Page 36 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

Elizabeth looked at the clock. It was barely half past ten, an hour when nobody in London was fit to be seen, let alone paying calls.

She found Lady Theodosia standing by the drawing room window, still in her bonnet and pelisse, her lovely face pale and anxious. The moment Elizabeth came in she crossed the room and caught both her hands.

"My dear. My dear Mrs Darcy. I came the instant I heard. I could not bear to think of you alone with it." Her grey eyes searched Elizabeth's face. "You have seen it? That dreadful paper?"

"I have seen it."

"It is too wicked. It is too cruel. Nobody of any sense will believe a word of it, of course. But I know how these things spread, and I could not rest until I had told you so, and told you that I am your friend, whatever anybody says." She pressed Elizabeth's hands. "Are you very distressed? You must not be. Truly."

"I am not distressed," said Elizabeth, and smiled. "I was, for a moment. Now I am only rather angry."

Lady Theodosia looked at her, and something moved behind the grey eyes, so quickly that Elizabeth could not have said what it was. Then she laughed, and embraced her.

"How brave you are," she said. "Everybody said you were brave. I shall tell them all so. Now sit down, and let me ring for tea, and tell me everything."

Elizabeth sat down, and let her ring, and was grateful. It was only much later, lying awake in the dark, that she wondered how Lady Theodosia had heard of the paper by half past ten, when the post had only come at nine.

#

White's at noon was quieter than at four, but not quiet enough.

Darcy felt it the moment he came in. A pause in the talk by the fire. A newspaper lowered, and raised again. Two young men in the bow window, whom he knew slightly, who looked at him and then at each other and then, very carefully, at the street. Somebody in the card room laughed, and stopped.

He had been coming here since he was one-and-twenty. He had never in his life been laughed at in this room. He found that his hands had curled into fists, and uncurled them, one finger at a time, and walked across the floor to the corner where the great leather-bound betting book stood open on its oak stand, as it had stood since before he was born.

It took him a long time to find the page. Two years was a great many wagers: on horses, on elections, on the weather, on whether Lord So-and-so would marry Miss Such-a-one or die first. He turned the heavy leaves one by one, conscious of every eye in the room on his back.

There it was. Spring of 1810. Aldridge's sprawling drunken hand, the ink splattered where the pen had caught:

Ld E. Aldridge bets Mr Darcy 50 gns that Mr D. will within five years marry a lady without fortune or connexion, and be glad of it.

That was all. There was no signature beside it, no mark of acceptance. The space where his own name should have been, if he had taken the bet, was empty, as it had always been.

But somebody had been at it. Beside the entry, in the margin, in a different ink and a small neat hand he did not recognise, somebody had written a single word:

Won.

And underneath, in yet another hand, cruder, with a flourish: And lost, I shd think, poor fellow.

There was a snigger from somewhere behind him.

Darcy did not turn round. He stood looking down at the page with his hands resting on the edges of the stand, very still, while the blood beat in his ears. He thought of Elizabeth at the breakfast table with the grey sheet in her hand, and her face, so carefully still. For about as long as it takes to draw a breath, I was frightened.

Somebody had done that to her. On purpose. And these men had laughed.

"Darcy." It was Aldridge, at his elbow, pale and wretched and unshaven. "Darcy, I have seen it. I came in at ten and somebody showed me. I swear to God I never wrote that. The margin. Neither of them. I would never—"

"I know you did not."

"I have been trying to find out who did. Nobody will say. Everybody saw it, and nobody wrote it." Aldridge gripped his arm. "And the paper. I did not go to any paper. I have not told a soul about this wager in two years, except you, a fortnight ago. And the fellow at the whist table who reminded me of it in the first place."

Darcy turned then, and looked at him properly. "Who was he?"

"That is just it. I cannot place him. Somebody's guest. Not a member. Fair-haired, very easy, very charming, laughed at everything. I thought he was an officer, but he was not in regimentals." Aldridge rubbed his forehead. "He knew all about you. Said he had grown up in your part of the world. Asked a great many questions about your wife."

The room went very quiet around Darcy, though nobody else in it had moved.

Fair-haired. Very easy. Very charming. Grew up in his part of the world.