Page 6 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"Because he deserves it! He is a vain, strutting, self-satisfied—"

"He is a man who is afraid of being laughed at," said Darcy, "and she laughs at him. And he loves her anyway. I have always thought that was the bravest thing in the play."

She opened her mouth, and closed it again.

"You are going to tell me," she said slowly, "that you take Benedick's part."

"I am telling you that I understand him."

"Then I suppose I must take Beatrice's, and we shall quarrel for ever."

"I would not mind that," said Darcy, before he could stop himself.

The words hung in the cold air between them. He felt the heat rise up his neck. It was the sort of thing a man said in a novel, not at ten o'clock on a Thursday morning in a squire's garden, three days after an introduction. He waited for her to laugh at him.

She did not laugh. She looked at him for a long moment, and then she looked away, down the path, and he saw that she was smiling, a small, private, astonished smile, as if someone had handed her a present she had not expected.

"Nor would I," she said. "Though I warn you, Mr Darcy, I always win."

"I have noticed."

They argued about Shakespeare for the rest of the walk. She defended Rosalind and he defended Viola, and they agreed that Hamlet talked too much and that Lear deserved everything that happened to him until the storm, and after it nothing. She quoted at him, and he quoted back, and twice she stopped dead in the path to wave her hand at him in indignation. He had not argued with anyone like this since he was at Cambridge. He had never argued with a woman like this in his life. The women of his acquaintance agreed with everything he said, and he had always thought he preferred it.

He had been wrong about that. He was beginning to suspect he had been wrong about a great many things.

When Bingley and Miss Bennet reappeared, looking guilty and radiant, Darcy was astonished to find that nearly an hour had passed. His boots were soaked. His fingers were numb. He could not remember when he had last been so happy.

"You are shivering, Miss Elizabeth," he said, as they turned back towards the house.

"I am not."

"You are. Your lips are blue."

She gave him a look of great severity. "A gentleman, sir, does not look at a lady's lips."

Darcy, who had been looking at very little else for the past quarter of an hour, had nothing whatever to say to that.

#

Lucas Lodge. Saturday, 19th October

Sir William Lucas had once been presented at St James's, and he had never recovered from it. His dinners were given with a lavishness that his income could not quite support, and his drawing room was lit with so many candles that Elizabeth half expected the curtains to catch.

She had meant to be sensible tonight. She had lectured herself all the way from Longbourn, squeezed between Kitty and her mother in the carriage. One garden walk and an argument about Shakespeare did not make an attachment. Mr Darcy was a man of great wealth and old family who would go back to London in a month and forget Meryton existed. She would be friendly and composed and would not look at the door.

She looked at the door the moment the Netherfield party was announced.

Mr Darcy saw her at once. She watched him greet Sir William, bow to Lady Lucas, and begin to cross the room towards her with the same unhesitating directness he had shown at the assembly. Her heart gave a foolish leap.

He got three steps.

"Mr Darcy!" Miss Bingley materialised at his side as if she had been lying in wait behind the sofa. She laid a gloved hand on his arm, and Elizabeth saw the fingers close. "You must take me in to look at Sir William's prints. He tells me they are views of Brighton. I am sure I shall not survive them alone."

"Your brother will escort you," said Mr Darcy.

"Charles is occupied." Charles was indeed occupied, at Jane's elbow, beaming. "Come, you must, or I shall be forced to talk to Mrs Long."

Mr Darcy looked across the room, over Miss Bingley's feathered head, and met Elizabeth's eyes. His expression was one of such profound long-suffering that she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing aloud. Then he was towed away to the prints.