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She looks at me for a long moment. And then she smiles, the most beautiful smile I have ever seen on any face, crooked and wet and shining.

"Not yet," she says.

My heart stops.

Then she laughs, and reaches up, and puts her hand against my face.

"No," she says. "I am only teasing you. You deserve it. You said not yet to me under the willows." Her thumb moves along my cheekbone. "It is yes. It has been yes since Oakham Mount. It has been yes since before that, I think. Since the carriage. Since the limes." Her voice drops to almost nothing. "Yes."

I kiss her.

Only gently. Only once. Exactly as it ought to have been, the first time, if I had had any sense. My mouth on hers, very light, very still, for the space of a single breath. Her lips trembling under mine. Her hand on my cheek.

When I draw back, an inch, no more, her eyes are still closed.

And I find there is a question I have been carrying since my aunt's sickroom. Since before I knew it was a question. Since she told me the whole beautiful lie of it, and I lay there and asked her the one thing in it that seemed to belong only to her.

"Elizabeth," I say. "Did you really cry?"

She opens her eyes.

They are full. They are overflowing. The tears are running down her face, quite openly now, and she makes no move to wipe them away. She looks at me with all of it in her face, everything, nothing hidden, the way her sister Jane looked at Bingley in the drawing room at Longbourn, lit from inside like a lantern.

"Buckets," she says.

And this time it is true.

***

I do not decide to kiss her again. I do not decide anything. It simply happens, the way the bough came down under the oaks at Rosings, all at once, with no space between one moment and the next.

One moment I am looking at her wet face. The next she is in my arms.

I do not know which of us moves first. I only know that my hands are in her hair, and her hands are in mine, and her mouth is under my mouth, and it is nothing like the first kiss. It is nothing like Oakham Mount, even. On Oakham Mount there was still a lie between us, a thin glass wall, and some part of her was always standing behind it, holding something back. I did not know that then. I know it now, because the wall is gone.

There is nothing between us now at all.

She kisses me as though she has been starving. As though she has been walking for ten days through a desert, a hundred and fifty miles of it, and I am water. She kisses me with her whole heart, and I can feel it, I can feel every bit of it, the way I could not on the hill. And I kiss her back as though I have been asleep for six weeks, and have only this moment woken up.

Perhaps I have.

Two letters. Be not alarmed, madam. Be not alarmed, sir. A score of pages between us, and a dawn ride under the oaks, and a bough, and a hundred and fifty miles of bad road, and it has all come down to this. To her, in my arms, on my sister's sofa, saying yes.

Her pins are coming out. I feel them go under my fingers, one and then another, and her hair coming down over my hands, heavy and soft and smelling of rain and lavender. I do not care. Let it all come down. I want to see it. I have wanted to see it since the Netherfield ball, when she stood up with me for one dance and would not look at me, and I could not stop looking at her.

I gather her in closer. She comes. Her arms are round my neck, holding on. The sofa is very small. Somewhere under us there are knitting needles, and the strawberry pincushion, and a great deal of green worsted. I do not care about that either.

I break away only far enough to breathe. Her forehead against mine. Her breath against my mouth, quick and shaking.

"Elizabeth."

"Yes."

"I have not asked you anything."

"I know," she says. "I am saying it anyway. I am going to say it to everything you ask me for the rest of my life. Yes. I am practicing."

I laugh against her mouth. She kisses the laugh. I kiss her back, slower this time, longer, deeper, until the room goes away entirely and there is nothing but this, her, the weight of her against my chest and her fingers curled into the hair at the back of my neck and the small sound she makes in her throat when I find the place just under her ear where her pulse is beating.