Page 111 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

And behind them, still coming, the others: the whole of the Town. Lady Jersey and Lady Sefton and Lady Castlereagh. Lady Pembury in purple, with her niece, who was engaged now, it seemed, to a baronet with a stammer and a very kind face, and who curtseyed to Darcy with a little smile as though they shared a joke. Mrs Drummond-Burrell, pink and humble. Sir Charles Hanley, who could not quite meet anybody's eye. Half the Cabinet. Most of the Lords. Old Lord Ashcombe in his chair, carried up by two footmen, with his terrible wife beside him, who looked at Darcy for a long moment down her beaky nose and then said, "So you are the young man. Hmph. He would have taken it, you know. Only he knew better," and passed on.

They came and came. They filled the drawing rooms and the music room and the long gallery, and spilled out onto the stairs, and the heat of their bodies and their candles made the whole house glow like a lantern. The musicians in the gallery could barely be heard. It was, everybody said afterwards, the worst crush of the Season, and the best.

And in the middle of it, at about half past eleven, Darcy looked up from a conversation with the French ambassador and saw his aunt Catherine and his mother-in-law meet.

It happened by the supper-room door. There was nobody near enough to intervene. He watched it happen the way a man watches two carriages approaching each other at speed on a narrow road.

Mrs Bennet saw Lady Catherine first. Her face lit up with a mixture of terror and triumph, and she dropped a curtsey so deep and so sudden that her turban slid over one eye, and said, very loudly:

"Lady Catherine! Your ladyship! What an honour! I do not suppose your ladyship remembers me. You came to Longbourn at Christmas, and would not have any tea, and I dropped all the napkins!"

The crush round the supper-room door went quiet.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh turned very slowly, and looked down her nose at Mrs Bennet. For a long, terrible moment she did not say anything. Darcy saw Elizabeth, across the room, close her eyes.

"I remember you perfectly," said Lady Catherine. "You have a pretty sort of wilderness beyond your small garden. And you have five daughters."

"I do, your ladyship. Five."

"One of whom," said Lady Catherine, "stood in her own garden in the frost and told me to my face that she would not give up my nephew for anything I could say. And another of whom I am told has played the pianoforte with my niece this evening, before half the peerage, better than anybody I have heard in ten years." She paused. "And I am informed that you once, madam, sent your eldest daughter to dine at Netherfield on horseback in the rain, on purpose that she might catch cold and be obliged to stay."

Mrs Bennet opened her mouth, and closed it, and went scarlet.

"That," said Lady Catherine, "was the cleverest thing I have ever heard of a mother doing. I could not have done better myself." She held out two fingers. "You will come and sit by me at supper, Mrs Bennet. I wish to hear exactly how you did it."

And she swept into the supper room, with Mrs Bennet trotting behind her, speechless for the third time in living memory.

Darcy found that his shoulders were shaking. He excused himself to the French ambassador, who did not understand what had happened and was looking very puzzled, and went to find his wife.

He found her by the pillar at the end of the ballroom, with her hand over her mouth and tears of laughter running down her face. It was a broad pillar, wrapped in green garlands. She had chosen it on purpose.

"I could not bear to watch," she gasped. "I hid. Behind a pillar. Like you."

"I heard it all."

"So did half of London." She wiped her eyes. "The cleverest thing she ever heard of a mother doing. My mother will never, ever recover. She will tell it at every dinner in Hertfordshire until she dies."

"Let her," said Darcy. He looked down at her, laughing behind the pillar in her white satin with the garlands round her, exactly where he had first heard her voice eight months ago, and he held out his hand. "The musicians are about to play the waltz, Mrs Darcy. I believe you asked me for it."

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The waltz was still, in the summer of 1812, a very shocking thing.

Everybody said so. It had come over from the Continent some years before, and the young people danced it at private balls, and the old people shook their heads. A gentleman put his arm round a lady's waist, in public, and held her hand in his, and turned her about the room in his arms for a quarter of an hour without letting go, face to face, closer than they would ever stand in a country dance. Lord Byron was said to be writing a poem against it. The patronesses of Almack's had not yet decided whether to allow it at all. Mrs Bennet had declared at Longbourn that she would never permit one of her daughters to be seen in such an attitude, and had then asked Kitty to show her the step.

Elizabeth had never waltzed in her life. She had watched it done once, at a private ball in London in April, standing at the edge of the floor with her chin up, and had thought that the couples looked as though they had forgotten there was anybody else in the room.

She had wanted, very much, to forget that there was anybody else in the room.

The floor cleared as the musicians began. It always did, for the waltz: the older people withdrew to the walls to watch and disapprove, and the country-dance couples drifted off to the supper room, and only a dozen pairs were left standing on the chalked boards under the chandeliers. Mr and Mrs Bingley. Richard, with a laughing Lydia, who had begged him and whom he could not refuse. Lord Aldridge, with Miss Bingley, who was pretending not to want to. A shy young man with a very nice face, a younger son of Lady Harriet Kerr's, with Georgiana, who had come to Elizabeth an hour before, pink and anxious, and asked in a whisper whether she might, and whether Elizabeth thought he was quite trustworthy. And Elizabeth had looked across the room at the young man, who was standing by himself near the musicians' gallery looking at Georgiana as though she had hung the moon, and turning the same page of his programme over and over in his hands, and she had said, yes, dearest. I think he is very trustworthy indeed. Go and dance.

And in the middle of the floor, under the great centre chandelier, where everybody could see: Mr and Mrs Darcy.

The music began: three slow beats, and then the lilt.

He put his hand on her waist. She put hers on his shoulder. He took her other hand in his.

She had thought it would feel shocking. It did not. It felt exactly like the conservatory at Netherfield, with the moon coming through the glass. It felt like the snowbound room at Whetstone, and the drive at Pemberley at dawn, and every morning she had ever woken up beside him. It felt like home.