Page 18 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She made a small choked sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. Then she looked up at him at last, and her eyes were wet and shining, and there was a question in them.

In future.

He held her gaze and did not look away, and let her read the answer in his face.

When the dancing began again after supper, he did not take her back to the ballroom. He offered her his arm, and turned the other way, down the long quiet passage towards the conservatory, where only two lamps were burning and the moon came in through the glass.

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The conservatory smelt of wet earth and oranges. The moon made silver of the glass roof and long blue shadows of the lemon trees in their tubs, and somewhere a small fountain was running, a thin bright sound in the dark. The music from the ballroom came very faintly down the passage, as if from another country.

He led her to the middle of the room, where the moonlight fell clearest, and let go of her arm, and stood looking at her.

Elizabeth had imagined this moment. She was ashamed to admit how often. In her imagination she had always been very composed, and witty, and had said something clever that he would remember all his life. In fact she stood in the moonlight with her heart hammering and her hands clasped so tightly together that her rings hurt her fingers, and could not think of a single word.

It did not matter. It turned out that he had enough words for both of them.

"I had a speech," he said. "I have been writing it for a month. I wrote it on the back of my steward's letters, and in the margins of a book of sermons, and once on my cuff, which my valet has not forgiven. It was very eloquent. It set out all the reasons, in order, and answered all the objections, and it was entirely correct in every particular." He paused. "I have forgotten every word of it."

A laugh escaped her, tremulous. "Then you must manage without."

"Then I shall say it plainly." He drew a breath. "I love you. I think I began to love you behind a pillar at the Meryton assembly, before I had even seen your face, when you told a room full of people who despised me that I might only be tired, or shy, or worried about someone at home. Nobody had ever troubled to think the best of me before. You did it for a stranger, and made a joke of it so that nobody could call you soft."

She could not speak. She could hardly see him; her eyes had filled.

"I have loved you every day since," he said, and his voice was not steady now. "In your mother's parlour. In a muddy lane. In a library with a candle shaking in your hand. On a hill in the wind, when I told you the worst thing I have ever known and you took off your glove. I cannot remember what my life was like before you walked into it, Elizabeth. I do not want to remember. I only want the rest of it, with you."

He went down on one knee on the conservatory flagstones, in his beautiful evening clothes, and took a small red case from his waistcoat pocket and opened it. The sapphire caught the moonlight and burned blue.

"It was my mother's," he said. "She told me to give it to the woman I loved. Not the one they would choose for me. The one I loved." He looked up at her. "Will you marry me?"

Elizabeth, who had always had an answer for everything, discovered that she was crying too hard to give one.

She nodded instead, fiercely, again and again, and then she found her voice, and it came out as half a laugh and half a sob.

"Yes. Oh, yes. Get up, you absurd man, you will ruin your knees on these stones."

He did not get up at once. He took her left hand, and drew off her glove, very slowly, one finger at a time, as if he had all the time in the world, and slid the ring onto her finger. It fitted. She thought, dazed, that of course it fitted; it would have been unthinkable for it not to. Then he pressed his lips to her palm, and held them there, and she felt him tremble.

Then he rose, and she was in his arms.

She had wondered, in the library, what it would be like. She had wondered every night since. She had not come close. He kissed her slowly at first, gently, almost carefully, as if she were something that might break. Then her hands came up of their own accord and slid round his neck into his hair, and she heard him make a low helpless sound against her mouth, and the carefulness went out of him altogether.

The fountain ran on. The moon moved a little across the glass. Far away, the fiddles began a reel. Neither of them heard.

When at last he lifted his head, she was breathless and dizzy, and would have been very glad to sit down, except that she did not want to move out of his arms for any reason at all. He rested his forehead against hers. She could feel his heart racing through two layers of waistcoat.

"Good-morrow," he murmured.

She laughed shakily. "It is barely midnight."

"It is the first morning of the rest of my life. I am entitled to call it what I like." He pressed a kiss to her temple, and another to her hair. "You underlined the same words, you know. In the book. I saw the pencil marks when I took it off your pillow to put the slip in. Twice over, very dark. So I knew."

Elizabeth, who had done that on the first night, alone, in the dark, and had thought no one would ever see it, went scarlet from her neck to her hair.

"You are insufferable," she said into his coat.

"I am yours," said Mr Darcy. "Which I suspect amounts to the same thing."