Page 104 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

It is understood that no gentleman in the club could be found to take the bet. An elderly peer of long matrimonial experience is reported to have declined it on the grounds of his personal safety. We have not the pleasure of the lady's acquaintance. But we are informed on excellent authority that, if she has yet been told, she is very well satisfied.

Darcy read it twice. Then he put it down and looked across the table at his wife, who had read it over his shoulder, and was now sitting with her chin on her hand and her eyes very bright, looking back at him.

"If she has yet been told," said Elizabeth softly.

"I noticed."

"Somebody at the Post has a very long memory, and a very good sense of humour." She smiled. "Or a very bad conscience."

The cards began arriving at ten. By noon there were so many that Pearce had given up putting them in the bowl on the hall table and was stacking them on a silver salver the size of a tea tray, and then on a second, and then, in despair, in a hatbox. Lady Jersey. Lady Castlereagh. Lady Pembury, twice. Mrs Drummond-Burrell, with a note enclosed, very humble, hoping Mrs Darcy would do her the honour of taking tea on Thursday. Lady Sefton, with a note hoping Mrs Darcy would forgive her for Almack's, and enclosing a voucher. Sir Hugh Ferrers, the old admiral, with a note that said only, in a large shaky hand, Bravo. Told you so. Finest eyes in London.

Elizabeth read them all, sitting on the green sofa in her green room with the hatbox on her knees. She read them, and smiled, and put them down, one after another, on the growing pile beside her, and did not answer any of them.

"You are not going to reply?" said Darcy, from the doorway.

"Oh, I shall reply. Politely. To every one." She put down Lady Pembury's second card. "Next week. Or the week after. When I have time." She looked up at him, and her eyes were dancing. "I find I am very busy this week, Mr Darcy. I have a great deal of catching up to do. With my husband."

He laughed, and came and sat beside her on the sofa, and took the hatbox off her knees and put it on the floor, and she put her head on his shoulder.

They sat like that for a long time, in the green room, in the May sunlight, with the lilac nodding outside the window in the square and the cards of half London in a hatbox at their feet, and did not say anything at all.

#

He woke the next morning very early, before it was light, in the big bed with the door standing open between their rooms, and lay still for a while and listened to his wife breathing.

She was asleep on her side, facing him, with one hand tucked under her cheek and her hair spread across both their pillows. In the grey dark before dawn, he could just make out her face: the curve of her cheek, the dark lashes, the freckle by her mouth. There was no crease between her brows. There had been one every morning since March, even in her sleep. It had gone.

He thought about a word.

It had been theirs. He had underlined it in pencil in a borrowed book, very faintly, because he had not dared to say it aloud. He had whispered it in Longbourn church. He had said it every morning of their marriage when he woke. And in March somebody had taken it, and put it in the Morning Post, between the Duchess of Rutland's barouche and Lady Jersey's ball, for the whole of London to laugh at.

He had not said it since. Not properly. Not without hearing that laughter behind it. He had said it on the drive at Pemberley, and in the morning sun there, but even then, somewhere at the back of his mind, he had heard it: the rustle of newspapers at a hundred breakfast tables. Good-morrow indeed.

He did not hear it now.

He lay in the grey light and listened, and there was nothing. Only the birds beginning in the plane trees in the square, and the far-off rattle of the first milk cart, and her breathing, slow and soft and even, beside him. The newspapers were full of something else now. His own words, in his own hand, in the book at White's. They could laugh at those if they liked. He did not think they would.

She stirred. Her eyes opened, dark and sleepy, and found him watching her, and she smiled, the slow private smile that was only ever for him.

"You are awake," she murmured.

"I am."

"What are you thinking about?"

He put out his hand, and touched a curl that lay across her cheek, and held it between his fingers, very lightly, as though it were something precious that had been lent to him, and that he had, at last, been allowed to keep.

"Good-morrow," said Fitzwilliam Darcy.

And it was theirs again.

Chapter 28: Presentation

Darcy House. Thursday, 4th June 1812. The King's Birthday.

"I cannot," said Georgiana, "get through the door."

She was standing on the threshold of her blue bedroom, and it was quite true. Court dress in the year 1812 was a thing of another age, and nobody pretended otherwise: a high-waisted gown of white satin, very simple and very modern, worn over a great old-fashioned hooped petticoat that stood out a full yard on either side of the wearer, like a table. Over the hoop went a skirt of white silk embroidered with silver, and over the skirt went a train of white satin, four yards long, fastened at the shoulders. On the head went three tall white ostrich plumes, nodding, and a pair of lace lappets hanging down behind. The whole was said by those who had worn it to be exactly like walking about inside a small tent.