Page 35 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"There was no wager," he said. "There was no fifty guineas. Nobody has settled anything. I did not marry you to win a bet, or to prove a point, or for any reason in the world except that I could not live without you. You know that. You must know that. And if you do not—" His voice cracked. He made himself go on. "If you do not, then tell me what I can do to make you know it. Anything. I will go and tear the page out of the book with my own hands. I will call Aldridge out. I will stand on the steps of White's and shout it down St James's Street. Only do not look at me as though you are wondering."

He ran out of words. He stood there in the doorway, breathing hard, and waited, and the clock ticked on the mantel, and he thought that if she believed the paper, even a little, even for a moment, he did not know how he would bear it.

Then Elizabeth crossed the room, and put the grey sheet into the fire.

She stood watching it catch. The flames licked up round the edges, and the black box round the paragraph curled and browned and was gone. Then she turned, and came to him, and took the other copy out of his clenched hand, finger by finger, and put that into the fire too.

"I was not wondering," she said.

"You were very still."

"I was thinking." She looked up at him. Her eyes were bright but perfectly steady. "I will not lie to you, Fitzwilliam. When I first read it, for about as long as it takes to draw a breath, I was frightened. Not that it was true. That it might be true. There is a difference." She drew a breath now, as if to show him. "And then I remembered you on your knees in the conservatory, forgetting your speech. And that you had the builders in, in December. And that you wrote to your aunt Catherine that any slight to me was a slight to you. And I thought, whoever sent this does not know him at all. Or they would not have bothered."

He stared at her. The relief that went through him was so enormous that for a moment he thought he might actually fall down.

"I was coming to find you," she said. "When you came in. I had got as far as the door."

"You were coming to find me."

"Of course I was. It is a door with no lock, is it not?" Her mouth trembled into the ghost of a smile. "We agreed. No sulking at opposite ends of the house."

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh, and pulled her into his arms, and held her so hard she gasped. He did not care. He put his face into her hair and held on, and felt her arms come up round him and hold on too, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.

#

It was Elizabeth who pulled back first. Not far. Only far enough to look at him, with her hands still flat on his chest.

"Now," she said. "Tell me what it means."

He blinked at her, and she saw him come back, slowly, from wherever he had been, to the room and the fire and the cold chocolate on the table.

"It means," he said, "that I am going to find whoever wrote it, and—"

"Yes, yes. After that. Think, Fitzwilliam. It was sent to me. Not left lying about for me to stumble on; sent. Sealed, and addressed, with a box drawn round the paragraph so that I could not miss it. And one sent to you, the same." She frowned, thinking it through aloud. "Somebody wanted to be quite sure we both saw it. On the same morning. At the same hour. Somebody wanted me to read it alone, and wonder, and you to read it alone, and be afraid that I was wondering."

He was very still.

"That is not gossip," said Elizabeth. "Gossip does not care whether we see it. Gossip is for everyone else. This was meant for us. This was meant to come between us." She lifted her chin. "Well. It has not. And it will not. Whoever it is, they have mistaken both of us."

"Elizabeth—"

"We face this together," she said. "Do you hear me? Not you in front, with me safe behind you, wrapped in cotton wool. Together. Side by side. That is what I promised you at Christmas, in the linen cupboard, and I meant every word."

He looked down at her for a long moment. She saw his jaw work, and something move in his eyes that she did not think he had ever let anyone see before.

"Together," he said.

"Good." She let out a breath, and found that her hands had begun to shake now that it was over, and pressed them harder against his waistcoat to stop them. "Then here is what I think. You must go to White's and see the book for yourself, and find out who else has seen it, and who has been talking. And speak to Lord Aldridge. He said somebody pointed it out to him. I want to know who."

"And you?"

"I," said Elizabeth, "am going to do exactly what I was going to do today. I am going to take Georgiana to Hookham's for a book, and walk in the Park at five o'clock, where everyone walks, and smile, and look as though I have not a care in the world. Because I have not. Not about this." She paused. "And if anybody looks at me as though they have read The Tattler's Glass, I shall look back at them as though they are the sort of person who reads The Tattler's Glass. Which is worse."

He laughed then, properly, the tension going out of him all at once, and kissed her hard on the forehead.

Pearce coughed in the doorway.

"I beg your pardon, sir. Madam. Lady Theodosia Rowe has called. I have shown her into the drawing room. She begs you will forgive the early hour."