Page 51 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

For my new friend, with every wish for her success. T.R.

No g at all. She did not know whether she was relieved or not.

She was still sitting there when Darcy came through the door with no lock, and found her, and she told him everything, because she had promised.

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Lady Catherine came to his study the next morning at eight, which Darcy had not known she was capable of, fully dressed, with her lorgnette on a ribbon and a sheet of paper in her hand covered in her large black writing.

"Sit down, Fitzwilliam," she said, in his own study, and he sat.

She did not. She stood before his desk like a general before a map, and read from her paper.

"Item. I shall call this morning upon Lady Sandridge. I have known her for forty years. I know what she did in Bath in the year 'eighty-one, and she knows that I know it. She will tell me who has been speaking about Georgiana in the Queen's hearing, or she will wish she had."

Darcy opened his mouth.

"Item. I shall write today to the Duchess of Welford, who is Mistress of the Robes, and who was my bridesmaid, and who has owed me a favour since 1774 which I have never yet called in. I shall call it in. Georgiana will be presented on the ninth."

"Aunt—"

"Item." She did not look up. "At five o'clock this afternoon, I shall drive in the Park in my own carriage, with the de Bourgh arms on the panels, and your wife beside me, and we shall go round the Ring three times, very slowly, and I shall bow to everybody I know. Which is everybody." She glanced up. "She will need a better bonnet. That green thing she wore yesterday will not do. Have Mrs Dawes see to it."

Darcy found that he was beginning, very much against his will, to smile.

"Item. On Sunday, we shall all attend service at St George's, Hanover Square. Myself, Anne, you, your wife, and Georgiana. In the front pew. I have not sat in the front pew at St George's since your mother's funeral. People will notice."

"They will," said Darcy.

"Item." She lowered the paper. "If my brother Matlock and his lady will not present your wife at the Drawing Room on her marriage, as they ought, I shall do it myself. I have not been to court in eleven years. I dislike it extremely. The rooms are too hot and the Queen talks about her snuff. But I will go." She fixed him with her grey eyes. "Is that clear?"

Darcy looked at his aunt Catherine, who had bullied him since he was in skirts, who had told him at twelve that he rode like a sack of meal and at twenty that he would never find a woman with sense enough to marry him, who had driven fifty miles in December to break his engagement with her own hands. She stood in front of his desk at eight in the morning, sixty-three years old and as upright as a lance, and he found that his throat had gone tight.

"Why?" he said.

"Why what?"

"Why are you doing this? You did not want her. You said so. You came to Longbourn to stop me."

Lady Catherine was silent for a moment. She folded the paper, very precisely, into four.

"I came to Longbourn," she said, "because I was told that you had been trapped by a scheming family into a marriage you would regret. I came to save you from it. I found a girl who stood in her own garden in the frost and told me to my face that she would not give you up, not for me, not for anyone, because she meant to make you happy. And she was not afraid of me." A faint grim twitch at the corner of the mouth. "Nobody has dared to be unafraid of me since your mother died."

She put the paper in her reticule.

"I do not like being made a fool of, Fitzwilliam. Somebody wrote to me at Christmas and sent me into Hertfordshire like a hound after a hare, and I went, and made myself ridiculous. And now I find that somebody is making the whole of London ridiculous in the same way, over the same girl, and trying to make a jest of the name of Darcy while they do it. I think it is very likely the same somebody. And I have been waiting four months to find out who."

"That letter," said Darcy slowly. "At Christmas. Do you still have it?"

Lady Catherine looked down her nose at him.

"I keep every letter I have ever received," she said. "In order. In boxes. In the muniment room at Rosings. It is there." She paused. "Why?"

"Because Anne thinks she knows the hand."

There was a long silence in the study. The clock ticked. Outside, a milk cart went rattling across the square.

"Does she," said Lady Catherine at last, very softly.