EPILOGUE
Four Months Later
The wedding of Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy took place on a fine morning in early spring, in the same small parish church that had witnessed Jane's marriage the autumn before, and if Mrs. Bennet's transports upon this second occasion were, if anything, rather more thoroughly indulged than the first, as her younger daughter married not only a man of good fortune but to one whose situation and consequence exceeded everything she had ever privately hoped for any of her five girls.
Elizabeth stood before the altar in a gown considerably plainer than her mother would have chosen, looking up into Darcy's face as the vows were spoken.
In that moment, she could not summon any memory of the proud, grave stranger who had once mistaken her for a servant in a room full of curtain-trimmings.
She could only summon, instead, the man who had held her steady through a carriage's violent bolt in the dark, who had confessed the whole of his heart to her in a fevered room she still could not think of without a small private shudder, and who now stood beside her promising, in the plain and ancient language the church provided, to do formally what promised to himself he would do forevermore.
As was expected, Mr. and Mrs. Darcy enjoyed a well-stocked wedding breakfast at Longbourn, where all twenty-four families of the neighborhood found their way to visit, along with Darcy’s family, with the exception of Lady Catherine and his cousin, Anne.
The couple had been invited to spend their wedding night at Netherfield before they traveled to a long, meandering journey through the Lake Distract, a desire of Elizabeth’s for a long while.
In the months leading up to their wedding, both Dary and Elizabeth found that Netherfield had settled into a happiness that suited both its master and its mistress that even the neighbourhood's most determined gossips found considerably less to occupy their attention there than the drama of the previous autumn had furnished.
Jane had grown confident in her role as mistress of a considerable household, managed her servants and her accounts and the general business of Netherfield's daily life with a competence that surprised no one so much as herself, and Bingley, watching his wife preside over her own dinner table with an ease that had been entirely absent in the anxious early weeks of their marriage, was heard to remark, more than once and with an undisguised pride that made Elizabeth laugh each time she heard it, that he did not know a finer mistress of a house in the whole of England, and did not care who disputed the point with him.
The nursery, prepared with such energetic haste before the wedding stood ready some months later to receive its first occupant, a daughter, born in the early spring with her father's easy temper and, by Mrs. Bennet's fond and frequent insistence, her mother's unmistakable eyes, and christened, after some good-humoured debate between the parents that Elizabeth privately thought had never been in any real doubt of its outcome, with her aunt Elizabeth's own name as her second.
After the Darcy's brief stay at Netherfield, they set off to the Lake Distract, first stopping for a day at their London townhouse, which Elizabeth was eager to see, before departing north.
While in London, Reeves, whose wound had healed cleanly under Dr. Ashworth's continued attention and the Thatchers' own rough good sense, returned to his position in Darcy's household, and warmly greeted the new mistress.
Reeves himself was promoted, before the year was out, to a position of considerably greater trust and considerably less exposure to highwaymen, a change he accepted with the same good humour he had shown throughout the whole ordeal, remarking only, when Darcy offered it to him, that he hoped never to have occasion to test his employer's gratitude quite so dramatically again.
Mr. Gardiner, fully recovered from the fever that had begun the whole extraordinary chain of events, took an evident pleasure in his niece's engagement, declaring to anyone who would listen that he had always thought Elizabeth the cleverest of his nieces and was gratified beyond measure to see her cleverness matched, at last, by a gentleman equal to appreciating it properly rather than merely enduring it.
Mrs. Gardiner, for her part, extracted from Elizabeth, in the course of several long and comfortable conversations that spring, a full and unhurried account of everything the earlier letters had only sketched, and pronounced herself, at the conclusion of it, entirely satisfied that her niece had chosen well, and rather better than well, whatever the strange and frightening road that had led her there.
Lady Catherine did not attend the wedding, nor did she trouble herself to send any communication beyond a single cold note of formal acknowledgment that Darcy read once, in Elizabeth's presence, and set aside without visible emotion of any kind.
"She will come round in time, or she will not," he told her, when Elizabeth asked whether the estrangement troubled him.
"I find, upon reflection, that I mind it a great deal less than I once believed I would.
I have learned, this past year, to weigh a great many things rather differently than I once did, and my aunt's good opinion, I confess, has fallen considerably in that particular reckoning. "
It was Georgiana, in the event, who mended what breach remained within the family, writing to Elizabeth with a shy warmth that blossomed, over the following months, into a genuine and easy affection between the sisters that Darcy watched develop with a quiet satisfaction he made no particular effort to conceal.
***
After their wedding tour, the Darcy’s traveled to Pemberly, where they would stay for the remainder of the Spring and Summer.
Darcy pointed out the window, eager for Elizabeth to see the great house rising before her carriage window on the first afternoon of her arrival.
It was a grand arrival, as the staff of the great estate welcomed their new mistress, arriving at a home she had been eagerly anticipating calling her new home.
"You are very quiet," Darcy observed, watching her take in the house's approach with an attention he had come to recognise, as the particular quality of her silence that generally preceded some observation he could not entirely predict.
"I am reflecting on how very strange it is that the library you once described to me, in a rainy drawing-room some lifetime ago, should now be as much mine to read in as yours; and, I confess I mean to make very thorough use of the privilege, whatever objection you may eventually raise to my rearranging your grandfather's careful ordering of the poetry. "
He laughed at Elizabeth’s pert statement, a behavior he found himself engaging in more and more as of late. "I would not dream of raising any objection at all."
She shook her head, while still staring out the window, watching as the estate become larger and larger the closer they came to it.
"You would raise a very great objection, sir, within the first week, and we should argue about it most satisfactorily for an afternoon together, and I find I am rather looking forward to the whole exercise. "
He laughed heartily again; it was a full, unguarded laugh, one he rarely permitted himself such freedom before she had taught him, argument by argument, that laughter was food for the soul. "Then I shall endeavour to object as thoroughly as the occasion deserves, purely for your satisfaction."
It became, in the weeks and months that followed, the settled and comfortable pattern of their marriage that they would disagreement over the ordering of a library, over the management of tenants, over the proper reading of a poem or the correct interpretation of a piece of news from London, conducted with all the old vigour of their earliest acquaintance and none of the old wound beneath it.
For both had learned, through danger and fever and every hard lesson the road to this happiness had exacted of them, that honest contradiction, freely given and freely received, was not the opposite of love but one of its surest foundations, a testing-ground upon which trust could be built rather than a battlefield upon which it must be won.
Hence, it will surprise no one who knew them well that marriage did nothing whatever to cure either party of the habit of disagreement; only that the quarrels of the drawing room found themselves, with a regularity that amused them both, resolved by evening in the privacy of their own chamber, in a manner that left neither one much inclined to complain of having lost the argument.
Mr. Bingley, who considered himself the true author of the match and never tired of saying so, professed himself unable to account for a husband and wife who argued so freely and yet retired, by his own observation, on remarkably good terms, to which Darcy would only reply, with the particular dryness Elizabeth had come to love best in him, that Bingley would understand the phenomenon perfectly the day he learned to lose an argument with his own wife half so pleasantly.
***
On a quiet evening some months into their marriage, watching his wife across the drawing-room at Pemberley as she read, her countenance unguarded in exactly the manner it had first undone him, that Darcy reflecting on the great privilege it was to call Elizabeth his wife.
He had believed himself, before Hertfordshire, a man of sound judgment and settled character, proof against the ordinary follies that undid weaker men, and he understood now how very nearly that settled character had cost him the one thing that made every other measure of his life worth having.
He had been proud. He had been, if he was entirely honest, exactly what she had once called him in the depths of a wood at night, exhausted and frightened and lashing out at a man who had deserved a portion of the charge.
He was arrogant in his certainty, careless of feelings that did not immediately serve his own comfort, and disdainful, selfishly, thoughtlessly disdainful, of any happiness that could not be arranged according to the design he had inherited rather than chosen for himself.
She had not merely captured his heart, though she had done that too, thoroughly and past any hope of recovery, within weeks of an acquaintance he had begun by mistaking her for a servant.
But, she had done something a great deal harder, and a great deal more necessary, she had contradicted him, patiently and then passionately and then, in the end, that had very nearly broken them both beyond mending, until the pride he had mistaken for strength lay exposed; she had helped him tear down a wall that only her particular, relentless, loving refusal to be agreeable had ever proven capable of bringing down.
Darcy did not think, watching her look up from her book and catch him watching her, that he would ever have found his own way past that wall alone.
He had needed, it turned out, exactly what he had least wanted when their acquaintance began, a woman who would not simply admire him, but would argue with him, contradict him, wound him honestly when honesty demanded it, and love him anyway, once he had finally proven himself worth the loving.
"You are staring, Mr. Darcy," Elizabeth said, without looking up from her page, though the small smile at the corner of her mouth told him she had felt his attention well before she had said anything.
"I am admiring my wife, Mrs. Darcy, which I understand to be a husband's privilege, and one I intend to exercise as frequently and as thoroughly as she will permit me."
"Then you had better come and admire me from somewhat closer quarters, sir, for I find the distance across this room is entirely too far away, and I have grown rather too accustomed to your particular manner of contradicting me from up close to settle now for anything less."
He crossed the room, and did not trouble himself, for the remainder of that evening, to argue the point at all, as he found himself very much better occupied with his wife; it was a state of occupation that continued, by mutual and entirely wordless agreement, well past the hour at which either of them had any further interest in who had been right.