Page 113 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"That will be all, Pearce. Thank you. Go to bed."

"Thank you, sir." Pearce hesitated. Then, for the first time in thirty years of service, he said something he had not been asked. "It was a very fine evening, sir. The servants' hall was of the opinion that it was the finest evening this house has seen since your mother's time." A pause. "The servants' hall was also of the opinion, sir, if you will forgive the liberty, that it was high time."

He bowed, and went away down the back stairs, before Darcy could answer.

Darcy went upstairs.

The ballroom was empty. The great double doors stood open onto the landing, and inside, the long room was full of the grey half-light of the dawn coming in at the tall windows, and the last of the candles guttering in the three chandeliers. The chalk patterns on the floor had been scuffed to nothing by five hundred pairs of dancing feet. There were petals on the boards from the flowers in the alcoves, and a forgotten fan on a gilt chair, and somebody's glove, and a single white ostrich plume lying in the middle of the floor like a feather dropped by a swan.

Elizabeth was standing in the middle of it, under the great centre chandelier, in her white satin, with her shoes in her hand.

She did not hear him come in. She was looking up at the chandelier, at the last few candles burning out in it one by one, with her head tipped back and her hair coming down from its pins, and on her face was an expression he had seen on it only once before: on the window seat at Pemberley, reading his letter, with the lake going silver below.

He stood in the doorway and watched her for a long time.

Then he crossed the floor to her, over the petals and the scuffed chalk, and she turned her head at the sound of his step and smiled.

"They have all gone," she said.

"All of them. Lady Ashcombe was the last. She says it was the best ball in ten years, and that we are on no account to give another for ten more, or it will become vulgar."

Elizabeth laughed, softly. Her voice was a little hoarse. "I shall hold her to it."

He looked round the empty room: at the petals, and the fan, and the dropped plume, and the candles going out.

"Everybody on your list came," he said.

"Everybody." She was quiet a moment. "And a great many people who were never on any list of mine, and who cut me at the Pemburys' in March, and wrote nasty things about me behind their fans. And I stood at the top of the stairs and curtseyed to them all, and smiled, and meant it." She looked up at him. "I did not think I would be able to. I thought I would be angry. I was not angry at all. I was only happy. I think I was too happy to be anything else."

"I know," said Darcy. "I watched you."

"You watched me all night."

"I did." He took her shoes out of her hand, and set them down on a gilt chair, and turned back to her. "I have been watching you, one way or another, since the fifteenth of October. I do not intend to stop."

The last candle but two went out in the chandelier above them, with a small hiss. The room grew a little greyer.

"There is no music," said Elizabeth.

"No."

"The musicians went home at three."

"I know." He put his hand on her waist. After a moment, she put hers on his shoulder. He took her other hand in his. "I find I do not need it."

They waltzed.

There was no music. There was only the blackbird in the square, and the far-off rattle of the first carts, and the soft whisper of her stockinged feet and his shoes on the bare scuffed boards. He hummed the tune, very low, under his breath, and badly, and she laughed at him, and then hummed it too. They turned slowly down the long grey empty room, through the drifts of petals, round the fallen plume, past the tall windows where the sky was turning from pewter to pearl to the faintest pink, like the inside of a shell. The last two candles went out above them. Neither of them noticed.

At the far end of the room, by the windows, he stopped, and held her, and they stood there together in the dawn light looking out at the square.

"Tomorrow," said Elizabeth, against his shoulder. "Today, I mean. It is today now."

"Today."

"Pemberley."

"Pemberley," he said. "The carriage is ordered for eleven. Georgiana is coming with us. And Anne, for a month, until her mother takes her to Ramsgate to see the sea. Lady Catherine has hired a house on the front, and a bath chair, and a nurse, and says she intends to sit on the beach and glare at the waves until they behave."