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I look up. He is looking down at me, with the forget-me-nots in his buttonhole and the wind in his hair, and his face is very serious.

"Elizabeth," he says. "I want to marry you by June."

The larks go up out of the grass.

"I have been thinking of it all the way down," he says. "I do not want to wait. I do not see why we should. Bingley and your sister mean to marry in June, he told me so at breakfast. We might all be married together. Your mother would like that, I think. She could faint at both weddings at once and save herself the trouble." He smiles, but his eyes are still serious. "I would write to the Archbishop for a license tomorrow. I would have you at Pemberley by midsummer. I would show you the house standing upside down in the lake."

He waits.

I look up at him. At his dear, proud, honest face. At the forget-me-nots I pinned there not an hour ago, with my own hands, so that he would not forget.

I open my mouth.

And I do not answer.

Chapter Eighteen — Darcy

"June!" cries Mrs. Bennet. "A June wedding, Mr. Darcy!"

She has had it from Bingley. Everything at Longbourn is had from Bingley, sooner or later. He cannot keep a secret any better than he can keep sugar off his ham, and he came into the drawing room this morning so full of the notion of a double wedding that it fell out of him before he had even sat down.

"Both my girls! On the same day! In the same church!" Mrs. Bennet presses both hands to her bosom and sinks back on the sofa. "Oh, Mr. Darcy. Oh, my nerves. Hill! Hill! My salts! Oh, Jane, oh, Lizzy, what will Lady Lucas say? She will be green. She will be green as grass. Hill!"

"Mama," says Jane, soothingly, from one side.

"Mama," says Elizabeth, from the other, in a rather different tone.

I look at Elizabeth.

She did not answer me on the hill. I have thought about that a good deal since yesterday. I stood there at the bottom of Oakham Mount with her hand in mine and the forget-me-nots in my buttonhole, and asked her to marry me in June, and she looked up at me and opened her mouth and said nothing at all.

I did not mind. I find I do not mind. She had been kissed half breathless ten minutes before, and her hair was falling down, and her bonnet had been in a gorse bush. I should not have been able to answer a question about the date of my own birthday. And then Kitty turned round on the stile and waved, and the moment was gone, and we walked home through the fields with our gloves on, quite properly, and she held my arm a little tighter than she needed to all the way.

Now she sits beside her mother on the sofa, with her hands folded in her lap, and she does not contradict a word of it. She only looks at me across the room. And smiles.

It is a lovely smile. It is the smile I would choose, if I were asked to choose one face to look at for the rest of my life.

There is something at the back of it that I cannot quite read.

"June suits me very well, ma'am," I say. "If it suits Miss Elizabeth."

"Suits her! Of course it suits her! Lizzy, tell him it suits you."

Elizabeth looks at me for a long moment.

"It suits me," she says quietly, "very well."

Mrs. Bennet shrieks for Hill again, and faints, gracefully, onto Jane.

***

I have never been so happy in my life.

I did not know it was possible to be so happy. I did not know that a man could wake in the morning, in Bingley's second-best bedroom at Netherfield, with the sun coming in at the window and the rooks quarrelling in the elms, and feel a kind of gladness spread through him before he had even opened his eyes, simply because he knew that in an hour he would ride over to Longbourn and she would be there.

I ride over every day. I come at ten and stay until the candles are lit. Mrs. Bennet feeds me ducklings and white soup and asks my opinion on lace, of which I have none, and on the arrangement of the breakfast for the wedding, of which I have fewer. I give it anyway. I find that I like Mrs. Bennet. She is loud, and foolish, and says everything that comes into her head, and she loves her daughters with a ferocity that I suspect nobody has ever given her credit for. When she looks at Elizabeth, sometimes, when she thinks no one is watching, her face goes soft and wondering, as though she cannot quite believe this clever, difficult girl is hers.

I know the feeling.