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"I do not remember this morning."

"No, sir." Another pause, smaller still. "I wish you joy, sir."

"Thank you, Lowe."

He bows, and gathers up the ruined coat, and goes. I find I cannot quite read the back of him either.

"Fitzwilliam," I say. "Is Miss Bennet still below?"

"She is."

"Then why the devil is she still below?"

He opens his mouth and shuts it again, a thing he has done more this morning than in the whole of our acquaintance.

"She is—composing herself," he says.

"She has been composing herself for an hour. She will be composed into a statue. Fetch her, would you? Before our aunt finds her first."

He goes. I lie in the big blue bed with my head pounding and my heart pounding louder, and I think: I am going to be married to Elizabeth Bennet.

There are a great many things I cannot recall. That is not one of them. That, I know in my bones.

***

She comes in behind Fitzwilliam, and stops just inside the door.

She has not changed her gown. There is mud dried pale across the hem, and a long smear of it on one sleeve, and a leaf caught in her hair above her left ear. Her face is white. Her eyes are red at the rims. She has been crying, and she has been trying to hide it, and she has failed.

I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

"Miss Bennet," I say.

"Mr. Darcy."

Her voice is very low. She does not come any closer.

"Will you not sit?" I say. "Fitzwilliam, a chair. Not that one, it has a broken spring, our aunt keeps it for the curate. That one."

Fitzwilliam brings the chair. Miss Bennet sits on the very edge of it, as though it might bolt. Her hands are folded tight in her lap.

"You have been crying," I say.

She hesitates. "A little."

"On my account?"

Something passes over her face, quick as a cloud shadow on a hillside. "Entirely on your account," she says.

I do not know why that should make Fitzwilliam turn away to the window. It makes me want to get up out of this bed, and I try, and the room swings sideways.

"Do not," she says sharply, and her hand comes out and catches my wrist, and the room swings back.

We both look at her hand on my wrist.

She begins to take it away. I turn my hand over and take hold of hers before she can.

Her fingers are cold. She was in the lane in the dawn wet, and then running, and then sitting in my aunt's breakfast parlor, which has not been warm since the reign of Queen Anne. I fold her hand in both of mine.