Page 34 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

For a fortnight, London had been kind.

Not warm; Elizabeth had not expected warm. But kind enough. Lady Theodosia had taken her to a musical evening at Lady Sefton's and a rout at Mrs Drummond-Burrell's, and introduced her everywhere with such easy affection that people who had come to stare stayed to talk. She had been left cards by eleven ladies she did not know. She had been told by a very old admiral at dinner that she had the finest eyes he had seen since Lady Hamilton's, and had laughed so much at the comparison that he had asked her to sit by him again. Darcy had gone alone to Matlock House and come back quiet and thoughtful, and said only that his aunt had asked him to bring Elizabeth to dine on the fifth of April, and that it was a beginning.

She had started to believe it might all be easy after all.

The post came in at nine, as it always did, on Pearce's silver salver: two letters from Longbourn, a bill from a milliner, a card for a ball at Lady Castlereagh's, and a newspaper, folded small and sealed with a plain wafer, addressed to Mrs Darcy, Grosvenor Square in a hand she did not know.

Georgiana had gone early to her singing master. Her husband was in his study with his steward's letters. Elizabeth sat alone at the round table in the small dining room with a cup of chocolate cooling at her elbow, and broke the wafer, and unfolded the paper.

It was a thin, cheap, badly printed sheet called The Tattler's Glass, of the kind Kitty and Lydia used to buy in Meryton and hide under their mattresses. Most of it was about an actress and a viscount. But on the second page someone had drawn a neat box round one paragraph, in black ink, so that she could not possibly miss it.

We hear from St James's Street that a certain Mr D—y of P—y, a gentleman long celebrated for his coldness to our sex and his contempt for any lady not possessed of rank and fortune, has lately astonished the Town by marrying a young person from the country without either. The wonder ceases, however, when we learn that some two years since the said gentleman entered into a wager in the book of a certain club, that he would within a given time wed a lady of no family and no portion, and bring her to London as his bride. The wager is now settled, and it is said the gentleman is richer by fifty guineas. Of the lady's feelings upon the matter, if she has yet been told, we are unable to inform our readers.

Elizabeth read it once. Then she read it again, very slowly, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something else if she looked hard enough.

They did not.

She felt nothing at first. Only a kind of odd, spreading coldness, starting in her fingers and moving up her arms, as if she had plunged her hands into snow. She was aware of the fire crackling in the grate, and the clock ticking on the mantel, and a cart going by in the square outside, and of her own face, quite still, reflected in the silver chocolate pot.

A wager. Fifty guineas. A young person from the country. If she has yet been told.

She thought of Darcy at the Meryton assembly, walking across a crowded room towards her as though he had made up his mind in a single instant. She thought of how fast it had all been. Sixteen weeks, from the assembly to the altar. Everybody had said so. Her mother had said so, gloating. Lady Catherine had said so, furious. Such a hurried affair.

And for one moment, one single dreadful moment, sitting alone at the breakfast table with the cheap grey paper in her hands, the thought rose up in her before she could stop it:

What if it is true?

It lasted exactly as long as it took her to breathe in.

Then she thought of a man on his knees on a conservatory floor, saying I have forgotten every word of it. She thought of a door with no lock. She thought of a letter she still kept, folded very small, in the drawer of her green writing desk: Any slight to her is a slight to me.

She breathed out. The cold went out of her hands.

No, thought Elizabeth Darcy, very clearly, and was astonished at how certain she was. No. Whatever this is, it is not that.

She stood up, with the paper in her hand, meaning to go and find him.

She had taken two steps towards the door when it burst open, and her husband came through it at something close to a run, his face white as chalk and a copy of the same grey sheet crushed in his fist.

#

He saw the paper in her hand, and his heart stopped.

Pearce had brought his own copy to the study five minutes before, folded and sealed and addressed in the same unknown hand, with the same neat black box drawn round the same paragraph. He had read it standing up. He had read it a second time with his hand braced on the desk because his knees had gone. And then he had thought, with a terror worse than anything he had felt at Ramsgate: she will have one too. And he had run.

He was too late. She had read it. She was standing in the middle of the breakfast room in her morning gown with the cheap grey sheet in her hand and her face perfectly still, and he could not read it at all.

"Elizabeth," he said. His voice came out hoarse. "Elizabeth. Listen to me. Please. Before you think anything. Let me tell you."

"Tell me," she said quietly.

He did not sit down. He could not have sat down. He stood in the doorway with the crushed paper in his fist, and told her, all of it, as fast and as plainly as he could, the way he had told her about Wickham on Oakham Mount.

Carlton's dinner, two years ago, in the spring. Too much claret. Himself, being pompous and insufferable, declaring to a table of young fools that he would marry for duty and consequence or not at all. Aldridge, drunk and laughing, going to the great betting book on its stand in the corner and scrawling a wager in it: that Darcy would fall for some girl without a penny to her name within five years, and marry her, and be glad of it. Fifty guineas.

"I did not take it," he said. "I never took it. I did not sign it. I did not even look at it. I thought it was vulgar and stupid and I walked out of the room. Nobody took it. It has been sitting in that book, unaccepted, for two years, and I had forgotten it existed until Aldridge reminded me of it a fortnight ago, and then I forgot it again, because it was nothing. It was a drunken joke. It was nothing to do with you. I had not even heard of Hertfordshire when it was written."

She was listening. She had not moved.