Page 30 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

He went up the stairs and stood in the doorway of the music room, and neither of them saw him at first. They were sitting side by side on the long stool with their heads together, arguing cheerfully about whether the second movement ought to be taken faster. Georgiana was pink and animated. Elizabeth had her keys at her waist. They looked as though they had been sisters all their lives.

Then Elizabeth looked up and saw him, and her whole face lit, and he thought: I would do anything. Anything at all, to keep that look on her face.

They dined together, the three of them, at the round table in the small dining room, because Elizabeth had declared the great one too cold and too far from the kitchen, and Mrs Dawes had agreed with her so warmly that Darcy suspected a conspiracy. Georgiana talked more at dinner than she had talked in six months. Elizabeth made her laugh twice about Mrs Bennet and the napkins. Afterwards they sat by the drawing room fire, Georgiana with her embroidery and Elizabeth with a book she was not reading, her stockinged feet tucked up on the sofa in a way that would have scandalised every hostess in Mayfair, and Darcy sat opposite them and did nothing whatever but watch the two of them in the firelight, and was perfectly content.

He did not think he had ever been happier in this house. He did not think this house had ever been this happy.

At nine o'clock Pearce came in with a note on a salver.

"From Matlock House, madam. The footman is waiting for an answer."

Elizabeth broke the seal, and read it, and raised her eyebrows.

"From your aunt Matlock," she said. "Very correct. She welcomes me to town, and regrets she is engaged tomorrow, but is sending her goddaughter to call upon me in her stead, to be of use to me in any way I need. Lady Theodosia Rowe." She looked at Georgiana. "Your Lady Theodosia."

"Oh!" said Georgiana, brightening. "How kind of her. She is very kind, Elizabeth, truly. You will like her."

Darcy frowned slightly. He barely knew Lady Theodosia Rowe. He had stood up with her at his aunt's balls, when obliged to, and handed her into dinner, and found her pleasant and quiet and forgotten her the moment she was out of sight. He had been aware, vaguely, that his aunt had once had hopes in that direction. He had paid them no attention.

It was a kind thought, on his aunt's part. It was perhaps even an olive branch. His aunt had not come to the wedding. She had sent a shawl. And now she was sending a friend.

"Tell the footman Mrs Darcy will be happy to receive her," he said to Pearce.

Elizabeth wrote a line of reply, and folded it, and sent it off. Then she put the note aside, and looked at him across the fire with her dark eyes dancing.

"Everybody," she said, "always said you would marry Lady Theodosia. Georgiana told me so this afternoon."

"Everybody," said Darcy, "was wrong."

"I know." She smiled. "I only wanted to hear you say it."

Georgiana went up at ten. Darcy locked the doors himself, and banked the fire, and put out the candles, all but one. Then he took his wife's hand and went up the stairs with her, and neither of them thought about Lady Theodosia Rowe again that night.

There was no footman with a candle. There was no forty yards of passage. There was only a door with no lock, standing open between their rooms.

Chapter 9: A Friend in Town

Darcy House. Thursday, 5th March 1812

Elizabeth had prepared herself for a beauty. She had not prepared herself to be liked.

Lady Theodosia Rowe came into the drawing room at a quarter past eleven in a pelisse of dove-coloured silk, and she was every bit as lovely as Georgiana had promised: tall and slender, with pale gold hair and grey eyes and the kind of perfect English complexion that Mrs Bennet used to sigh over in fashion plates. She was perhaps four-and-twenty. She moved as though she had never in her life been in a hurry or a muddy lane.

And then she held out both her hands, and said, with a smile of such open warmth that it quite disarmed Elizabeth's defences, "Mrs Darcy. I have been so longing to meet you. You cannot conceive how curious we have all been."

"I can conceive it very well," said Elizabeth, taking the hands. "I have been curious about you too, Lady Theodosia. Georgiana speaks of you so warmly."

"Dear Georgiana. She is the sweetest creature alive." Lady Theodosia sat down on the sofa and pulled off her gloves. "And I expect she has told you the other thing, too. That everybody thought I should marry your husband." She laughed, a soft rueful laugh. "There. Now it is said, and we need never be awkward about it. I promise you, it was never anything but my godmother's fancy. Mr Darcy never looked at me twice. I am not sure he looked at me once. I used to think he did not look at anybody, until I heard about you."

It was so frank, and so exactly what Elizabeth had been wondering, that she laughed too, and the last of her wariness went out of her.

They talked for an hour. Lady Theodosia was easy company, clever and light and full of gossip that was never quite unkind. She knew everybody. She told Elizabeth which hostesses mattered and which only thought they did; which drawing rooms were warm and which were draughty; which gentleman at a ball would tread on one's feet, and which would tread on one's reputation. She offered, quite simply, to be her guide.

"The Season is a dreadful thing to face alone," she said. "I remember my own. I cried every night for a month. My godmother means well, but she is very busy, and very grand, and not always..." She hesitated delicately. "Not always patient. You must let me be of use to you. Truly. It would give me such pleasure."

"You are very kind."

"Not kind. Selfish. I am bored to death this spring and you are the most interesting thing that has happened in years." Lady Theodosia smiled. "And I admire you, you know. Everybody talks about how you caught him, as though it were some sort of trick. I think it was simply that you were the first person who ever told him the truth to his face. Am I right?"