Page 24 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

It was the last time. She knew it the moment she was awake. Tonight Jane would sleep at Netherfield and she herself would sleep somewhere on the road to the south, in a strange inn, beside a man she had known for sixteen weeks. Tomorrow there would be no Jane in the morning, murmuring about the weather, warming her cold feet against Elizabeth's. There would be no Longbourn at all.

She had not expected to mind. She had been counting the days for a month.

"Lizzy," said Jane softly in the dark. "Are you crying?"

"A little."

"So am I." A hand found hers under the quilt. "Are you frightened?"

Elizabeth thought about it honestly. "Not of him," she said. "Never of him. Of everything else a little. Of London. Of being a Mrs Darcy, when I have only ever been Lizzy. Of not knowing how." She turned her head on the pillow. "Are you?"

"Only of being so happy," said Jane. "It does not seem right that anyone should be allowed to be so happy. I keep waiting for someone to notice and take it away."

They lay holding hands until the window turned grey, and then Mrs Bennet burst in without knocking, in a nightcap and a flurry of curl-papers, crying that it had snowed in the night and the road to the church would be ruined and they would all be married with wet feet, and the moment was over.

It had snowed. Not much, only a dusting, like sugar on a cake, enough to make the whole world white and hushed and new. By ten o'clock the sun had come out on it and everything glittered.

They dressed in the room they had always shared, with the door shut against their mother. Jane in white satin, looking like the angel on top of a Christmas tree. Elizabeth in white sarsenet, simpler, with a spencer of dark blue velvet against the cold. Mrs Gardiner did their hair. Mary, who had been given charge of the flowers, brought up two posies of hothouse violets that had come from Netherfield that morning, and a note in a firm clear hand that said only: for your eyes.

Elizabeth pinned her posy to her spencer and could not look at anybody for a moment.

There was a tap at the door. Georgiana Darcy put her head round it.

She had come down from London with her brother three days before, in a travelling carriage with a hot brick at her feet and a face white with terror, and had got out at Longbourn's door and looked up at Elizabeth standing on the step and burst into tears. Elizabeth had come down the steps and put her arms round her without a word, and held on. By dinner that evening they had been friends. By the second evening Georgiana had played her new sonata, very badly, trembling so much she dropped a whole bar, and Elizabeth had said, quite truthfully, that she had never heard the slow movement played with so much feeling. Georgiana had looked at her brother. Darcy had said nothing, but his eyes had been very bright.

Now she stood in the doorway in her own new blue gown, pink with shyness, holding out a small flat box.

"It is from my brother," she said. "He said you would not need anything borrowed, but you might need something blue, and that he trusts you to take care of it, since it has been in the family for a hundred years and my great-grandmother would haunt him otherwise."

Inside the box, on white silk, lay a slender chain with a single sapphire drop that matched the stone in her ring.

"And he said," Georgiana went on, pinker still, reciting carefully, as if she had been made to learn it, "to tell you that he did not sleep at all, and that he has tied his cravat four times, and that Colonel Fitzwilliam has confiscated his watch because he kept looking at it."

Elizabeth laughed until she had to sit down on the bed. It was, Jane said afterwards, the best possible thing that could have happened; she had been as white as her gown, and now she had colour in her cheeks for the church.

#

Longbourn church was small and very old and very cold, and it was full to the doors.

Darcy stood at the chancel step with Bingley beside him and his cousin behind, and faced a sea of Hertfordshire bonnets, and did not see one of them. Richard Fitzwilliam had arrived from Horse Guards at midnight on a lathered horse, with three days' leave, a sabre cut on his wrist from some affair in Portugal he refused to discuss, and a large flask of brandy, which Darcy had declined at seven that morning and was now beginning to regret.

"Steady," murmured Richard at his shoulder. "You look like a man facing a firing squad. I have seen them. You have exactly the expression."

"I am perfectly composed."

"You have retied your cravat twice since we arrived. Bingley, tell him."

Bingley, who was gazing at the church door with his heart in his face, did not hear.

The Matlocks had not come. His uncle had written a short correct letter regretting that the sitting of the Lords made it impossible. His aunt had written nothing, but a parcel had arrived at Netherfield the day before, directed to Miss Elizabeth Bennet, containing a very fine cashmere shawl and a card with only her aunt's name on it. Darcy did not know what it meant. He thought it might mean more than it said. Lady Catherine had sent nothing at all.

He had minded, a little, at first. He did not mind now. Georgiana was here, in the front pew, with the Gardiner children on either side of her and one of them asleep on her shoulder, and she had smiled at him when he came in, a real smile, without shadows. Richard was here. That was his family. The rest could follow when they chose, or not at all.

The door at the back of the church opened, and the cold came in, and the sunlight off the snow, and everybody turned.

Mr Bennet came first, with Jane on his arm, and Darcy heard Bingley's breath catch and felt him sway, and put out a hand to steady him without looking, because he could not look anywhere but the doorway behind them.

And then there she was.