Page 95 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"You play badly?"

"Dreadfully. Ask Fitzwilliam. He says I play like a woman who would rather be out walking."

Lady Matlock made a sound that might, in anybody else, have been a laugh. Then her face crumpled again, and she put her hand over her eyes.

"I do not know how to ask your pardon," she said. "I have never had to. I do not know the words."

Elizabeth looked at her: at the proud grey head bowed, and the thin hand over the swollen eyes, and the knuckles white in her lap. She thought of her own mother, who had never once in her life asked anybody's pardon for anything. She thought of Lady Catherine in the frozen garden at Longbourn, saying I am most seriously displeased, and at the top of the steps last night, touching Anne's cheek.

She put out her hand, and laid it over the countess's clenched ones in her lap.

"Then do not ask it, ma'am," she said. "There is no need. You were deceived by somebody you loved, who knew exactly how to deceive you. So was Georgiana. So was Caroline Bingley. So, very nearly, was I; I thought she was my only friend in London." She pressed the cold hands. "I will not hold it against you. I only ask one thing."

Lady Matlock lowered her hand from her eyes.

"What?"

"That you forgive Fitzwilliam," said Elizabeth. "For not telling you sooner, in December. He was afraid. Not of you. Of losing me. He thought, if he told you before it was settled, that you and my lord would find some way to part us. And I think he may have been right." She held the pale eyes steadily. "But he loves you. He went to see you alone in March, because I asked him to, and came back quieter than I have ever seen him. He has minded your coldness more than anybody's in London. More than White's, or the Post, or Lady Pembury. I know. I have watched him mind it."

The countess looked at her for a very long time.

Then she turned her hands over, under Elizabeth's, and held on.

"Theodosia told me," she said slowly, "that he had married a scheming little nobody who would ruin him. I see now that she was wrong about everything. But she was most wrong about that." Her grip tightened. "He has married a woman who would stand in a path in front of George Wickham. And who would sit here on this sofa and forgive me in the same breath."

"I only stood in the path, ma'am. Mrs Reynolds had the key."

And this time, Lady Matlock did laugh. It was small and cracked and wet, but it was a laugh.

"The Birthday Drawing Room," she said, when she could speak. "On the fourth of June. You will be presented on your marriage, Elizabeth. And Georgiana with you. And I will stand beside you both, in front of the Queen and the whole of London, and anybody who wishes to cut you will have to cut me too." She drew herself up. "We shall see how many of them dare."

It was the first time the countess had ever called her by her name.

#

Lord Matlock's study was smaller than the library and a great deal more comfortable, and it smelt of cigars and old leather and the port his uncle was not supposed to drink before dinner. Darcy stood by the window. His uncle sat at his desk with his big hands spread flat on the blotter, looking down at them. Richard leant against the bookcase. Lady Catherine sat bolt upright in the only good chair, where nobody had dared to stop her sitting.

For a long time nobody said anything.

Then Lord Matlock cleared his throat, and did not look up.

"I was wrong," he said.

Darcy turned from the window.

"About the girl." His uncle's voice was gruff and low and very uncomfortable, the voice of a man who had not said those words aloud in perhaps thirty years. "About your wife. I thought you had been caught. Some pretty nobody with an eye to the main chance and a mother who could count. I have seen it happen to a dozen young fools. I thought, he will regret it in a year, and I told you so, in December, in the library. And then all this in the papers, and I thought, there, you see." He turned his big hands over on the blotter and looked at the palms. "And all the while it was Clara's girl. In my house. At my table. Eating my dinners. And I never saw it."

"Neither did I, sir."

"No. Well." Lord Matlock looked up at last. His heavy handsome face was flushed, and his eyes were not quite steady. "Your wife saw it. Richard tells me she saw it in March, and would not say so for fear of hurting Audrey and the child. That she kept her counsel and stood in the path and let Georgiana bring her the letter. That she went a hundred and fifty miles into the country to take the child out of harm's way, and caught Wickham in an ice house with a dozen servants and an invalid." He shook his head slowly. "I have sat in the Lords for thirty years with men who could not have managed half so well."

"She is remarkable," said Darcy.

"She is." His uncle looked at him. "And so, it seems, are you. Richard says you had your father's pistols out and put them away again because she asked you. And rode from London to Pemberley in a day and a night. And then did not hang Wickham when you might have." He paused. "Your father would have been proud of you, Fitzwilliam. I am."

Darcy found that he could not answer. He nodded, once.

Lord Matlock stood up, heavily, and came round the desk, and held out his hand. Darcy took it. His uncle's grip was hard and warm, and he held on for rather longer than was usual, and then let go, and cleared his throat very loudly, and went to the side table and poured four glasses of port, although it was not yet noon, and nobody stopped him.