Page 112 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

They began to turn.

She was aware of the room, at first. She could not help it. The ring of faces round the walls, the fans lifted, the quizzing glasses raised. The Duchess of Rutland, who had once been in a paragraph beside her. Lady Pembury, in purple, with her mouth a little open. Old Lady Ashcombe, bolt upright in her chair. Her own mother, at the supper-room door, clutching Lady Catherine's arm. Her father, beside them, not smiling, quite still, watching her with an expression she could not read.

Then her husband said, very low, "Elizabeth," and she looked up at him, and forgot every one of them.

He was not looking at the room. He had not looked at it once. He was looking at her, only at her, with his dark eyes very steady, the way he had looked at her across the assembly room at Meryton, the first night, when she turned her head and found him standing behind a pillar. He had never, she thought, looked at anybody else that way in his life. He never would.

They turned. The chandeliers turned above them, a slow wheel of gold. The music lifted and fell. His hand was warm and firm on her waist, and his steps were very sure, and she found that she did not have to think about her own at all; she only had to follow, and let him turn her, round and round, down the long bright room and up again.

"You are a very good dancer," she said, a little breathless. "For a man who does not dance."

"I have been practising."

"When?"

"Here. In this ballroom. At midnight, every night this week, while you were asleep. With Richard." He did not smile. "He insisted on leading. It was very undignified. I should be obliged if you would never mention it to anybody."

She laughed, and he turned her, and she felt the whole room go by in a blur of candlelight and colour and faces, and did not care.

"Everybody is watching us," she said.

"Are they?"

"Every single person in the room."

"I had not noticed," said Darcy. "I have been occupied."

"With what?"

"With my wife," he said. "Who is the most beautiful woman in England, and the bravest, and the best, and who stood in a path in front of George Wickham, and forgave my aunt, and laughed at the Queen's Drawing Room, and made my sister play Handel loudly." His hand tightened on her waist. "And who once, a long time ago, before she had ever met me, told a room full of people who were laughing at me that I might only be tired, or shy, or worried about somebody at home."

Elizabeth could not answer. She looked up at him, turning under the chandeliers, and her eyes filled, and she let them.

"I have been thinking," he said, "that I never told you what I heard. That night. Behind the pillar. I have told you that I heard you. I never told you what it did."

"What did it do?"

He was quiet for a turn. Then he said, very low, so that nobody in all that crowded room but her could possibly hear:

"It opened a door."

The music slowed. The last three beats. He turned her once more, very slowly, under the great chandelier, and brought her to a stop, and held her there, a moment longer than he needed to, with his hand still on her waist and hers still on his shoulder, in the middle of the floor, in front of everybody.

Then the room began to applaud. She heard it as if from a long way off.

She did not look at them. She did not look at anybody but him.

She had found out, she thought. It was every bit as shockingly improper as everybody said. And she intended to do it again at the very first opportunity for the rest of her life.

#

The last carriage left at a quarter to four in the morning. It was old Lord Ashcombe's, and his terrible wife leant out of the window as it pulled away and said to Darcy, standing on the steps, "Hmph. Best ball in ten years. Do not do it again for at least another ten, or it will become vulgar," and was driven off round the square into the grey beginning of the dawn.

Darcy stood on the steps of his house and watched it go.

The square was very quiet. The linkboys had gone home. The torches by the door had burned down to stumps and were smoking faintly in the cool air. Somewhere over towards Oxford Street a cart was rattling, and in the garden in the middle of the square a blackbird had begun, very tentatively, to sing. The sky over the rooftops to the east was the colour of pewter, and beginning, at the very edge, to turn pale.

He went back inside, and Pearce shut the blue door behind him, and bolted it, and looked at his master with his long grave face, and said, "Will that be all, sir?"