“For what?”
“For you to stop bearing it alone.”
His arm tightened around her.
Georgiana, standing on Elizabeth’s other side, slipped her hand into hers. Elizabeth clasped it at once.
Together they looked down at the house that would be their home.
There would be work ahead. Elizabeth knew it with the certainty of one who had never believed happiness meant idleness. Tenants to know, accounts to understand, rooms to open, repairs to order, gardens to reclaim, neighbors to meet, servants to encourage, and a sister to love into confidence. There would be disagreements too, no doubt. Darcy was too decided and she too opinionated for perfect serenity. But they hadalready learned how to speak when afraid, how to forgive when wounded, and how to stand together when threatened.
That, Elizabeth thought, was worth more than symmetry.
Pemberley did not need a mistress who wanted only grandeur.
It needed affection, patience, courage, laughter, and a great deal of practical sense.
She could give it all of those.
Darcy bent his head, his voice low for her alone. “Welcome home, Elizabeth.”
Home.
The word settled over her with all the sweetness of a promise kept.
She rested her hand over his where it lay at her waist, felt Georgiana’s fingers warm in her other hand, and looked once more upon Pemberley with a heart so full it seemed impossible it could ever have known emptiness.
“Home,” she said.
And so it was.
Epilogue
Ten years later…
Elizabeth Darcy looked up from her mother’s letter and met Jane Bingley’s eyes across the breakfast table.
“Well?” Jane asked.
There were many comforts to having Jane settled not twenty miles from Pemberley, but one of the greatest was this: when Mrs. Bennet’s letters arrived, Elizabeth need not bear them alone. She could send a note, Jane would come the next morning if she could, and together they would divide their mother’s alarms into those requiring action, those requiring patience, and those requiring only a great deal of tea.
Elizabeth folded the letter slowly, though not before reading one sentence again to be sure it was truly as astonishing as she believed.
“Our mother writes that Kitty is determined to have the wedding breakfast at Lucas Lodge rather than Netherfield, for she says it is more romantic to leave her childhood home for her husband’s house, though, as Mama observes, Kitty did not precisely grow up at Lucas Lodge.”
Jane smiled. “I am so happy for her.”
“As am I. Though I confess I am happier still that Mama has found a subject to occupy her besides the dreadfulinconvenience of my refusing to let her re-paper Netherfield’s breakfast room in purple.”
Jane laughed softly.
Elizabeth rested back in her chair and looked out toward the lawn, where a small troop of children had turned an ordinary morning into an expedition. Her eldest son, Bennet Darcy, aged nine and already possessed of his father’s height in promise if not yet in fact, marched at the head with all the solemn consequence of a general. Little Anne Bingley followed him with a basket, two of Jane’s younger boys dragged sticks large enough to threaten every shrub in their path, and Elizabeth’s daughters, Fanny and Eleanor, had clearly determined that the expedition lacked poetry and were correcting the defect by singing at the tops of their voices. Georgiana’s eldest girl toddled after them under the watchful eye of a nurse.
“Bennet is leading them toward the stream again,” Jane said.
“He says he is leading them toward glory.”
“Will Darcy interfere?”
