Page 8 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"I know," said Bingley, with feeling. "It is one of your most exasperating qualities."

Darcy drank half the brandy. It did not help.

"She has no fortune," he said. "No connections. Her mother—"

"—is her mother, and mine was a tradesman's widow who kept the accounts in a kitchen ledger," said Bingley cheerfully. "I did not notice you minding that, when you let me into your club."

"That is different."

"Is it? How?"

Darcy opened his mouth to explain how, and found he could not. The reasons were all there, drilled into him by his father, by his uncle, by every dinner table in Mayfair. They had always seemed as solid as the walls of Pemberley. Tonight, when he reached for them, they felt like paper.

"I walked with her for an hour on Thursday," he said at last, "and argued about Shakespeare, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. She makes me laugh. She made Mary Bennet smile. She stood up to your sister without raising her voice and made the whole room love her for it." He set the glass down. "She thought kindly of me before she had even met me, Bingley. Nobody has ever done that. They think of Pemberley first, and me a long way after. She did not know what Pemberley was."

Bingley was silent for a moment, which was so unusual that Darcy looked up.

His friend was smiling at him with an expression Darcy had never seen before: not teasing, but something close to tenderness.

"Well," Bingley said. "You are done for, old fellow. I thought so at the assembly. I am certain of it now."

"I have known her four days."

"I have known Jane four days," said Bingley, "and I mean to marry her." He stood, and clapped Darcy on the shoulder, and went to the door. There he paused. "Jane has a cold coming on, I think. She sneezed twice at dinner. If Caroline asks her to Netherfield next week, I shall not object. And if her sister walks over to nurse her..."

He let the sentence hang, grinned, and was gone.

Darcy sat alone for a long time after that, with the fire burning low and the brandy forgotten.

He was not a romantic man. He had always prided himself on it. He had watched his friends fall in and out of love every Season, and he had thought that when he married, it would be the way his father had married: carefully, sensibly, to a woman whose family and fortune were a credit to Pemberley, and whom he would come to respect.

He had not known, then, that a voice could reach through a crowded room and find him behind a pillar. He had not known that the sight of a woman arguing about Beatrice with her bonnet slipping off could make his whole chest ache. He had not known that he would ride home at midnight and think only of how soon he could see her again.

He knew it now.

I am lost, Darcy thought, and was surprised to find that the words did not frighten him at all. They felt like coming home.

Chapter 3: Reading Aloud

Tuesday, 22nd October 1811

Jane's note came at breakfast, written in a hand so shaky that Elizabeth read it twice before she understood it.

She had gone to dine at Netherfield the evening before, on horseback, in the rain, because Mrs Bennet had refused her the carriage with a cunning that would have done credit to a general. She had been soaked to the skin. She had stayed the night. And now she had a sore throat and a headache and a fever, and the apothecary had been sent for, and she was very sorry to be so much trouble, and Elizabeth was on no account to worry.

Elizabeth was on her feet before she had finished the second reading.

"The carriage is wanted on the farm," said her father, without looking up from his egg.

"Then I shall walk."

"Three miles, Lizzy? In this dirt?" Her mother flapped her napkin. "You will not be fit to be seen when you get there!"

"I shall be fit to see Jane," said Elizabeth, "which is all I want."

She went by the field path, because it saved a mile, and regretted it within ten minutes. The rain had stopped in the night but the ground had not forgiven it. Mud sucked at her half-boots. Her hem grew heavy and dark. A stile she had climbed a hundred times in summer had become a slick green ordeal, and she came down off it with more speed than grace, and only saved herself from sitting in a puddle by clutching a very unsympathetic hawthorn.

She was standing in the lane beyond, examining a long scratch across her glove and saying something unladylike under her breath, when she heard a horse.