Page 44 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She looked up at him, and he saw her open her mouth to say the name, and then, for some reason he could not read, close it again.

"From a friend," she said. "Who meant it kindly. Everybody has been telling me the same." She shook her head, as if to clear it. "It does not matter. Half of London thinks Caroline wrote it. It would have been odd if nobody had said so."

It was reasonable. It was entirely reasonable. Darcy let it go.

But he stood with her at the railings a long time after that, looking into the dark garden, and neither of them said anything. And when at last they turned to go in, and Pearce opened the blue door and the warm light spilled down the steps, he found that he had put his arm round her, quite tightly, as though there were something out there in the square that he did not want to let near her.

On the hall table there was one card, left that afternoon while they were out. It was engraved in the latest style, very fine, and in the corner a hand he did not know had written, in a pretty sloping script: So sorry to have missed you. Tomorrow? T.

Elizabeth picked it up, and looked at it, and put it down again without a word, and went upstairs.

Chapter 13: Pillow Talk

Darcy House. Monday, 30th March 1812

The second one was not in The Tattler's Glass. It was in the Morning Post, which lay on every breakfast table in Mayfair, and it came with no black box round it and no sealed wafer. It did not need them. Everybody would find it.

Georgiana found it first. Elizabeth came down at half past nine to find her sister-in-law sitting at the round table with the paper spread in front of her and her face scarlet to the ears, and when Georgiana saw her, she tried to fold the paper up and hide it under the toast rack, which was how Elizabeth knew.

"Give it to me, dearest," she said gently.

"Elizabeth, please, you need not—"

"Give it to me."

It was in the column called Fashionable Intelligence, between a notice of Lady Jersey's ball and the Duchess of Rutland's new barouche.

We learn that the new Mistress of a certain great house in Grosvenor Square has lost no time in making her mark upon it. The Master, not content with the customary forty yards of corridor between his apartments and his Lady's, has had the builders in to knock a door through the wall; being, it is whispered, unable to endure even one night's separation from his rustic bride. Her influence over him is said to be remarkable. He reads love poetry to her at breakfast, and each morning greets her with a line from Dr Donne. Good-morrow indeed! Whether the lady's charms will prove as durable as the gentleman's plaster, the Town waits to see.

Elizabeth put the paper down on the table, very carefully, as though it might break.

She was not frightened this time. She was not cold. She found that she was angry: a slow, deep, burning anger, rising up from somewhere under her ribs, such as she had never felt in her life. Not even with Lady Catherine. Not even with Mr Wickham.

The door. The door with no lock, that he had made for her in December and never told a soul about. The door he had shown her in the dusk on her first evening, with his heart in his eyes, and told her about a small boy lying awake listening for a footman with a candle.

And good-morrow. Their word. The word he had underlined in pencil, very faintly, in a borrowed book, because he had not dared say it aloud. The word he had whispered in Longbourn church. The word he said to her, every single morning, when he woke.

Somebody had taken it, and put it in the Morning Post, between the Duchess of Rutland's barouche and a notice of Lady Jersey's ball, for the whole of London to laugh at over their toast.

"Elizabeth?" said Georgiana, frightened. "Elizabeth, you have gone so white."

"I am quite well, dearest." She heard her own voice, very calm and very far away. "Where is your brother?"

"In the study. He has seen it. He saw it before I did. He—" Georgiana swallowed. "He broke a chair."

Elizabeth closed her eyes for a moment.

Then she opened them, and sat down, and poured herself a cup of chocolate with a hand that was almost steady, and made herself think.

The betting book had been in White's for two years, for any man to read. The inn at Whetstone had been in a letter her father had read aloud at a table of eight. The white silk and silver at the Pemburys' had been seen by three hundred people. Everything so far, anybody might have known.

But not this.

The door had been built in December. It had not been mentioned in any letter to Longbourn; she had written only that the rooms were lovely, and Jane had had the rest from her own lips on Tuesday. And good-morrow... she had never written that word to anybody. Not to Jane. Not to her father. It existed in only three places in the world: in his mouth, and in hers, and on a slip of paper in a little brown book that lay on the writing desk in her green room.

Whoever wrote this had been in that room. Had stood by that desk. Had seen that book, and opened it, and read what was written on the slip.

She thought of the people who had been in her green room since she came to London. It was not a long list. She did not like it at all.