Page 75 of The Servants’ Matchmaking

Darcy stopped. He had rehearsed nothing this time. Bingley's practice proposals, delivered twice over in Darcy's own hearing, had taught him something useful after all. The danger of a sentence spoken first to the wrong person, worn smooth before it ever reached the right one.

"Elizabeth." His voice was rougher than he meant it to be, and he let it stay that way. "I offered you marriage once because a storm gave me the courage and duty gave me the shelter to hide behind. I loved you even then — but I did not trust the love enough to name it honestly, not even to myself."

She watched him without moving, without breathing, it seemed to him.

"Since then you have corrected me. Refused to flatter me, not once, not even when it would have been easier for both of us. You have trusted me with your family, and let me trust you with mine — with the one thing in this world I guard most closely. You have made me less certain of my own judgement, and far more certain of my own character than I had any right to be before I met you." His hands were not quite steady. He let them stay that way too. "I am not asking because of weather, or gossip, or gratitude, or the hopes of two servants who ought to know a great deal better than they do. I am asking because I love you — because I want to build every ordinary day of my life with you standing next to me in it. Will you marry me?"

Silence followed. It lasted no more than a single breath, but inside that breath Darcy lived an entire future all at once. The exact shape her face would make across a breakfast table for forty years running, the sound of her laugh loosed somewhere inside Pemberley's library where no one had laughed properly in a decade, the particular, specific quality of a life that had her in it at long last.

"Yes," Elizabeth said, and her chin came up, and her eyes were bright and certain and standing at the very edge of tears. The colour flooding her face had nothing whatsoever to do with the cold.

She said yes. She said yes to me.

He did not touch her. Not yet. He had promised himself, walking out here, that he would wait to be invited nearer, whatever it cost him to wait. Elizabeth understood him well enough by now to know it. She closed the distance herself and put her hand in his.

"I love you," she said, and her voice shook, just slightly, on the words. "I began by revising an opinion of you. I ended by discovering that every better opinion I have ever had of anything, since, has had your face somewhere in it."

Darcy bowed over her hand. His lips brushed her glove, and even through the kid leather he felt the small tremor running through her fingers, matching his own.

"May I kiss you?"

She glanced toward the window. Jane and Bingley had turned their backs with suspicious, perfect unity. Mr. Bennet's book had risen to cover half his face.

"Once," she said.

Darcy touched her cheek. It was cold from the wind and warm underneath, and he kissed her. The kiss was brief, careful, and nothing whatsoever like the composure he had spent a lifetime practising. Elizabeth's hand caught his lapel and held on. When they parted, she laughed against his jaw.

"Your valet will know."

"McKeever knows things before they happen. It is his single most objectionable quality."

"Sarah will claim the shawl predicted the whole thing."

"The shawl has already carried enough responsibility for one winter."

He offered his arm. Elizabeth took it, and they walked back toward the house together, unhurried, as if the day had all the time in the world to give them.

At the garden door, Mr. Bennet lowered his book at last. "Well?"

"I have accepted Mr. Darcy," Elizabeth said.

"Then I suppose I must grow accustomed to being pleased with you both at once. It will take some adjusting."

Jane embraced her sister so hard it nearly knocked the breath from her. Bingley embraced Darcy for the second time in a month, and this one surprised nobody.

Mrs. Bennet learned the news in the drawing room, and her exclamation brought Hill running from the kitchen, Mary from the pianoforte, and Kitty and Lydia thundering down the stairs two steps at a time. She kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks, declared Darcy a charming man in a voice that carried clean through to the servants' hall, and demanded to know whether Pemberley possessed a ballroom large enough to hold the whole of her side of the family at once.

"It has several rooms large enough," Darcy said gravely.

Elizabeth looked away fast, before her mother could catch the laugh threatening to break loose.

"You see," Mrs. Bennet announced to the room at large. "He is generosity itself."

"He is careful with his nouns," Elizabeth said.

Lydia wanted to know when the wedding would be. Mary wanted to know whether the affection had been properly governed by reason before it was acted upon. Kitty wanted to see the ring, which did not yet exist and would have to be imagined for the time being. Mrs. Bennet wanted to know whether Lady Catherine de Bourgh would attend, and Darcy replied, with admirable composure, that his aunt would receive the news at Rosings and wish them every happiness, from a comfortable distance.

Darcy stood in the middle of all of it. The noise, the questions, Mrs. Bennet's triumphant voice rising over everything else. And he found, to his own considerable surprise, that he had no desire whatsoever to escape. Elizabeth caught his eye across the chaos. She had chosen him with full and complete knowledge of the life he offered her and the family he would be taking on along with it, loud opinions and mud-stained hems and all.