Page 86 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

The night porter was there, and James with a blunderbuss still under his arm, and two housemaids in their nightcaps, and the cook in her wrapper, and Hannah weeping, and the head groom, and a boy from the stables, and, at the foot of the staircase, very small and very upright in a black dressing gown with her grey hair in a plait, Mrs Reynolds.

They all stopped talking when he came in. They all looked at him: at the dust and the torn coat and the unshaven jaw, and at the mistress in his arms in her soaking nightgown with her hair all down. Nobody said a word.

Then, from the gallery above, there was a cry, and a clatter of feet on the stairs, and Georgiana came flying down them two at a time in her nightgown, exactly as she had come flying down the stairs at Darcy House on the day Elizabeth first arrived there. She did not stop at the bottom. She ran straight across the hall and threw her arms round both of them at once, her brother and her sister together, and hung on.

"You came," she was saying, into his torn coat. "You came, you came. I knew you would. Elizabeth said you could not possibly, not for days, but I knew."

He got one arm free, somehow, without dropping his wife, and put it round his sister, and held her too. He could not speak. He found he did not need to.

"She did not go," said Elizabeth softly, against his neck. "Tell her. She will want to hear you say it."

He looked down at his sister's fair head pressed against his chest.

"Georgiana," he said. His voice was hoarse. "Elizabeth tells me that a letter came. In Theo's hand. And that you brought it to her."

Georgiana lifted her face. It was wet, and very pink, and fierce.

"I nearly did not," she said. "I sat on the floor with it for half an hour. I wanted so much to go."

"But you did not."

"No." Her chin wobbled, and steadied. "I thought: Elizabeth would bring it to someone. And so I did."

Darcy looked at his little sister, who a year ago had gone down onto the sands at Ramsgate with a man who meant to ruin her, and told nobody. He found that his eyes had filled again, and that he did not care in the least who in the hall saw it.

"I have never been so proud of anyone in my life," he said. "Except one."

A dry voice spoke from the gallery.

"I suppose," said Anne de Bourgh, "that nobody is going to be proud of me."

She was leaning on the balustrade at the top of the stairs, in her nightcap and four shawls, holding a candle, looking down at them all with her crooked smile. She was still a little hoarse.

"I screamed," she said. "I have never screamed before. I believe I frightened every rook in Derbyshire. I have lost my voice. And I did it all in borrowed clothes."

Darcy looked up at his thin, pale, invalid cousin, who had never been allowed out of a carriage, and who had sat on a bench in the dusk and waited for George Wickham to take her by the arm. And he began, quite helplessly, to laugh.

"Anne," he said. "Your mother is going to have an apoplexy."

"I know," said Anne, with deep satisfaction. "I am going to write and tell her myself."

It was Mrs Reynolds, in the end, who took charge. She came forward across the hall in her black dressing gown and looked her master up and down, the way she had looked at him when he was a boy coming in muddy from the lake, and her mouth went very thin.

"Master Fitzwilliam," she said. "You are not fit to be seen. You have been in the saddle all night, and you are dropping where you stand, and you are holding your wife in a wet nightgown in the front hall in front of the whole household. She will take a chill." She turned. "Hannah, stop crying and have hot water carried up to the mistress's rooms. And to the master's. A great deal of it. And a fire in both." She turned back to Darcy, and her face changed, just for a moment, and he saw that her old eyes were wet too. "The man in the ice house will keep. He is not going anywhere. I have the key in my pocket. You may deal with him when you have slept."

"Mrs Reynolds—"

"Upstairs, sir."

He went. He carried his wife up the great staircase of Pemberley in the bright morning, with the sun pouring in through the tall windows on the landing and turning the dust on his coat to gold, and his sister running up beside him holding on to his sleeve, and his cousin standing aside at the top with her candle guttering in the daylight, grinning. At the turn of the stair, he glanced back down into the hall.

They were all still standing there, the whole of Pemberley, looking up at him. And as he looked, the old cook put her apron to her eyes, and the head groom took off his cap, and somebody, he never knew who, began to clap. Then they were all clapping, in the great hall, in their nightcaps and shirtsleeves, the housemaids and the stable boy and James with his blunderbuss.

He did not know what they were clapping. Him, perhaps, for coming. Her, for standing in the path. Georgiana, for bringing the letter. Anne, for the scream. All of them, for being alive and together in the morning.

Elizabeth, in his arms, turned her head and looked down at them all, and then up at him, and smiled, the slow private smile that was only for him.

"Welcome home, Mr Darcy," she said.