Page 77 of The Servants’ Matchmaking

"Mrs. Nicholls tells me you have chosen the lady's-maid training for certain."

"Yes, ma'am."

The new address startled them both, and Sarah's eyes went wide for just a second.

"When your training is finished, you may write to me through Mrs. Nicholls, if you would like to apply for a place at Pemberley. No promise is asked of you now. Choose whatever serves your own future best."

Sarah's eyes filled fast. "Thank you, ma'am."

"And Sarah."

"Yes?"

"No arranging the journey."

"Never, ma'am."

McKeever coughed, somewhere behind Darcy's shoulder, with suspicious timing.

Elizabeth turned her gaze on him without missing a beat. "That prohibition includes you, Mr. McKeever."

"I have only ensured the carriage is sound, ma'am."

"A suspiciously ordinary duty, for you."

Darcy handed his wife up into the carriage, and sat opposite her until Longbourn had shrunk out of sight behind the trees. Then he moved to sit beside her instead, close enough that their shoulders touched.

"Mrs. Darcy," he said, testing the sound of it.

"You are enjoying that far too much."

"Immoderately."

The word carried them both straight back to a rain-soaked pavilion, wet and uncertain, before either of them had learned how to ask for what they wanted.

Elizabeth put her hand in his, and this time neither of them let go.

"Fitzwilliam."

This time, no answer required correcting. This time, everything he felt and everything he said were, at long last, exactly the same thing.

EPILOGUE

EIGHT MONTHS LATER

Elizabeth

Pemberley's library held too many books for even Darcy to have read every one of them. Elizabeth had made the claim, laughing, within her first week as its mistress, and she had every intention of proving it.

She had tested it properly during the first month of marriage, pulling volumes down from the highest shelves, the least inviting bindings, and at last, in triumph, a French treatise on land drainage that looked as though it had not been opened since the Flood. Darcy knew every one of them by heart. The drainage treatise defeated him only because it had been mis-shelved after his father's death and he had genuinely never seen it before.

"That is not defeat," he had said, with wounded dignity.

"It is retreat, with the papers to prove it."

Marriage had not made him any less proud. It had made his pride considerably easier to tease, because neither of them mistook the teasing for distance anymore — it was, if anything, the surest sign of how close they had become.

On a wet September morning, rain streaking the tall windows, Elizabeth found the old Netherfield copy of Cowper tucked behind a row of newer poetry. McKeever had shelved it among Darcy's own books without a word of comment to anyone. A strip of blue silk still marked the same cheerful passage Sarah had once chosen, months ago now, for Jane's sickroom.