Page 97 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"Mrs Drummond-Burrell," said the countess. "You know my niece, Mrs Darcy, I think. You met at Lady Pembury's in March."

There was a pause of perhaps two seconds, in which Elizabeth thought she could hear every candle in the three chandeliers burning.

Then Mrs Drummond-Burrell sank into a curtsey so deep that her knees cracked audibly, and said, in a very small voice, "Mrs Darcy. How delightful," and fled into the ballroom.

Elizabeth did not laugh. She was very careful not to laugh. She kept her face pleasant and calm and her chin up, and curtseyed back, exactly as deep as was proper and not an inch more, and said, "Ma'am," and turned to the next guest.

But beside her, very low, without moving her lips, Lady Matlock said, "That was for the Pemburys'."

And behind them both, Elizabeth heard her husband make a very small sound in his throat, which she knew, after four months of marriage, to be the sound of Fitzwilliam Darcy trying with all his might not to laugh in public.

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She came at half past ten.

Darcy saw her first. He had been watching the stairs for half an hour, every face, every bonnet, every flash of silk on the turn of the landing, and he saw the white and silver before he saw her face: a gown of white gauze over silver tissue, sewn all over with tiny crystal beads, so that she seemed to shimmer as she came up the stairs, like frost in sunlight. It was, he realised, almost the very colour of the gown Elizabeth had worn to the Pemburys'. He did not think it was an accident.

Then she reached the turn of the stair, and lifted her head, and he saw her face.

She was beautiful. He had known it, in the vague way a man knows the colour of the curtains in a room he has been in a hundred times. Tonight he saw it. The pale gold hair, the perfect skin, the long grey eyes, the soft curved mouth. She was smiling as she came up, the gentle, gracious, self-deprecating smile that had fooled his aunt for six years and his sister for five and his wife for a month. It was a very good smile. It must, he thought, have taken a great deal of practice.

She came up the last three steps with her hand on the rail, and looked up at her godmother to make her curtsey, as she had every year since she was eighteen.

And saw Elizabeth standing in her place.

Darcy was watching her face. He would remember it for a long time.

Nothing changed. That was the most remarkable thing. Nothing at all. The smile stayed exactly where it was. The grey eyes went from her godmother's face to Elizabeth's, and rested there for perhaps one second, and in that second he saw something move behind them, very far down, like a pike turning in deep water. Then it was gone. And Lady Theodosia Rowe sank into a curtsey of perfect, practised, flawless grace, and rose from it, and held out both her hands to Elizabeth.

"My dear," she said warmly. "My dear Mrs Darcy. You have come back. I am so glad. So very glad. I heard you had gone into the country, and I was so afraid for you." She pressed Elizabeth's hands. "And you look beautiful. Doesn't she look beautiful, godmama? In white. Like a bride."

Elizabeth did not take her hands away. She did not snatch them back, or go pale, or say anything unkind. Darcy had wondered, walking across the square, what she would do at this moment, and had not been able to guess. He saw now that he should have known.

"Thank you, Lady Theodosia," she said pleasantly. "You are very kind. You always have been." A pause, so slight that nobody but the four of them could have noticed it. "I had a delightful time in Derbyshire. Pemberley is very beautiful in the spring. We had a great deal of excitement."

The grey eyes flickered. Once.

"How lovely," said Lady Theodosia. "You must tell me all about it."

"I shall," said Elizabeth. "I promise."

Lady Matlock had not moved during this exchange. She had stood with her hand on Elizabeth's arm and her face like marble. Now she turned her head, very slowly, and looked at her goddaughter, and Darcy saw Theodosia meet her eyes, and for the first time, something in the lovely face faltered.

"Theodosia," said the countess. Her voice was very quiet. "After the first set, you will come to me in my sitting room. The small one, off the landing. There are some friends of yours who wish very much to see you."

"Of course, godmama." The smile did not falter. But the gloved hand that had been resting on the stair rail had closed on it, very tightly. "What friends?"

"You will see," said Lady Matlock.

Theodosia curtseyed again, and passed on into the ballroom in her shimmer of white and silver, and was at once surrounded. Darcy watched her go. He watched her greet a dozen people in as many seconds, laughing, touching sleeves, tilting her fair head. He watched her let a young baronet write his name on her card for the first set, and take his arm, and go down the room towards the head of the line with her chin up and her back straight and her silver beads catching the candlelight.

Once, just once, as she took her place in the set, she looked back over her shoulder at the top of the stairs.

Not at Lady Matlock. Not at Elizabeth.

At him.

He had spent six years not seeing Theodosia Rowe. He saw her now: across the whole length of his aunt's ballroom, in the blaze of three chandeliers, one long look, over a bare white shoulder. And he understood, in that look, everything that had been in the letter on the back of the last page from Wickham's saddle. I waited six years. I sat at my godmother's table every Christmas and every Season and waited for him to look at me.