LXXIII
Home
He came down the stair with her on his arm an hour later.
He had been put back together as a gentleman by stages — shaved, dressed in clean linen, a coat that had been sent over from Grosvenor Square — and the gentleman who descended the stair was, by every external measure, the Mr Darcy of Pemberley who had last walked these stairs the previous spring.
He was not. He knew it. He suspected the house knew it also.
He had Elizabeth’s hand on his arm, and he had no intention of releasing it.
Georgiana was at the foot of the stair.
She came across the hall and into his arms with a sound he hoped never to hear from any person he loved again — the sound of months of fear leaving her too quickly to be borne — and he caught her and held her against his shoulder and closed his eyes.
“Oh, Georgie! Forgive me, dearest.”
“You are home! Brother, look at me. Oh, you are back, you are home!”
“I am home. It is done. I am here.”
“I knew. Richard came. He told me. I knew, I knew —”
“All is well, sweet one. Better than well.”
He held her for a long moment. He did not, for that moment, look at anyone else in the hall. He could not. If he looked at Elizabeth or his uncle or any of them, his composure would go entirely.
Georgiana stepped back at last and wiped her face with both her hands at once, and laughed against her own palm with a small wet hiccupping sound that broke him further than the weeping had. He kept his hand on her shoulder a moment longer before he let her go.
Jane Bennet was a step behind Georgiana. Richard was a step behind her.
He marked, before he had quite noticed himself doing so, that Richard was standing closer to Jane Bennet than the architecture of the hall required.
But he would think about it later. There would be time, now, to think about a great many things he had not been able to permit himself to think about, and his cousin’s evident standing in relation to his wife’s sister could wait until the second cup of coffee at the earliest.
He went to Jane and took both her hands, and the gratitude in his face must have been more than he had thought he was permitting it to be, because she coloured and laughed a little to hide tears.
“You have my life’s thanks.”
“Then keep your life, Brother, and we shall call the account square.”
It was so exactly the answer her sister would have given him in her place that he laughed as he turned to Richard.
Richard had not, by the look of him, slept at all.
He had been at the courthouse until almost four, on a horse for the better part of the small hours, and at this house since perhaps five.
He met Darcy’s eye and inclined his head fractionally.
Darcy returned it. There was nothing he could say to his cousin, in the open of the hall and at the foot of his uncle’s stair, that would have been adequate to what Richard had done for him the last twelve months.
Richard cleared his throat. “Welcome home, cousin.”
Darcy merely squeezed his cousin’s hand. Somehow, someday, he would find a way to say one quarter of what he meant.
His uncle had been standing by the breakfast-room door throughout, with the air of permitting weather to occur in his own entrance hall for one exceptional morning.
Darcy crossed the hall and held out his hand.
The earl looked at it as if the English tendency towards demonstrative feeling had at last become intolerably continental. Then he took it.
“You have done too much, my lord.”
“Nonsense. I have done exactly as much as was required by self-interest. The family name is a perfectly rational object of investment. Come and have your coffee. The household has been waiting an hour, and the eggs have gone past saving. Your wife is hungry. So is your sister. So am I, and by the look of you, you ought to be, too.”
They left London eight days later.
The delay was necessary, legal, and entirely unwelcome.
Darcy had papers to sign. Pemberton had to finish ruining Sterling properly.
Marsh and Foss required protection. Elizabeth endured the interval with less patience than pregnancy had improved in her and Darcy with none at all, except where her comfort was concerned.
Once the road north opened, the country seemed to widen around them with each mile.
Pemberley appeared at last in afternoon light, the stone pale gold against the green descent towards the water.
None of the descriptions she had heard had included what mattered most — the shock of seeing, after so much turmoil, a place capable of looking like permanence without arrogance.
She drew breath. Darcy’s hand closed over hers.
“Well?” he asked quietly.
“Caroline Bingley did not exaggerate enough.”
He laughed, and the laugh did not stop at the corner of his mouth as it usually did, but reached his eyes and stayed there.
“That is a generous reading, my love. Miss Bingley exaggerated about a great many things. You shall have to forgive her now.”
“I shall forgive her one item per visit, beginning with this one. At the present rate, she may expect to be received at Pemberley in approximately fifteen years.”
He was still laughing as the carriage drew up at the front of the house.
A footman handed her down. Her foot had been on the gravel perhaps three seconds when something large and dark came around the corner of the south wing at a speed that suggested several hours of waiting for the sound of wheels.
She gasped. “Falstaff!”
He was upon her before she had finished saying his name.
He stopped just short of putting her on the ground — by training, or by sense, or by some last shred of the household manners he had once been able to manage — but he came up against her hard enough that Darcy had to fling an arm at her back to keep her from going down on the gravel.
His front paws went up against her hip. His great head pressed itself into the curve of her belly with the desperate proprietorship of an animal who had been required to live four months without his proper occupation and was at last permitted to resume it.
He made a sound she had never heard from any dog in her life — a long, broken whine that started as a question, became a complaint, and ended somewhere in the neighbourhood of an open accusation that she had taken longer than was reasonable.
She bent over him with both hands buried in the rough at his neck.
“Falstaff. Falstaff, you wretched creature, you are absurd. Look at the size of you! You are entirely too large for this, and I am entirely too ungainly just now for this sort of nonsense. If you knock me to the gravel, your master shall blame you for it for the rest of your life. Stop. Stop, you ridiculous animal. Stop at once!”
The dog had, in the moment, no intention of stopping for any human reason whatever, and Elizabeth had no intention of meaning what she said.
Darcy was watching with the small alteration of his mouth that he had been wearing since the carriage had crossed the second bridge.
“Falstaff.”
The dog ignored him.
“Falstaff! You may be aware that I am also returned.”
The dog raised his head briefly, conceded the point in the most cursory possible manner, and put his face directly back against the curve of Elizabeth’s belly with the firm conviction of a creature who had located the centre of his universe and saw no reason to attend to its periphery.
Elizabeth tugged at the dog’s ears, then returned her hand to his. “Oh, I missed this ridiculous creature. I almost forgot how much when I was so busy missing you. How did you get him here?”
“I sent Angus an express the very morning I came back to you. They put him on a packet at Aberdeen, and he has been overland for four days, with two grooms in attendance and the kind of letters of introduction my uncle’s name has been known to procure.
I think Mrs MacLeod was glad to be well rid of him, and I hope Mrs Reynolds does not leave over his arrival. ”
Elizabeth raised up on her toes and kissed her husband’s cheek, then bent and kissed the top of Falstaff’s head between his ears.
“He will be a menace, and he will likely terrorise the house. I hope Mrs Reynolds is more patient than Mrs Hatchett might have been.”
Darcy laughed and gave her his arm again.
“I believe you will find her so. Come and see what she has prepared. She has been making the place ready for you for… well, far longer than was prudent, I daresay. Probably from the moment Georgiana wrote to her that I was not dead and that you existed, and I believe she is eager to meet you.”
They went up the steps together with Falstaff between them, the small white patch on the back of his head bright in the afternoon light, his entire enormous body angled against Elizabeth’s hip as though he had decided that this was now his place in the procession and would not be argued out of it.