Page 66

Elizabeth, for reasons she still could not entirely explain with logic, felt her breath catch. The garden, indeed the entire world, seemed to still. She looked at Mr Darcy with the full attention of a woman who has spent several months looking at a person obliquely, through management and performance and careful self-deception, and who is finding, in the directness of this moment, that looking directly is both easier and more consequential than she had imagined.

She thought about all that had transpired. The corridor and the servants’ faces and the cold dread of understanding what the situation would require. The parlour, and the proposal that had been honourable and nothing else, and her acceptance that had been purely practical. She thought about the investigation and the promenade, their almost-shared-laugh and the warmth of being understood without explanation. Her paddock circles and the sleepless hours and the painful, complicated process of learning what she actually wanted while being unable to act on it.

Elizabeth considered the housemaid, and the proof, and the choice she had made and held to. About the choice made for Jane, and how she could not truly claim that Jane’s happiness had been her only motivation. She thought about the anteroom at the assembly, and Lady Catherine’s attacks, and how much Mr Darcy’s defence of her had meant.

She knew now, with the clarity that can only come from a prolonged period of heartsickness and ill-fortune weathered quietly, that she had been choosing this, choosing Mr Darcy, for quite some time.

“Yes,” she said plainly, without the careful management of feeling she had been undertaking these past months.

Mr Darcy’s face shifted and settled in the way of something that has been held taut for a long time and has finally been permitted to release.

“Yes,” she said again, because it bore repeating and she found she did not mind. “Without reservation or the machinery. Of my own choosing, entirely.” She paused and offered him a smile. “Was that sufficient clarity, or would you like me to continue?”

“That was,” he said, allowing his full smile to arrive, “entirely sufficient.”

“There is one more thing I should like to say,” Elizabeth mused.

“Yes?”

“I love you,” she said then, plainly and openly. “I have been arriving at that conclusion for some time without the courage to use its correct name, but I can do so no longer.”

Mr Darcy’s eyes filled with a desperate emotion that Elizabeth felt flutter against her own ribcage.

He stepped toward her. She did not step back, and the distance between them, which had been the distance of propriety, then the distance of careful management and mutual misreading, was gone. Mr Darcy took her gloved hand and held it in both of his, caressing it between them. Elizabeth felt a shiver run through her at the warmth and strength of his hands and the gentleness of that caress.

“I love you with all my heart,” Mr Darcy murmured. “Dearest Elizabeth…I cannot imagine a happier fate than to spend the rest of my life with you.”

They walked on hand in hand, too happy to feel the cold. Elizabeth could see the bright window of the house, visible now as they had moved back along the path, with the drawing-room lit and Mrs Bennet still in evidence at the glass.

A little ruefully, Elizabeth thought it was not how she would have chosen to find the love of her life. Not the study, not the rumours, not the months of managing something that was always going to arrive here, regardless. And yet, though nothing she would have chosen, she would not have changed a moment of the past months, for they were months of falling in love with Mr Darcy.

They stalled a little way from the house, not wanting to part.

“We should go in,” Mr Darcy said. He still had not released her hand.

“We should,” Elizabeth agreed, but she did not move to do so.

“Perhaps not quite yet,” Mr Darcy murmured. “Elizabeth…” He caressed her cheek, a question in his eyes.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, and then nothing more, as Mr Darcy kissed her, a kiss full of promise.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The weddings were held on a Thursday in March, when the lanes had firmed from February’s muddy impassability and the hedgerows showed the first tentative hints of green. Though not yet warm, there was a softness in the air, and the light through the church windows had a hopeful quality, something that suggested that better, warmer days were coming.

Mrs Bennet had wanted St James’s. She had wanted, at various points in the preceding weeks, the church at Meryton, a grander ceremony in London, a breakfast of such ambition that it had required three separate revisions, and flowers of a quantity and variety that would have required the services of every hothouse within fifty miles. What she had received was the local church, a moderate breakfast, flowers from Netherfield’s glasshouse, and two daughters married on the same morning. By any reasonable accounting, this was considerably more than she had any right to expect, and despite all protestations to the contrary, Mrs Bennet seemed to find it entirely satisfactory.

Mr Bennet gave away both his daughters with the expression of someone who has arrived at an outcome he finds he cannot argue with. He pressed Elizabeth’s hand before they walked in and said nothing, which communicated more than most speeches would have. She pressed his hand in return, and they understood each other in the way they always had, namely completely and without the requirement of elaboration.

Half the occupants of Hertfordshire seemed to have filed into the church to witness, for all their neighbours were attending with the avidity of those who have followed a story for several months and are now attending its final chapter. The Lucases were there, and Charlotte caught Elizabeth’s eye as she came in and gave her a look of such genuine happiness that Elizabeth carried it with her up the aisle.

The ceremony proceeded with all the quiet orderliness of long tradition. Jane was married first because she was older and because Mrs Bennet had very decided opinions about the order of things. Bingley had agreed to everything anyone suggested with the uncomplicated willingness of a man whose only requirement was that the ceremony end with Jane as his wife. He stood at the front of the church looking so delighted that Elizabeth really thought he deserved every blessing, even so great a blessing as Jane.

Jane moved through the ceremony with grace, entirely at ease. Her lovely face was flushed; her eyes bright. She said her vows with clarity and steadiness, and when it was done and she turned with Mr Bingley to face the church, her expression was one of unrestrained delight.

It was exactly right.

Then the church rearranged itself, and the guests transferred their interest from one subject to another. Elizabeth felt the shift in the room’s attention, the way thirty pairs of eyes moved toward her. She had stood under the neighbourhood’s attention before, in worse circumstances and with rather less to show for it, and she had learned, over the course of a winter that had required a great deal of her, how to face it with grace, undiminished by scrutiny.