Page 38 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

#

Pembury House, Berkeley Square. Friday, 20th March

She wore the white silk with the silver net that Mrs Dawes had sent out for in a hurry, and the sapphire at her throat, and Lady Matlock's cashmere shawl, and she walked up Lady Pembury's red-carpeted stairs on her husband's arm with her head high and her heart hammering under her bodice like a trapped bird.

It began on the stairs.

There was a crush, as there always was at the Pemburys'. People stood three deep on every step, waiting to be announced. And as the Darcys came up, Elizabeth watched the crowd in front of them part. Not much. Not rudely. Only a small shifting of shoulders, a gathering-in of skirts, as though the people ahead had all at once decided to talk to someone on the other side. A space opened round them on the stair, a foot wide, like the space round a stone in a stream.

She felt Darcy's arm go rigid under her hand.

"Chin up," she murmured, not moving her lips.

"It is up."

"Higher. You look as though you want to kill someone."

"I do."

"Later," said Elizabeth.

Lady Pembury received them at the top of the stairs. She was a small plump woman in purple with a great many diamonds, and she had plainly spent the day in an agony of indecision, and had plainly not decided. She gave Darcy two fingers and a smile that did not reach her eyes, and gave Elizabeth one finger and no smile at all, and turned at once, with a great show of warmth, to the people behind them.

They were in.

The ballroom was long and gold and very hot, lit by three chandeliers, and smelt of hothouse lilies and candle wax and too many people. The musicians were tuning in the gallery. Elizabeth walked in on Darcy's arm and felt the room notice them. It was like walking into cold water. The sound did not stop, but it changed: a ripple going out from the door, heads turning, fans lifting, a murmur beneath the chatter like the undertow beneath a wave.

She heard it, in pieces, as they moved down the room.

"—the very one—"

"—fifty guineas, my dear, can you conceive—"

"—an attorney's granddaughter, I heard, and an uncle who sells—"

"—I should not have thought him capable of such a—"

"—well, she has certainly got the better of the bargain—"

Laughter. A tall woman in green turned her whole back on them, slowly and deliberately, as they passed. Another took her daughter by the elbow and steered her away, as though Elizabeth were infectious. Mrs Drummond-Burrell, who had welcomed her at her own rout only a week before with every appearance of pleasure, looked straight through her, and then straight past her, and then turned to her neighbour and said something that made them both glance back.

Elizabeth smiled. She smiled at the tall woman's back, and at the retreating daughter, and at Mrs Drummond-Burrell's profile, and at everyone who looked at her, pleasantly, calmly, as though she had not heard a word. She had grown up with Mrs Long and Lady Lucas. She had been laughed at in Meryton for walking three miles in the mud. She was not going to be made to cry at Lady Pembury's.

But her hand, on her husband's arm, had begun to shake, and she could not stop it.

He felt it. She knew he felt it, because his other hand came across, quite openly, in front of the whole room, and covered hers, and held it still.

"Mrs Darcy!"

It was a bluff hoarse voice, and it came from a sofa by the wall, and Elizabeth turned to it as a sailor turns to a lighthouse. The old admiral from the dinner, Sir Hugh Ferrers, with his wooden leg and his face like a walnut, was struggling to his feet and holding out both his hands.

"Mrs Darcy, the finest eyes in London. I have been waiting for you this hour past. Come and sit by me. Nobody here has anything sensible to say, and you shall tell me all about Hertfordshire." He took her hand, and kissed it, very loudly, and glared round at the nearest group of staring ladies. "And I shall tell you, madam, in confidence, which of these ladies I knew when they were girls, and what they got up to at Bath in the year 'eighty-nine."

There was a sudden scattering in the nearest group of staring ladies.

Elizabeth laughed, and it was very nearly a sob, and she sat down beside the old man and let him tell her about Bath. She did not trust herself to look at her husband. When at last she did, he was standing a little apart, watching her with an expression she could not read, and the musicians in the gallery were striking up the first set.

#