Chapter Fourteen
Mamma was thrown into a whirlwind of nerves and bliss. She accepted Papa’s suggestion of allowing Christmas dinner to double as a wedding celebration and spent many blissful hours adding courses she was sure a man of Mr. Darcy’s status would expect.
Mr. Darcy had advocated for marrying the very day after he had received Papa’s permission, but Papa had insisted that they spend the week remaining on the license talking to one another about their marriage rather than the wedding. “It will last longer,” he had commented wryly.
Therefore, on each of the five remaining days before their wedding, Mr. Darcy came to Longbourn to share in their breakfast and remain until after dinner.
Papa had given orders that they could walk out alone so long as they remained within sight of the house, and that they could sit alone in the back parlour with the door open.
Elizabeth found herself grateful for her father’s insistence.
It was only five days, but how much they had to say to one another!
On the first day, Elizabeth offered Mr. Darcy a confession. “I was so afraid that your aunt had convinced you to stay away.”
His bemused expression was almost comical. “I beg your pardon?”
“She came to see me. Did she not tell you?”
He shook his head slowly, his dark eyes turning stormy.
“Lady Catherine informed me very directly that she did not approve of you proposing to me, and as you had done no such thing, I did not know what to say.”
“So you said nothing? Forgive me, Elizabeth, but that does not sound like you.”
She glanced away. “I said many things. She pressed me not to accept you even should you ask, and that request I refused.”
Mr. Darcy rubbed the back of his neck. “I would not see my aunt when she came to London. Perhaps if I had, I might have spared us a few miserable months.”
“It does not matter now,” she assured him. “For despite everything, we shall soon be wed.”
He pressed her hand in his.
On the second day, Mr. Darcy explained that he had requested the marriage license before he brought Bingley back to Hertfordshire.
When she saw the brief flash of melancholy cross his face, she regaled him with stories of her youth at Longbourn.
Her escapades while visiting with the Gardiners in London, her taste in books—biographies over histories, comedies over tragedies—and how she had always wanted to learn to play the harp, but the instrument was too expensive to purchase when they already had a pianoforte—anything to make him smile.
Mr. Darcy asked her a hundred questions and listened carefully to every answer.
Over the remaining days, while she continued to amuse him with tales of her irreverent ways, Mr. Darcy told her stories about his own childhood, how he and Colonel Fitzwilliam had spent much of their summers together at Pemberley, how he had run from his home to Lambton and ridden to the far edges of his father’s property, what he recalled from the time when both his parents lived, how his father had changed and become a much more solemn man after his wife died.
How the weight of his responsibilities had almost crushed him when, at twenty-two, he had found himself helping to bear his father’s casket to the church yard.
“It was too soon,” he said softly. “I was not ready.”
“I cannot imagine you ever would be, but you were so young.”
“My father never allowed either Georgiana or me to doubt that he loved us,” Mr. Darcy told her quietly, “but he treated Wickham in the same way, and knowing that Wickham in no way deserved it, but feeling unable to disappoint my father by revealing that man’s transgressions . . . that was difficult.”
Elizabeth squeezed his hand. “I cannot tell you how I regret what I said to you in regard to him.”
“It is no matter, Elizabeth,” he told her. “I am not that man any longer. Your reproofs soon taught me that I wanted to be a better one, and I hope that I have succeeded in that.” He stroked her cheek with the back of one hand. “Not that my work there is done.”
“You are not the only one who felt the need to change,” Elizabeth replied, leaning into his touch. “I am a different woman than the one who rejected you out of hand. Wiser, I hope. Less gullible, certainly, and I hope also less prejudiced.”
“Elizabeth,” he asked haltingly, “why did you keep the letter I gave you in Kent? It was certainly not kind.”
“I did not want to believe it, at first,” she admitted. “It was so dismissive of Jane and hinted that I held some sort of infatuation for Mr. Wickham.”
He shut his eyes and shook his head.
“Please look at me,” Elizabeth said.
Mr. Darcy did as she asked.
“It was not very long, though, before I saw how foolish I had been. I needed to keep that letter to remind myself how easily I had been led and how I had allowed my prejudice against you to blind me to certain truths. It was a lesson I sorely needed. And your adieu was kindness itself.”
“Will you burn it now?”
“Must I?”
“Those words haunt me nearly as much as the proposal in Kent. Knowing that they still exist is painful to me.”
“I suppose I do not need it anymore, for I have a more recent one. One I like a great deal better.”
Darcy brushed her forehead with his lips. It was not the first time he had done so, and the intimacy of it no longer surprised her but made her happy.
His voice was low and impossibly tender. “I promise I shall write you many more like the second if only you will burn the first.”
Elizabeth leaned her head on his shoulder. “Very well. If it bothers you that much, I shall burn the first letter.”
He released a deep, bone-rattling sigh, and Elizabeth’s heart ached for him. “I shall fetch it now, and we will burn it together.”
“Thank you, love” was all he said.
Elizabeth examined herself in the glass.
The blue silk dress she had meant to wear to dinner at Pemberley suited her very well indeed as a wedding gown.
All it had required was a bit of the silk Mr. Darcy had gifted Jane on the occasion of her marriage so that Kerr could add long sleeves.
Kerr had come to Longbourn last night in order to prepare Elizabeth for the wedding, and the young woman bobbed up and down on her toes, she was so pleased with her work.
“Oh, Miss Bennet,” Kerr said with a pleased sigh. “You do look a picture.”
“It is the dress,” Elizabeth said modestly, admiring it. “I am so happy to finally have an occasion grand enough to wear it.”
“Elizabeth?” Kitty’s voice floated through the door. “May we come in?”
“Yes, do,” Elizabeth called.
Kitty walked in and stopped abruptly. Mary ran into her from the back.
“Why are you stopping?” Mary asked peevishly. She stepped around Kitty. “Oh.”
Both her sisters stared at her. Elizabeth knew it was the dress, but there was something else about her this morning that had made her gawk at her own reflection.
She was not just pretty today. She was glorious, and it had to do as much with the way she felt inside as the extraordinary care that had been taken with her toilette.
“We brought you this,” Kitty said, and thrust a small bouquet of dried flowers at Elizabeth. It was tied together, quite cleverly, with ivy.
“Ivy is for wedded love and fidelity,” Mary said earnestly.
“And there are dried primroses, for everlasting love and devotion,” Kitty added. “Plus all the herbs. Mrs. Hill helped us.”
“I am sorry there will not be flowers at the dinner, like you had for Jane,” Mary added. “I am afraid that when we asked, no one had any left.”
Elizabeth smiled. “I shall not require them, Mary. It was so sweet of you two to make me a bouquet.”
“You love flowers.” Kitty shook the ones in her hand a little, and Elizabeth took them. “It would not be right for you not to even have a few to hold.”
Elizabeth’s eyes stung with unshed tears. “Do not make me cry. Fitzwilliam might turn and run away if he were to see it.” He would not, for he had seen her weep before when he came to visit her in Lambton.
Her sisters were plainly unconvinced. “He adores you, Lizzy,” Kitty said. “It was all Mamma could do to get him out of the house last night.”
Even Mary giggled at that.
“I did not want him to go,” Elizabeth admitted. “And I cannot wait to meet him this morning. Is everyone ready?”
“Mamma is downstairs ordering the servants about, even though the dinner is not until tomorrow,” Mary informed her. “They will be only too happy to have her leave for church.”
Elizabeth smiled widely. “Then to church we shall go.”
Blue. Her dress was blue. But not only one shade of the hue, for it shimmered lighter, darker, and sometimes almost green in the light of a grey, snowy Christmas Eve morning.
It reminded Darcy of the sea and its unfathomable depths.
Elizabeth was like a water nymph rising from the waves, and he was the fortunate man to whom she was travelling. He could not take his eyes from her.
Never had he been so grateful that he had not discarded the common license tucked into his writing case. For after so many months of suspense, a prompt wedding to Elizabeth was the only reasonable conclusion. He smiled at his bride as she walked on the arm of her father, drawing ever closer.
“Good morning, Mr. Darcy,” she said quietly, once her father had given her over to his care.
“Good morning, love,” he replied, for he would never call her Miss Bennet again.
Her countenance lit up at the endearment.
The ancient vicar cracked open his well-worn Book of Common Prayer and began to read. “Dearly beloved . . .”