Page 50 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

It did not come. Lady Catherine sat very still, looking at him, and for a long moment her hard old face was quite unreadable. Then she said, in a voice he had never heard from her before, "Is she well? Now?"

"Better," said Darcy. "Since Elizabeth."

Lady Catherine turned her head, and looked at Elizabeth down the length of the table for a long time.

"Then," she said, "we shall make certain that nobody takes that away from her."

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Anne de Bourgh did not want to hear music. She told Georgiana so, very kindly, after one sonata, and sent her to bed, and then asked Elizabeth whether she might see the famous green room, since everybody in England had now read about it but herself.

So they sat by the fire in the green room at ten o'clock at night, Anne wrapped in three shawls on the sofa with her feet on a stool, and Elizabeth in the chair opposite, and Anne looked round at the pale green paper and the half-empty shelves and the door in the far wall, and began to laugh.

It was a small, dry, wheezing laugh, and it turned into a cough, and Elizabeth got up in alarm and fetched her a glass of water. But when the cough had passed Anne was still smiling.

"Forgive me," she said. "It is only that I have been imagining it for four days, and it is exactly as I pictured. My cousin Fitzwilliam, who once sent back a whole dinner service because the gold rims were a sixteenth of an inch too wide, standing in here with the plasterers, choosing the colour of the paper for you." She wiped her eyes. "He did choose it himself, did he not? I can tell. It is precisely the green of the beeches in Pemberley park in May. He used to climb them when he was a boy. I watched him from the carriage. I was never allowed out."

Elizabeth looked at the walls. She had not known that. She felt her throat tighten.

"You never wanted to marry him," she said. It was not a question.

"Heavens, no. My mother wanted it. His mother, too, I suppose, when we were in our cradles. I have never wanted to marry anybody." Anne tucked her thin hands into her shawls. "I want to see the sea. That is my great ambition. I have been told all my life that the sea air would kill me, and I have come to think that if I must die of something, I had rather it was something I chose." She looked at Elizabeth with her bright hazel eyes. "You told my mother you were sorry for me. Nobody ever said that to her before. She came home from Longbourn in a temper that lasted a week, and then one evening, at dinner, she looked at me across the table and said, Anne, do you wish to go to Ramsgate this summer? I nearly fell off my chair."

Elizabeth laughed. "And will you?"

"We shall see. She has not forgotten she said it. Nor have I."

They sat for a while in companionable silence. The fire crackled. Somewhere below, a door shut; Lady Catherine had at last gone to bed.

"May I ask you something?" said Elizabeth. "How did your mother hear of our engagement, at Christmas? My husband wrote to Lord Matlock, but he did not write to Rosings until after she had been to Longbourn."

"Oh, that." Anne's thin face grew thoughtful. "A letter came. Just before Christmas. My mother does not know I saw it; she left it on her desk. It had no signature. It said that Mr Darcy had been entrapped by a scheming family of no consequence, and was on the point of throwing himself away, and that if Lady Catherine valued her nephew's future and her daughter's claims, she would go into Hertfordshire at once, before it was too late." She paused. "It was very well written. Very feeling. It made my mother quite wild."

"Who sent it?"

"She thinks it came from somebody in Lord Matlock's household. A servant, perhaps, or a secretary. Because of the news." Anne was silent a moment. Then she said, rather carefully, "I did not think so."

"No?"

"I have had letters from Theodosia Rowe since we were twelve years old," said Anne. "We used to be thrown together at Matlock at Christmas, because we were the two girls who were supposed to marry Fitzwilliam, and nobody else wanted to play with either of us." A faint crooked smile. "She makes her gs in a particular way. With a little hook at the bottom, like a fishhook. She always has. The letter at Christmas had fishhooks."

Elizabeth sat very still.

She thought of a card on the hall table, propped against the bowl. So sorry to have missed you. Tomorrow? T. She could not remember whether there had been a g on it.

"Many people must make their gs like that," she said slowly.

"Oh, dozens. I do not say it was her. I did not say so to my mother, either. I have no proof, and my mother has a great deal of temper, and Theodosia is my aunt Matlock's darling." Anne pulled her shawl closer. "I only thought you might like to know. Since she is your particular friend, now, I hear."

"She has been very kind to me."

"She is always very kind," said Anne, "when there is somebody to see." She said it lightly, looking at the fire, and did not explain it, and Elizabeth did not ask her to.

After a while Anne began to yawn, and said that she must go to bed or her mother would think she had died, and Elizabeth took her along the passage to the room next to Lady Catherine's, and said good night, and came back to the green room alone.

She went to her writing desk and sat down at it. The little brown Donne lay on the blotter, where Darcy had put it. The red morocco Mirror of Graces lay beside it, with Lady Theodosia's card still tucked into the cover.

She drew out the card, and held it to the candle, and looked at it.