Page 23 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

They descended the hill as the first drops fell. By the time they reached the lane, the sky had opened properly, a hard, driving rain that soaked them both in minutes. Darcy offered his coat. She refused it. They walked in the rain with water streaming down their faces and their clothes clinging to their bodies, and neither of them suggested hurrying, and the rain felt like absolution, or its approximation, and Elizabeth discovered that she was laughing.

She couldn't say why. The laugh came out of her the way a sob might, involuntary, surprising, beyond her control, and once it started she could not stop it. She was soaking wet and walking through a rainstorm beside a man who had blackmailed her into marriage and she was laughing, and the absurdity of it was so complete, so perfectly calibrated to the general insanity of her life, that laughter was the only honest response available.

Darcy looked at her. His hat had blown off somewhere on the descent and he had not bothered to retrieve it. His hair was plastered to his forehead. His coat was dark with water. And on his face, on his careful, controlled, immaculately managed face, was an expression of pure bewilderment that was so far from his usual control it might have belonged to a different man.

"You're laughing," he said. As though the observation required verbal confirmation.

"I'm aware."

"At what?"

"At everything." She wiped rain from her eyes. "At this. At us. At the fact that I am standing in a rainstorm with a man I cannot decide whether to blame or to thank, and I am happier than I have been in weeks."

He stared at her. The rain fell. Then his mouth curved beyond its usual restrained amusement into a full, unguarded smile that transformed his face before he caught it and put it away.

But she had seen it. And she would remember it.

They walked home through the rain, not touching, not speaking, dripping a shared trail of water along the muddy lane, and the silence between them was, for the first time, not weighted or watchful or full of the things they could not say. It was simply silence. Two people walking in the rain.

At Longbourn's gate he stopped. "Tomorrow we begin the wedding preparations in earnest."

"I know."

"Three days, Elizabeth."

"I can count, Fitzwilliam."

His real name, offered voluntarily. The surprise on his face became evidence she would remember: the man she was marrying was more than the monster she needed him to be.

She went inside. She did not look back.

She did not need to. She could feel his gaze on her back, steady as a hand.

CHAPTER 9

ELIZABETH

Three days later, the morning came. No objection. No rescue. No miracle Elizabeth had allowed herself to hope for. It arrived too soon and too bright.

Elizabeth Bennet. For the last time.

The marriage settlements had been signed the previous week in her father's library: Darcy's solicitor, Mr. Bennet's silence, the scratch of pens on paper that transferred a woman's future from one man's keeping to another's. That had been merely businesslike. Today would make the bargain permanent.

The ceremony was small. Family and a few close intimates only, as Darcy had specified. "Specified" was a polite word for what he had done. He had informed the vicar, instructed the servants, and arranged every detail of the morning with the military thoroughness of a man planning a campaign that happened to involve flowers.

The church smelled of beeswax and damp stone and the hothouse roses someone, Mrs. Bennet, probably, had arranged along the aisle, their scent too sweet for the season. Elizabeth wore cream silk. Jane had pinned her hair. The bruises were gone, finally, the last yellow shadow absorbed back into her skin like it had never existed, like Collins's fists had been something she dreamed. She couldn't dream it away. But the evidence, at least, had been erased, and the woman who walked up the aisle of Longbourn church looked, to everyone present, like a bride and not a prisoner.

Darcy stood at the altar in dark blue. He watched her approach with his face set, eyes bright, and hands held carefully at his sides. His attention fixed her as the only person in the church who mattered and the one he had decided to acquire.

Her father walked her to the altar. His arm beneath her hand was rigid, the muscles locked, and when the vicar asked Who giveth this woman? Mr. Bennet said "I do" in a voice so flat it might have been reading an inventory. He placed Elizabeth's hand in Darcy's and released it, a gesture that should have been ceremonial but felt, to Elizabeth, like the severing of a rope.

Darcy took her hand. His fingers closed around hers with a pressure that communicated more than the words the vicar was about to speak, a physical claim, witnessed, sanctified, legally binding.

The vows were spoken. She had practised I will in front of her bedroom mirror at Longbourn the previous night until the words lost their meaning and became mere sounds, syllables emptied of consent, mechanical as a clock's tick. She said them. She meant nothing by them. The church heard a promise. Elizabeth heard a transaction.

The ring. Cold gold on warm skin. Darcy's hands were steady. Hers were not.

"With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow."