Chapter 6
Elizabeth reached up and adjusted George’s cravat. “You look more like your grandfather Bennet every day,” she commented, eyes misted.
He flashed a wide, gleaming smile. Blessed with all his late father’s charm and facility with words, at the age of seven-and-twenty George Wickham-Darcy was a young barrister on the rise, his future ascension to the bench almost preordained by his own qualities and his connexions to the Darcy, Nolton, and Fitzwilliam families.
“I am told he was accounted a handsome fellow in his time.”
“Fishing for compliments?” she enquired archly. Smoothing the lapels of his morning coat, she stepped back and took in the elegant appearance he presented. With a pleased smile, she allowed, “You would deserve them. You look absolutely perfect. Are you ready?”
“More than ready,” he agreed fervently. “The season of engagement has many charms, but to be a husband is all I want now. I hope to be as good at it as Papa is,” he continued, aiming a grin at the silently smiling man at Elizabeth’s side.
“Millie deserves no less, and the general will have my hide if I fail.”
“You will not fail,” she reassured him. “You have had the best of examples in your papa and uncles. Do you know it is twenty years to the day since you came to us?”
“Of course I do,” he replied with a curious smile. “I requested this date particularly—I know it to be an auspicious day on which to begin a new life.”
He bent and kissed her cheek before turning to her right to clasp Darcy’s hand and receive his quiet expression of pride. Beaming, he then strode jauntily up the aisle to the front of the church, where William waited to attend him and the rector smiled and shook his head over such an eager groom.
Darcy’s hand settled warmly on the small of Elizabeth’s back while the other extended a handkerchief.
With a soft laugh, she took it and put it to good use.
This was not the first wedding among their children, but unlike Jane’s marriage three years previously, she thought George’s would mark the beginning of a cluster of such bittersweet occasions.
Charlotte was being most assiduously courted by a young man of whom she appeared entirely enamoured, though she was quite close-lipped about the whole business; and despite William’s repeated vow that he would not be coaxed to the altar before the age of five-and-thirty, she and Darcy agreed that Lady Petunia Hatherleigh was well on her way to changing his mind.
“I know,” Darcy remarked, fondly watching their eldest boys joke with each other about something, “that we have fretted more over him than the others, but I tell you this—he is a better man than I was at his age, and now that he is to have an excellent wife to see to any improvements we have failed to make, we need worry ourselves no longer.”
She laughed, tucking his handkerchief into her reticule. “You did not need very much improvement.”
“Oh, I rather think I did. It is only that you are so good at it, it must have seemed a trifling labour,” he replied with that wide, earnest smile that still made her heart quicken after all these years.
“Let us agree that we have improved each other, and hope that George and Millie may do likewise.”
He raised her hand to his lips and bestowed a lingering kiss upon the back. “I cannot think of a finer blessing on any marriage than that it should be like ours.”
Frances Reynolds’s lifelong obsession with Doctor Who, which began at age seven, opened the door to a deep appreciation for all things British—from tea and scones to Dickens and Austen.
She lives slightly south of Canada with her spouse and a small herd of cats in a century-old house that has been grudgingly standing since 1916.