Epilogue #3
“Oh, she recovered by the third sheet,” Kitty said. “She says Ellie’s eyes alone will do more for the family than any boy could have done.”
“Mama’s principles are never inflexible when admiration is available,” Elizabeth said.
Jane tried not to smile and failed.
Mary, who might once have corrected everyone into misery, only said, “The second chapter has more structure than the first.”
Mr. Pratt looked at her as if structure itself had become dear.
Elizabeth caught Fitzwilliam’s eye across the table. His expression was almost grave; but his eyes held morning still, and private amusement, and a warmth that crossed candles, flowers, guests, and all the proper distance between host and hostess.
She raised her glass by the smallest degree.
He understood.
The old shadows came, as they must, but thinly.
Richard spoke of Rosings because Mrs. Belwick asked after Lady Catherine with the careful appetite of a woman who wanted news but not guilt.
“My aunt,” Richard said, “is in excellent health and very poor temper, which I understand to be her preferred condition.”
“And Mrs. Wester?” Mrs. Belwick asked.
Richard’s expression shifted. Not into solemnity; he was too much himself for that. But the amusement thinned.
“Inviting people,” he said.
“To Rosings?”
“To Rosings.”
There was a small movement around the table: surprise, interest, sympathy, caution.
“And do they go?” Lydia asked.
Richard’s mouth curved. “Not often. It appears that many households are engaged whenever Sir Edmund is at liberty.”
Caroline looked down at her glass. “Society is never so busy as when it wishes to be virtuous without inconvenience.”
“Caroline,” Bingley said.
“What? I am praising society. It has discovered delicacy.”
Elizabeth saw Georgiana listening, very still.
Fitzwilliam said, “Anne writes herself. That is something.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “It is.”
Richard glanced between them and nodded once. “She writes herself. She invites herself. That is more than she did a year ago.”
“Even if no one accepts?” Mrs. Belwick asked softly.
“Especially then, perhaps,” Elizabeth said. “At least the refusal is to Sir Edmund, not to her silence.”
Later, when the conversation had turned toward cousins, duty, and the several miseries of being connected to people one could not recommend, Uncle Edward took a measured sip of wine.
“Mrs. Wickham has made trial of several relations,” he said.
Richard’s brows rose. “With success?”
“Temporary endurance in two houses. Refusal in all the useful ones.”
“Including ours?”
“Particularly ours.”
There was no triumph in it. Only closure. Mrs. Wickham had built a life from grievance and proximity; the first remained, but the second had deserted her.
Elizabeth turned the conversation before it hardened. “Mrs. Pratt, I am told Mr. Pratt’s piece this evening is very difficult.”
Mrs. Pratt looked both proud and anxious. “He says not.”
Mary said, “He lies from modesty.”
Mr. Pratt nearly dropped his fork.
The table laughed, and the old shadows thinned further.
After dinner, the company moved by degrees toward the music room.
Georgiana had arranged it beautifully. Elizabeth saw her nerves only because she knew where to look: the careful lowering of her lashes, the moment she touched the edge of the music stand, the breath taken before she sat.
Caroline turned pages for her, exact as promised and mercifully free of encouragement.
Georgiana played first, not brilliantly, not beyond all criticism, but with a clear tone and a steadiness that made Elizabeth’s throat tighten before she mastered herself.
No one displayed her. No one pressed her forward. No one claimed her effort as family credit.
She played because she had chosen to play.
Mary followed later, when the room had indeed settled.
She played Mr. Pratt’s music.
Elizabeth, who had known Mary when music was chiefly a battleground between ambition and want of taste, listened now with something near wonder.
Mary still sat too straight. She still counted visibly in one difficult passage.
But the harshness had gone out of her playing; or perhaps, Elizabeth thought, it had only ever been effort waiting to be properly heard.
When she finished, there was applause enough to satisfy any reasonable musician and not quite enough to satisfy Mrs. Bennet, had she been present.
Mary rose, colour high.
Mr. Pratt bowed to her.
Not deeply. Not theatrically. Only enough that everyone who had eyes saw the respect in it.
Elizabeth found herself smiling before she could help it.
The evening loosened after the music. Guests rearranged themselves.
Some admired Georgiana’s drawings. Some examined Kitty’s forbidden papers once Lydia discovered where they were hidden.
Caroline was heard advising Kitty that if she meant to be an authoress, she must grow accustomed to people praising the wrong sentence.
“It is better than no praise,” Lydia said.
“Not always,” Caroline replied.
Kitty looked between them. “I shall make a list.”
“Do,” Caroline said. “Lists are the only defence against admiration.”
Georgiana, passing near Elizabeth, murmured, “Miss Bingley is helping.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “It happens occasionally.”
“I think she knows exactly when she is doing it.”
“I am certain she does.”
A little before ten, Eleanor came down.
Elizabeth had not ordered it. She suspected Kitty. Or Lydia. Or possibly both, assisted by Mrs. Doddridge, who would deny everything and yet had been known to believe that babies improved rooms more reliably than flowers.
The nursery maid carried Eleanor to the doorway, but Eleanor, seeing Elizabeth, leaned forward with such decided expectation that the matter was settled.
“My love,” Elizabeth said, taking her. “You were meant to be asleep.”
Eleanor answered by seizing her pearls.
“She has taste,” Caroline observed.
“She has appetite,” said Fitzwilliam, coming to Elizabeth’s side.
Eleanor turned at once toward his voice and reached for him next. He took her with an ease that still did something disconcerting to Elizabeth’s composure.
She was only Eleanor: sturdy, curious, pearl-stealing, ribbon-chewing, and offended when admiration did not include immediate movement.
Bingley declared her the finest child in England.
Jane said, “Charles.”
“What? She is.”
Richard said, “I have seen several children and am prepared to support the claim.”
Uncle Edward inspected Eleanor gravely. “Elizabeth’s eyes.”
“Darcy hair,” Richard said.
“And Darcy nose,” Bingley added, with the cheerfulness of a man who believed every infant feature a compliment.
Fitzwilliam looked down at his daughter. “Elizabeth’s command.”
Eleanor struck his chin with one open hand.
“Demonstrated,” said Uncle Edward.
Lydia came near, bright-eyed. “Lizzy, Kitty must make one with Ellie for the Gardiner children.”
“No,” Kitty said at once. “She cannot be a horse.”
“She need not be a horse. She may be the baby who commands them.”
Kitty considered.
Elizabeth said, “Do not put my daughter in charge of a stable before she can stand.”
“She already commands everyone else,” Lydia said.
This was difficult to dispute.
Eleanor laughed then, for no reason anyone could see.
It was not the first time she had laughed. It was not even a remarkable laugh by nursery standards. But it rang in the drawing room, over silk and silver, over old friends and new alliances, over sisters and cousins and careful servants, and Elizabeth felt the whole house receive it.
For a moment, she saw it all: Mary and Mr. Pratt near the music, heads bent over a passage he was explaining and she was correcting; Jane seated with Bingley beside her, his hand hovering near her shawl; Lydia under Mrs. Gardiner’s eye but not crushed by it; Kitty defending the dignity of fictional horses; Georgiana speaking to Mrs. Albright at the door with quiet assurance.
And Fitzwilliam, holding their daughter, watching Elizabeth as if all the noise had only made her easier to find.
A bell rang somewhere above stairs.
Elizabeth turned by habit, but Georgiana had already heard it. Mrs. Albright had already appeared. The nursery maid was already moving. The house answered before Elizabeth had done more than lift her head.
Fitzwilliam stepped nearer and shifted Eleanor so that one small hand brushed Elizabeth’s sleeve.
“Too much?” he asked quietly.
Elizabeth looked around the room.
At Portman Square opened wide. At the candles burning steadily.
At the sisters she had kept and the friends she had chosen.
At the child who had made no one less themselves by being loved.
At the husband who had once come to this house as a man stripped of name and standing, and now stood within it neither guest nor rescued creature, but beloved, inconvenient, indispensable master of every private disorder she had no wish to cure.
“No,” she said. “Not nearly enough.”
His smile began slowly.
Eleanor laughed because Elizabeth did, and the room turned toward them, amused and alive. For one wild instant Portman Square seemed less like a house reopened than a creature woken from a long, disciplined sleep and delighted by the noise.
Elizabeth took Fitzwilliam’s free hand.
Outside, September darkened the square. Within, music lay open on the piano, Kitty’s paper horses waited upstairs, the bell had been answered, and the house kept all of them.
Not quietly.
Not moderately.
Exactly as it ought.