Page 99 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"You sat on my bed," she said. "At Matlock. In October. With a candle. You held me while I cried. You said I was not wicked, only young. You swore on your mother's grave that you would never tell a living soul." Her voice cracked. "And then you wrote so that she has time to hope first."

Theodosia looked at her.

And Elizabeth, standing by the door, watched the mask come off.

It did not fall. It did not crack. It was simply, all at once, not there any more, the way a candle is not there when somebody pinches it out. The gentle, gracious, self-deprecating smile went out of the lovely face, and what was left underneath it was something Elizabeth had never seen before, and hoped never to see again: a face perfectly cold, and perfectly still, and so full of hatred that it seemed to burn.

It was not turned on Georgiana. It was not turned on Lady Matlock, or Caroline, or Darcy.

It was turned on Elizabeth.

"Six years," said Lady Theodosia Rowe. Her voice was quite quiet. "Six years I waited. I did everything right. I never put a foot wrong. I never asked for anything. I learned to ride because he rode. I read every book in his library at Pemberley. I sat at that table every Christmas and waited for him to look at me. And you walked into some country assembly with mud on your petticoat and laughed at him, and he gave you everything. His name. His house. His mother's ring." Her lip curled. "A door."

Nobody said anything.

"And they all love you," said Theodosia. "His sister. His aunt. Even that old harridan from Kent. Even Caroline Bingley, who hates you. What are you? What have you got that I have not? You are not beautiful. You have no fortune. You cannot even play the pianoforte. What is it?"

Elizabeth looked at her for a long moment.

She thought of all the things she might say. They crowded up into her throat: every paragraph, every whisper, every cut, every morning at breakfast with her chin up. Georgiana on the floor of the blue room, shaking without a sound. So that she has time to hope first.

She found, when she opened her mouth, that she did not want to say any of them.

"I did not want anything from him," she said quietly. "That is all. I did not know who he was. I only thought he looked tired, and unhappy, and that people were being unkind to him. I said so. And he heard me." She paused. "You waited six years for him to see you, Lady Theodosia. I am sorry for it. Truly. But you never once let him. You only ever showed him what you thought he wanted. He could not see you, because you were never there."

Theodosia stared at her. For one moment something went across the white face that was not hatred at all. Something much younger and much sadder, like a child who has been told a truth it has always known.

Then it was gone. She turned, very fast, in a flash of silver, and wrenched open the door, and was out on the landing and gone before anybody could move.

#

Darcy was the first out of the door after her. He did not know why. He did not mean to stop her; there was nothing left to stop. He only found that he was on the landing, with Elizabeth a step behind him, looking down over the balustrade into the ballroom.

The first set had just ended. The dancers were drifting off the floor in pairs, laughing, fanning themselves, and the musicians in the gallery were turning their pages. It was the loudest moment of any ball: two hundred people all talking at once, in the heat, under the chandeliers.

Theodosia came down the last stairs into the middle of it, very fast, in her shimmer of silver, with her face as white as her gown.

She did not see where she was going. She was making for the far doors, the ones that led to the back stairs and the carriages. She got perhaps a dozen steps across the floor before a hand caught her sleeve.

It was Mrs Drummond-Burrell. Darcy saw her quite clearly from the landing: plump and flushed and eager, still pink from her curtsey on the stairs, delighted to have found somebody who would understand.

"Theo! Dearest! There you are. Whatever is going on?" Her voice carried, as it always did. "Your godmother has put the Darcy woman at her right hand! In your place! After everything you told us! You said she was a scheming little nobody who would be gone by Easter, and that Lady Matlock could not bear her, and now—"

It was at that moment that the musicians, in the gallery, finished turning their pages. And for one of those strange, sudden, accidental seconds that happen in every crowded room, the whole of the ballroom fell silent at once.

Into the silence, Lady Theodosia Rowe said, very clearly, in a high, cracked, furious voice that Darcy had never heard her use in six years:

"She should have been! I made sure of it! Every paragraph! Every one! I paid for every word! And that fool Wickham—"

She stopped.

Darcy saw her hear herself. He saw it go through her like a sword. She stood quite still in the middle of the floor with her hand still raised, and Mrs Drummond-Burrell's fingers still on her sleeve, and her mouth open, and her face slowly changing, from fury to understanding to something beyond both. And all round her, two hundred people stood equally still, and looked at her.

Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. Every person in that room had read The Tattler's Glass and the Morning Post that spring. Every one of them had laughed at the wager, and the door, and good-morrow. Every one of them had read the question for the Drawing Room. And every one of them understood, all at once, in the same second, who had written it.

Mrs Drummond-Burrell let go of the silver sleeve as if it had burned her.

Nobody had done anything to Theodosia Rowe. Nobody had shouted, or accused her, or read out her letters, or dragged her into the light. Lady Catherine had said there would be no scene, and there had been none. She had done it all herself.