Page 23 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

I enclose a copy of the letter I sent to Rosings this morning. I wanted you to see it with your own eyes, so that you never have to wonder, on any day of our life together, what I said about you when you were not in the room.

F.

The enclosure was a single sheet in his firm clear hand.

Madam,

I understand you have been to Longbourn. I understand you told Miss Elizabeth Bennet that she would disgrace me.

Let me be plain, since you value plainness. Miss Elizabeth Bennet is the best, bravest and most honest woman I have ever known. I asked her to marry me because I cannot imagine a life worth living without her, and she did me the very great honour of saying yes. There was never any engagement between myself and Anne, whom I love as a cousin and nothing more, and who has never, to my knowledge, wished for anything else.

I have been told that I must choose between my wife and my family's good opinion. I do not accept that I must. But if I am made to, I have already chosen.

Any slight to her is a slight to me. Any door closed against her is closed against me. I hope, for the sake of my mother's memory and of the affection I have always had for you, that you will not make me prove it.

I remain, Madam, your nephew,

Fitzwilliam Darcy

Elizabeth read it standing in the hall, with her mother clamouring at her elbow to know what an express could possibly contain. She read it twice. Then she folded it very small and put it inside her bodice, against her heart, where nobody could see it, and went up to her room without a word to anyone, and sat on her bed with her hand pressed flat over it for a long time.

Nobody had ever defended her like that. Not her father, who loved her best and would sooner make a joke than a stand. Not anyone. She had fought all her own battles since she was old enough to talk, with laughter mostly, because laughter was the only weapon she had. It had never once occurred to her that she might not have to.

She was not alone any more. The thought was so large and so strange that she could not quite take it in.

#

Longbourn. Christmas Day

My love,

I have never written those two words before to anyone. I find I like the look of them very much.

I will not tell you about the weather today. It is Christmas. We have been to church, and my uncle Gardiner and his family have arrived from London with four small children and a goose, and the house is so loud that I have had to come and write this in the linen cupboard. I am sitting on a pile of sheets, with a candle, like a heroine in a novel about imprisoned nuns. It is the only quiet place in Hertfordshire.

Your letter to your aunt is in my bodice. It has been there for four days. I take it out at night and read it and put it back in the morning. You will think me very foolish. I do not care.

You said I need not leave out the parts that hurt. Very well. Here they are. She frightened me. Not what she said; I have heard worse from Mrs Long. But I was afraid, for one moment in the garden, that she might be right, and that I would be a millstone round your neck in London, and that one day you would look at me across some grand drawing room and wish you had chosen differently.

And then your express came. And I read it, and I understood that you would never, ever let that happen. That you would stand between me and all of them. And I am not afraid any more.

So I will make you a promise in return, since you have made me so many. Whatever they say to us, in London or anywhere else, we will face it together. You will not have to stand in front of me. I will stand beside you. I am not very tall, but I am very determined, and I have been told I am impossible to discourage.

My father says that the second of February, which is Candlemas, is a very good day for a wedding, being neither too cold for the church nor too near Lent for my mother's breakfast. Jane and Mr Bingley agree. So do I. Will you?

Come home soon. I have kept your seat by the fire. Mary refuses to let anyone sit in it.

Your Elizabeth

His reply was one line, and it came by express again, on Twelfth Night, and her mother had to be given hartshorn.

Candlemas. Yes. Every day of my life, yes. — F.

Chapter 7: The Wedding

Longbourn. Sunday, 2nd February 1812. Candlemas.

Elizabeth woke before dawn in the bed she had shared with Jane since she was four years old, and lay very still in the dark, and listened to her sister breathing.