Page 101 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

He turned. His face was grave, but his eyes, when they met hers, were not.

"I did."

"What is it?"

He was silent a moment.

"I am going to White's," he said. "This afternoon, at four o'clock, when the room is fullest. Aldridge will be there. And Richard. And a great many other people, I suspect, since Aldridge has spent the morning telling everyone in St James's Street that I am coming." He paused. "It began in White's. In that book. With a stupid drunken joke that I did not take. I mean to finish it there."

"How?"

He crossed the room to her, and took both her hands, and looked down at her, and for the first time that morning he smiled: the slow private smile from the garden path at Longbourn.

"That," he said, "I am going to ask you to let me keep. Until tonight."

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. "We said no secrets."

"We did. I know it. And if you tell me I must, I will tell you now, this minute, every word." His hands tightened on hers. "But I should very much like, just this once, to do something for you that you do not see coming. I have been afraid for four months, Elizabeth. Every day. I should like to do one thing that is not about being afraid. May I?"

She looked up at him. At the grave dark eyes, and the best blue coat, and the careful brushed hair, and the smile.

Then she began to laugh.

"That is not a secret, you absurd man," she said. "That is a surprise. They are entirely different things. Secrets are for keeping people out. Surprises are for letting them in." She rose on her toes and kissed his cheek. "You may have your surprise. I shall not ask a single question. I shall sit here all afternoon being perfectly patient and dignified, like a lady in The Mirror of Graces."

"You will not."

"I will not," she agreed. "I shall go mad by three o'clock. But you may have it anyway."

He laughed, and kissed her, properly, in the study doorway, where Pearce was coming along the passage with the second post and had to stop and study the barometer again.

At a quarter to four, she stood at the drawing-room window and watched him walk away across the square in the May sunshine, very tall and straight, with his hat in his hand and Richard striding beside him like an escort, and turn the corner into South Audley Street towards St James's.

She did not go mad by three o'clock. She went mad by a quarter past four.

#

White's at four o'clock on a fine Friday afternoon in May was always full. That afternoon it was fuller than Darcy had ever seen it.

He felt it before he was through the door: the press of bodies, the heat, the smell of cigars and coal smoke and port, the low roar of a hundred men talking at once. They were three deep at the bar and four deep in the bow window. Men he knew only by sight stood in the passage with their hats still in their hands, as though they had come in off the street on purpose. Old Lord Ashcombe, who had not been seen in the club in two years, had been carried in in his chair and set down by the fire. Aldridge had not been exaggerating. The whole of St James's Street, it seemed, had heard that Mr Darcy of Pemberley was coming to White's at four o'clock, and had come to see why.

The roar died as he came in.

It did not die all at once. It went out slowly, from the door inwards, like a tide going down a beach: a ripple of heads turning, conversations breaking off in the middle, a newspaper lowered, a glass set down. By the time he had crossed the hall, the whole long room was silent, and every eye in it was on him.

In March, in this room, he had heard somebody snigger at his back. He had stood at that stand with his hands braced on it and the blood beating in his ears, and not turned round. He remembered it very clearly.

He was not angry now. He had looked for the anger, walking down St James's Street in the sun with Richard beside him, and not found it. He found, instead, that he was perfectly calm, and perfectly happy, and that his heart was beating quite steadily, and that he was thinking of his wife standing at the drawing-room window, pretending to be patient.

The betting book stood in its corner on its oak stand, as it had stood since before he was born, great and heavy and leather-bound. Aldridge was standing beside it: pale, shaved, in his soberest coat, looking as though he had not slept for a week. When Darcy came up, he held out his hand without a word, and Darcy took it.

"Is it open at the page?" said Darcy.

"It is. I found it an hour ago." Aldridge swallowed. "Darcy, I—"

"I know. Do it now. Where they can all see."

Aldridge turned to the book. Darcy watched him pick up the pen from the inkstand, and dip it, and bend over the page. The entry was there, as it had been for two years, in his own drunken sprawling hand: Ld E. Aldridge bets Mr Darcy 50 gns that Mr D. will within five years marry a lady without fortune or connexion, and be glad of it. And beside it, in the margin, in two other hands: Won. And, And lost, I shd think, poor fellow.