Page 12 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

He lay awake and went over it again and again: the candle shaking in her hand, the curl between his fingers, her face turned up to his with her eyes half closed. He had been one breath away from kissing her. He had wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.

And he had no right to it. Not yet. Not in another man's library, in the dark, with her sister ill upstairs and nothing said between them. His father had taught him what a gentleman owed a lady, and it was not a stolen kiss behind the atlas. If he kissed Elizabeth Bennet, it would be because she had promised to be his wife.

He lay very still, and let that thought settle.

It did not frighten him. That was the astonishing thing. A week ago it would have. A week ago he would have been listing the objections, and packing his trunk, and ordering the carriage for London before dawn. Now he only lay in the dark and thought: yes. And then: but not yet. Not like this. She deserves to be asked properly.

In the morning, Miss Bennet was declared well enough to go home, and the Longbourn carriage was sent for.

Darcy was in the hall when the sisters came down. Miss Bennet leant on Bingley's arm, pale and smiling, and Bingley looked at her as though he meant to follow the carriage on foot. Elizabeth came a step behind, in her walking pelisse, with the three books he had lent her held against her chest.

"I must return these," she said, and held them out.

He took the Cowper and the Shakespeare. He did not take the third. It was not his; it was the little brown Donne from the library, which he had quietly left on her pillow the night before, with a slip of paper between two pages.

"That one is Bingley's," he said. "He will never miss it. Keep it, if you like."

She looked down at the book in her hands, and then up at him, and her cheeks turned slowly pink. So she had found the slip. So she had read the lines he had marked, and knew what he meant by them. He watched her understand, and saw that she was not displeased, and felt as though he had been handed the world.

"Thank you," she said. "I shall take good care of it."

"I know you will."

Bingley coughed, loudly, and Miss Bingley appeared at the top of the stairs, and the moment passed. Darcy handed Miss Bennet into the carriage, and then Elizabeth. Her gloved fingers rested in his a moment longer than they needed to.

"Mr Darcy," she said, from the window, "my aunt Phillips gives a card party on Friday, for the officers of the militia. They arrived in Meryton yesterday. Will you come?"

"If you will be there," said Darcy, "then yes."

She smiled, and the carriage rolled away down the drive. He stood on the gravel and watched it until it turned out of the gate, and then for some time after that, until Bingley came and took his arm and led him back into the house as though he were an elderly relation.

"The militia," Bingley said cheerfully. "That will liven Meryton up. Denny says they have a new man joining, a very charming fellow. Wickham, I think his name is. Do you know him?"

Darcy stopped dead on the step.

The warmth that had filled him since the library drained away all at once, as if someone had opened a door onto a winter night. He saw, very clearly, Elizabeth at her aunt's card table, laughing, turning her bright face towards a handsome stranger in a red coat, who smiled the smile that had fooled Darcy's father, and his own sister, and half the tradesmen of Lambton.

"Yes," he said. "I know him."

And before Bingley could ask him anything else, he went up to his room, and began to think very hard about how much he was prepared to tell her.

Chapter 4: The Truth About Wickham

Meryton. Friday, 25th October 1811

The slip of paper was still in the little brown book, at the page where he had left it. Elizabeth had read the lines he had marked so many times in three days that she no longer needed to look. She looked anyway, while Kitty and Lydia squabbled over a sash, and then she tucked the book into the bottom of her drawer, under her stockings, where no sister would think to search.

He had underlined two words in pencil, very faintly, as if he had not quite dared. Good-morrow.

She did not know exactly what he meant by them. She knew what she hoped.

Mrs Phillips's parlour was hot, crowded, and scarlet. The militia had arrived in force: a dozen officers crammed around two card tables and a pianoforte, laughing too loudly, admired from every corner by girls who had seen nothing in a red coat but a lieutenant's pay and a pair of good shoulders. Lydia was in raptures before she had taken off her cloak. Kitty followed her in with the expression of a pilgrim entering a cathedral.

Elizabeth looked round the room once, found that the Netherfield party had not yet arrived, and was annoyed with herself for looking.

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet? Lieutenant Denny has told me so much about the Miss Bennets that I begged him for an introduction. I hope I am not too bold."

She turned. The officer bowing to her was the handsomest man in the room, and he knew it, and somehow managed to make it charming that he knew it. He had a frank, open, smiling face, a pleasant voice, and a way of looking at a woman as though she were the only interesting thing he had seen all week.