“Thank you, sir.”
The bishop’s expression softened. “Bring her to call upon me in the spring,” he said kindly. “I should like to meet the lady who has secured you.”
“I shall.”
When Darcy stepped back into the chill London air, the document secure within his coat, he felt an unfamiliar impatience settle upon him.
The settlements were drafted. The license obtained. Nothing now stood between him and the eighteenth of December—save a handful of days.
He found that he did not much care for days.
Nothing can stop us now, my love.
∞∞∞
The first morning after Darcy departed, Elizabeth bore his absence with admirable composure.
By the second, composure had begun to fray.
It was not that she doubted him—never that. It was the roads.
The dreadful, rutted, winter-darkened roads.
Each time the wind rattled the shutters, her imagination supplied images unbidden: a wheel striking ice, a carriage overturned in a ditch, a horse shying at some unseen obstacle. Once, waking from an uneasy doze before dawn, she was certain she had heard the crack of splintering wood and sat upright in bed with her heart racing before reason returned.
“You are being foolish,” she told herself sternly.
But the mind, once supplied with calamity, proved reluctant to surrender it.
On the second afternoon, her father appeared in the drawing room with a letter in his hand and an expression of exaggerated solemnity.
“I have received correspondence,” he announced, “from a gentleman whose vocabulary surpasses even my own. I do not think I have ever seen so many four-syllable words on one page since I read Johnson’s Dictionary for amusement during your mother’s first confinement.”
Elizabeth sprang to her feet before she could stop herself.
Mr. Bennet regarded her over the top of the folded paper. “It is addressed to me, you understand.”
“Yes, Papa,” she said, attempting dignity and failing entirely.
He held her gaze for a moment longer—long enough to tease—before relenting. “Very well. I find that I am not so tyrannical a parent as to withhold news of a young man from his betrothed.”
He passed the letter to her.
Elizabeth retreated to the window, her fingers trembling slightly as she broke the seal.
Darcy’s hand was steady, the tone measured but unmistakably warm.
He informed Mr. Bennet that the common license had been secured without difficulty. He was only awaiting the solicitor’s final copies of the marriage settlements. “Several copies,” he specified, with typical thoroughness. All was proceeding as intended. He anticipated his return within a few days.
Elizabeth read the letter twice.
Then a third time.
The tightness in her chest eased. The imagined wreckage dissolved under the reassuring solidity of ink and paper. He was well. He was efficient. He was coming back.
The remainder of his absence she resolved to endure with purpose.
If she could not have him present, she would have his family.
