling in the grate, and her own heart, which was being unreasonably loud.

"Here," he said, and drew out a small shabby volume bound in brown calf. "Donne. I suspect Bingley does not know it is here. I suspect nobody has opened it since the previous century."

"Donne," said Elizabeth. "The love poet. I should not have thought it of you."

"No?" He rose, and blew the dust from the top edge, and looked at her over it. "What would you have thought of me?"

"Oh, something improving. Something with a great deal of Latin, and no women in it at all."

"I read that too," he admitted. "In the daytime."

She laughed, and he smiled, and then he opened the book, turned a few pages as if he knew exactly where he was going, and began to read aloud.

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we loved?

He read quietly, without any performance at all, the way a man might speak to someone sitting beside him in the dark. His voice was low and even. He did not look at her. He looked at the page, and the candle shook very slightly in her hand, and she steadied it.

If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

He stopped. The silence afterwards was so complete she could hear the candle flame.

"That is 'The Good-Morrow'," she said, when she could speak. "About two lovers waking together, and finding the whole world is nothing to them."

"Yes."

"It is a very improper poem, Mr Darcy."

"It is," he agreed. He closed the book, and at last he looked at her. "I have been thinking of it since Thursday."

There was perhaps a foot of air between them. Then there was less. She did not know which of them had moved. She knew that his eyes had dropped to her mouth and come back up to her eyes, and that there was a question in them, and that she had stopped breathing.

He lifted one hand, slowly, as if she were a bird he did not want to startle, and touched a curl that had come loose at her temple. He did not tuck it back. He only held it a moment between his fingers, as though it were something precious that had been lent to him.

"Elizabeth," he said, very low. It was the first time he had used her name alone.

She had been kissed once before, by a curate's son, behind the church at Harvest Home when she was sixteen. It had been wet and hurried and she had laughed about it with Jane for a month. She knew, with total certainty, that this would be nothing like that. She tilted her face up. Her eyes began to close.

"Mr Darcy! There you are!"

They sprang apart. The candle guttered wildly. Elizabeth found herself facing the atlas with her back to the door, her cheeks on fire, staring very hard at a map of the Low Countries.

Miss Bingley swept in on a gust of lavender water. "We are to have cards," she announced, "and Louisa insists you make up the table. Oh, Miss Eliza! I did not see you there, in the dark. How very... studious." Her eyes went from Elizabeth's back to Mr Darcy and to the little book in his hand. "Have you found something to read?"

"Mr Darcy was so kind as to recommend a volume of sermons," said Elizabeth, to the Low Countries.

"Sermons." Miss Bingley's voice could have cut glass. "How suitable."

Mr Darcy said nothing at all. When Elizabeth dared to turn round, he had put the Donne into his coat pocket and was holding out his arm to Miss Bingley with an expression of such perfect, stony courtesy that it would have frozen a river. He escorted her out. At the door, where Miss Bingley could not see, he looked back over his shoulder.

It was only a glance. It lasted less than a heartbeat. But in it Elizabeth read, as plainly as if he had said it aloud, this is not finished.

She sat down rather suddenly in the nearest chair, the candle still in her hand, and did not go back to the drawing room for a long time.

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Darcy lost fourteen shillings at loo that night, which was a record, and did not sleep, which was becoming a habit.