Page 25 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She came up the aisle on her uncle Gardiner's arm, since her father could not give away two daughters at once. White and dark blue, violets at her breast, the sapphire at her throat. She was not smiling. She was looking straight ahead at him, the whole length of the church, with her dark eyes very wide, and her face was more serious than he had ever seen it, as though she had come to the edge of something very deep and was not afraid to step off.

Everything else went away. The cold, the bonnets, the rustle of the Longs and the Lucases, Mrs Bennet sobbing noisily into her handkerchief in the second pew. There was nothing left in the world but that one face coming towards him.

He had been eight-and-twenty years alive, and it seemed to him that he had spent every one of them walking towards this moment without knowing it.

She reached him. Mr Gardiner put her hand into his. Her fingers were ice cold, and trembling, and he closed his own round them and felt them grip back, hard.

"Good morning," she whispered.

"Good morrow," he whispered back, and saw her eyes fill, and her mouth tremble, and then, at last, her smile.

Old Mr Wilkins read the service in a voice like a creaking gate. Darcy heard every word of it and would not afterwards have been able to repeat one, except the ones that mattered. He said his own vows clearly, to the back of the church, because he wanted every person in it to hear him. With my body I thee worship. With all my worldly goods I thee endow. He put the ring on her finger above the sapphire and felt her hand tremble in his.

She said hers in a low clear voice, looking up at him the whole time. To love, cherish, and to obey. On the last word, her eyebrow went up, the smallest fraction, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek, in church, in front of the whole of Hertfordshire, not to laugh aloud.

"Those whom God hath joined together," said Mr Wilkins, "let no man put asunder."

And it was done. She was his wife.

He signed the register with a hand that did not feel like his own. Fitzwilliam Darcy, of Pemberley in the county of Derby. She signed beneath him in a firm quick hand, and paused, and looked at it, and then up at him with a kind of wonder.

Elizabeth Darcy.

He could not stop looking at it. Richard had to take him by the elbow and lead him out into the snow.

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The wedding breakfast went on for three hours, and Darcy could not afterwards remember eating anything.

He remembered Mrs Bennet, pink with triumph, telling Lady Lucas that she had now two daughters married and twelve thousand a year between them. He remembered Mr Bennet, very quiet, taking Elizabeth aside by the window and saying something to her that made her put her arms round his neck. He remembered Richard making a speech that was mostly about Darcy falling off a pony at the age of six, and Elizabeth laughing so hard at it that she had to be patted on the back. He remembered Mary, of all people, coming up to him with a small parcel and saying stiffly that it was a book of sermons for the journey, and then, turning scarlet, that it was not really sermons, it was Cowper, because Lizzy liked Cowper, and she hoped he would read it to her.

He remembered Elizabeth's face when she looked at him down the long table, over all their heads, as though there was nobody else in the room.

They got away at one. The Bingleys had only three miles to go. The Darcys had rather further. He had taken a house on the Sussex coast for a month, a little white place above the sea where no one knew him and nobody would call, and had meant to reach it in two easy days, stopping the night at a good inn in Surrey that he had used for years.

The snow had other ideas.

It began again soon after Barnet, soft and slow at first, great lazy flakes drifting past the carriage window. Elizabeth watched them with delight, her hand in his on the seat between them, her head on his shoulder. By three o'clock the flakes had become a curtain. By half past, the road had vanished under a smooth white blanket, the horses were labouring, and John Coachman was leaning down from the box, his hat white as a wedding cake, to shout that he would not answer for it if they went another mile.

"There's the Rose and Crown at Whetstone, sir, just ahead. Not what you're used to. But it's warm."

Darcy looked at Elizabeth. She looked back at him, and her lips twitched.

"A strange inn," she said, "in a snowstorm, on our wedding night. My mother would faint. Mrs Radcliffe would write three volumes about it."

"I had planned it very differently."

"I know you had. You planned everything. You told me about the Surrey inn in three separate letters. The one with the good sheets and the view of the river." She squeezed his hand. "Fitzwilliam. I do not care where we are."

It was the first time she had called him by his name. He felt it go through him like the first sip of brandy on a winter night.

The Rose and Crown was small, and old, and leaned a little to one side, and was the most welcome sight Darcy had ever seen. The landlady, a stout rosy woman named Mrs Pym, took one look at the bride in white sarsenet under her travelling cloak, and at the groom holding her hand as if he were afraid she would blow away, and put her fists on her hips.

"Well!" she said. "Married this morning, I'll be bound. You'll want the best room, and a fire, and your supper up there, and nobody to bother you. Leave it all to me, sir."

The best room was under the eaves, with a low beamed ceiling that Darcy had to duck under, a great old four-poster hung with faded red, and a fire already crackling in a wide stone hearth. Snow piled on the sill outside. Mrs Pym's daughter brought up a supper of roast fowl and hot bread and a jug of mulled wine, and laid it on a little table before the fire, and whisked herself away with a knowing grin.

And then the door closed, and they were alone.