Epilogue
The breakfast things had been cleared away an hour ago, and no one had moved from the table.
This was, Elizabeth had decided, the truest measure of a successful house party: when the declared purpose of a room ceased to matter and people simply remained in it because they could not think of any place else they would rather be.
The morning came through the long windows in that particular late August way, unhurried and golden, and outside, the park was at its fullest and deepest green.
It had been an impromptu sort of gathering.
She and Darcy and Georgiana had been at Pemberley all summer, following the wedding in town of Lord and Lady Saye in May.
The Season had not tempted them, for Elizabeth had been nearing her confinement and Darcy dearly wished for his son or daughter to be born at Pemberley.
And so had it been with Elizabeth safely delivering Master James Fitzwilliam Darcy at the end of June.
Now, with Elizabeth having lately been churched, the family had descended upon them, eager to meet their new relation and next heir of Pemberley.
“Lizzy, I cannot comprehend how you have so quickly regained your slender figure,” said Jane, her eyes earnest with the compliment. “It feels impossible to me that I shall ever look the same.”
Elizabeth reached over and touched her arm. “You will,” she said. “You will be just as beautiful as ever and even more so because you will be a mother.”
Jane had reached the point of her pregnancy where the heat was positively unbearable to her.
She kept her fan close and stayed near the open windows.
Bingley hovered near her chair with a vigilance that had softened, over the months, from obligation into something more genuine.
He refilled Jane’s cup before she asked.
She thanked him without uncertainty. It was, Elizabeth thought, a small and quiet thing, but it was real and she was glad for it.
The first year of the Bingley marriage had not passed without difficulty.
Jane, unable to bear the weight of her guilt, had eventually confessed to him what she and Mrs Bennet had done.
Bingley had been rightfully resentful; he had subsequently abandoned her in Hertfordshire to go to town and make merry in the desperate way of the despairing.
Darcy and Elizabeth had again been required to intervene. Elizabeth went to her sister and, seeing how she suffered, could no longer bear to be at odds with her. Holding on to her disappointment and anger, she told Darcy, had hurt her as much as anyone and so she had decided to put it all aside.
While Jane was endlessly apologetic, Mrs Bennet was unrepentant.
One conversation with her was enough to send Elizabeth to bed with a sick headache and so she had left the subject.
Mrs Bennet was what she was, and there was no changing her.
Elizabeth had not ever considered herself as having a disposition sympathetic to that of her mother’s, and this incident would do nothing but underscore that point.
Mr Bennet responded to the intelligence with a quirk of his brow and disappointment in Jane, but as the whole of the matter had been resolved without him, he saw no need to get unduly excited about it.
Darcy had gone to Bingley in town, and what he did, and how he did it, were unknown to her.
What she did know was that Bingley returned to Netherfield sheepish and contrite and determined to make his marriage felicitous.
And they had been content, or at least had the appearance of it, thereafter.
She knew not how her husband did what he had done, but it was one more thing for which she was deeply grateful to him.
Elizabeth looked down the table at him now, finishing his cup of coffee, and wondered for the millionth time how she had been so fortunate as to earn the love of such a man.
“How are you settling into Woodthorpe, Mrs Bingley?” Lady Saye enquired.
“We positively love it there,” Jane told her warmly.
“The park is nothing to Pemberley, of course, but the kitchen garden is excellent and the village is very pretty. It was vacant for some time, so it is a bit overrun with game, but Charles says that a hunting party or two this autumn ought to take care of that.”
“No need to wait for that. I will go and kill some grouse right now if you would like,” Fitzwilliam offered.
“I had the most sublime notion for a hunting party,” Saye inserted. “What if we all threw in a hundred pounds and sent our wives out there? Whichever wife bagged the most wins the pot.”
“I have no wish to shoot anything,” said Lady Saye with a little shudder. “Poor animals.”
“Lilly would live on boiled potatoes and salad,” Saye informed them all. “She came upon the tenants slaughtering a pig when she was very young and has not been able to tolerate the sight of ham since.”
“I enjoy good venison as much as anyone,” Elizabeth offered, “but I have no wish to harm the poor creatures.”
“The poor creatures would eat everything from the gardens if we did not,” Bingley told her. “Which has certainly been the case at Woodthorpe.”
Saye and Fitzwilliam had been engaged in a clandestine argument through the meal—clandestine because it was being conducted via written notes passed by a dedicated footman who was obliged to walk round the table and deliver each missive.
“Forgive me,” Saye told the boy whose name was John, “but I find I am much better able to be withering by pen than I am by speech, and it is pleasanter for the group this way.”
The argument seemed to have come to an end. With an air of victory, Saye crumpled his final note. “I have won,” he announced. “As was to be expected.”
“You cannot win an argument by declaration,” Fitzwilliam retorted indignantly.
“I won the argument because you gave in.”
“I said only that I would consider it,” Fitzwilliam shot back.
“Fitzwilliam, you have known him far longer than I,” said Lady Saye. “You must surely know you will find it easiest to agree with him. The argument is the same length either way, but you save yourself the middle portion. And in this case, we may save John’s feet the trips round the table.”
Saye reached for the last of the rolls with the serenity of a man at complete peace with himself. “My dear Lilly understands me so very well.”
“I understand you perfectly,” Lady Saye said with a little purse of her lips in her husband’s direction. “That is not the same as agreeing with you.”
“But in this case, you do agree with me, because we have already talked of it,” Saye informed her. Then, to the table at large, he said, “I have decided that my brother should propose to Miss Bentley.”
Choruses went round the table about how charming was Miss Bentley, how good such a match might be, for Miss Bentley, with all her eccentricities, was very wealthy.
Fitzwilliam greeted them all by throwing up his hands.
“Can you not all content yourselves with your own matrimonial joys?” he cried out.
“Allow me to be the black sheep for a while!”
Elizabeth met Darcy’s gaze across the table.
He had the expression she had come to love most in him, the one that only appeared in rooms like this, with people he was easy with, where nothing was required of him but to be himself.
The slight deepening at the corner of his mouth.
The light in his eyes that he had spent years keeping carefully out of his face in company and had, very gradually, over the course of the last year, stopped suppressing.
As he met her gaze, he rose and came to her. Leaning over her, he said, “Perhaps some rest would do you good.”
“I cannot abide the idea of sleeping while everyone else is enjoying themselves,” she said, with a little pout for effect.
“A short nap,” Darcy urged. “You will not miss anything but additional arguing between my cousins followed by a rousing battle of ‘what shall we do today’. Our son sleeps and so should you.”
Their son, thus far, slept in brief, decisive intervals and woke with the conviction that whatever had happened in his absence required immediate review.
The nurse they had hired declared him spirited.
Darcy had given Elizabeth a pointed look when she said so, but nevertheless was by her side for whatever she did with their son and whenever she chose to do it.
Feeling the wave of exhaustion particular to new mothers, Elizabeth rose and excused herself from her guests.
Darcy offered his escort to her bedchamber, and they left to the sounds of a new conversation beginning round the table: Saye had another outlandish suggestion for something they might bet on; Fitzwilliam told Bingley they needed to get the grouse at Woodthorpe in hand immediately; and Jane, Georgiana, and Lady Saye began their own quiet discussion.
Elizabeth paused on the landing and listened to them all.
Things were not perfect between them all; she and Jane were still mending their rift as were Bingley and Darcy, Georgiana was already anxious about coming out the following spring, and Fitzwilliam was obstinately resistant to marrying anyone the family wished for him to consider.
But nothing ever was perfect, and her life with Darcy was as close to it as ever it would be.
“What are you thinking of?” Darcy asked her as they began to climb the stairs.
“I was thinking,” she said, “that we are unimaginably blessed. And how many delightful years there are to come.”