Page 28 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"Mrs Dawes tells me," said Elizabeth, a little breathless on the second flight, "that I am to have the rooms that were your mother's. At the far end of the east passage, overlooking the garden. She says they are very fine."

"They were," said Darcy. "They are shut up now."

She looked at him sideways. "Shut up?"

"In the fashionable houses," he said, "the master and the mistress sleep at opposite ends of the building. It is supposed to be very genteel. My father's rooms were here, on the west side. My mother's were forty yards away, on the east. When they wished to say good night, a footman carried a candle down the passage." He heard his own voice harden. "I used to lie awake as a boy and listen for that footman. He did not come very often."

They had reached the landing. He stopped outside a door on the west side, the door to his own rooms, the rooms that had been his father's, and did not open it yet.

"I did not want that," he said. "I did not want forty yards of passage and a footman with a candle. So when I came back to London in December, I had the builders in."

He opened the door beside his own.

It had been a dressing room once, and a small dark sitting room beyond it that nobody used. He had had the wall between them taken down, and the windows made larger to the south, and the whole of it hung with paper the pale green of beech leaves in May. There was a writing desk by the window, facing the garden, with a new inkstand and a stack of good paper and the little brown volume of Donne, which she had lent him on their last morning by the sea, already laid on the blotter. There were bookshelves, half empty, waiting to be filled with her own choices. There was a sofa by the fire, long enough for two. There was a pianoforte, small and plain, which she would never play well and would, he hoped, play anyway.

And in the far wall, between her bedroom and his, where the old dividing panel had been, there was a door.

It was not locked. It had no lock. He had had the carpenter leave it off.

Elizabeth stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly, all the way round, and did not say anything at all.

He began to be anxious. "You may change anything," he said quickly. "The paper, the furniture. Mrs Dawes thought the green too plain. If you would rather have your mother-in-law's rooms after all, with the silk hangings and the view of the square, I will have them opened at once. I only thought—"

"You did this in December," she said. "Before the wedding. Before Lady Catherine. While I was still writing you letters about my mother and the napkins."

"Yes."

"You never said a word."

"I wanted to see your face."

She turned round, and he saw her face.

She crossed the room in three steps, and put both hands flat on his chest, and looked up at him with her eyes brimming, and he thought for one alarmed moment that she was angry. Then she said, in a voice that shook, "You are the most absurd, the most ridiculous, the most wonderful man in England, and I shall never let you out of my sight again."

"That," said Darcy, "was rather the idea."

She laughed and cried at once, and pulled his head down, and kissed him until they were both breathless, standing in the middle of her green room with the March dusk coming in at the windows.

Afterwards, with her head against his shoulder, she said into his waistcoat, "Fitzwilliam."

"Yes?"

"The door. Between our rooms."

"It has no lock," he said. "I will not have one fitted. Ever. If you are angry with me, you must come through it and tell me so to my face. And if I am angry with you, I shall do the same. We shall not sulk at opposite ends of the house with forty yards of passage between us. I have seen where that ends."

She lifted her head and looked at him for a long moment, and he saw that she understood everything he had not said: about his father, and his mother, and a small boy lying awake in the dark listening for a candle that never came.

"Agreed," said Elizabeth. "No locks. No sulking. No footmen with candles." A smile trembled at the corner of her mouth. "Though I reserve the right to slam it very hard, on occasion."

"I should expect nothing less."

#

Mrs Dawes came to her the next morning at ten, with the household books under one arm and a great ring of keys at her waist, and the air of a general who expects to be relieved of her command and is prepared to be gracious about it.

Elizabeth had lain awake half the night deciding what to do. She had been mistress of nothing in her life but a small corner of Longbourn's still-room and her own sewing box. She knew nothing about ordering dinners for twenty, or the proper wages of an under-footman, or where one bought beeswax candles in London and how many one burnt in a week. Mrs Dawes knew all of it, and had known it for fifteen years.