Nineteen
Muffin had to be confiscated.
“He will come to the wedding in my pocket, Miss Bennet. I shall make him very small.”
“He will not come to the wedding, Miss Darcy. He will wait for your return with the dignity appropriate to a horse of his standing.”
Anne scrunched her face but set him down on the shelf, smoothing his mane once, with a reverent finger.
“He shall watch from the window, then. He likes to see the carriages.”
“A compromise worthy of diplomats, Miss Darcy.”
Anne stepped back into the room and presented herself for final inspection.
Her pinafore was white, starched to the point of architectural rigour, and her blonde curls had been arranged under Alice’s patient hand into a style that would survive a coronation, let alone a ceremony at St George’s.
She stood with her hands folded at her waist, her chin level, her feet placed with the exactness of a dancing master’s pupil.
Elizabeth regarded her.
“You look very fine, Miss Darcy.”
“I know.”
Elizabeth bit back a smile. “Remember. You will sit beside Lady Catherine. You will not turn your head and will not speak unless she speaks to you. You will not fidget, you will not sigh, and you will certainly not enquire whether God has noted anything in His ledger.”
“I know, Miss Bennet. I am not a child.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together.
“My apologies, Miss Darcy. I stand corrected.”
“Shall we go down, Miss Bennet?”
“In a moment. I must attend to myself first.”
Elizabeth rushed to her room and dressed.
The cream silk fitted her perfectly. The bodice sat close without pressing; the sleeves were short, the neckline modest, the line of it running from her shoulders to the floor in a plain and beautiful geometry.
Madame Delacroix had cut it for a woman who would be standing rather than sitting, would be walking rather than lounging, and who would not wish to call attention to herself.
She crossed to the washstand and pinned her hair in a severe knot, without ornament. She let two small strands fall at her temples, because the fashion required it and she had learned not to fight fashion on unimportant points.
She looked into the glass. The woman who looked back was unfamiliar. She did not feel grey and drab anymore. She was beautiful.
The thought surprised her. She held her own gaze for a second longer, then she turned from the glass, retrieved Anne, and they went downstairs.
Mr Darcy was in the entrance hall, standing by the marble console with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a dark blue coat, and an impeccable cravat.
Elizabeth paused on the second-to-last step, and he turned around. His eyes landed on her. She descended the final step.
Mr Darcy did not speak.
He stood with his hands still clasped behind his back, and he stared at her for a full minute. Barton cleared his throat, and the sound restored the hall to its ordinary dimensions. Mr Darcy’s shoulders shifted, his eyes moving, fractionally, to a point over her left shoulder.
“Miss Bennet.”
“Mr Darcy.”
“The carriages are ready.”
“So I gathered.”
He looked at her again.
Barton, who had clearly been trying to restore some semblance of normal function to the morning, produced a small wooden tray and presented it to Mr Darcy. Mr Darcy took his hat and gloves from it without looking. He put the hat on, then the gloves on, all of it while still looking at her.
Anne’s voice came from behind Elizabeth.
“Papa, you look handsome!”
The spell broke. Mr Darcy turned, his face rearranged itself into the particular softness he reserved for his daughter, and he crossed the hall to her.
“Thank you, Miss Darcy. You scrub well yourself.”
Anne laughed and he offered her his arm with the gravity he would have offered a duchess.
Soon enough, they were entering St George’s Hanover Square.
The church was full. The pews were filled to the back, and the aisle had been lined with white silk for the bride’s passage.
The scent of lilies and beeswax hung in the cool air.
Sunlight fell through the clerestory windows in pale, diagonal shafts, and the altar had been dressed with flowers from the Matlock hothouses at Derwent.
Elizabeth walked Anne towards the front.
Lady Catherine was already seated. She wore unbroken black silk, which among the pale plumes and coloured sashes of the rest of the congregation, produced the effect of a single dark brushstroke across a painted landscape.
Her posture was straight, and her hands were folded in her lap over a plain black fan.
Elizabeth conducted Anne down the aisle until they reached the front pew, then released the small hand.
“Good morning, Lady Catherine.”
Lady Catherine did not turn her head. She extended her hand a fraction and Anne, who had also been instructed on this point, stepped neatly around Elizabeth and slid into the pew beside her grandmother.
She arranged her pinafore and folded her hands in her lap in imitation of the figure beside her.
She raised her chin and fixed her eyes on the altar.
Lady Catherine’s hand settled on Anne’s shoulder and Elizabeth withdrew.
She walked back down the nave, past the filled pews, past the clusters of Matlock, Fitzwilliam, and Lofton connections, past a dowager who raised a quizzing glass to inspect her and let it fall again with a small, disappointed sniff.
From where she sat, she could see the front pew. Anne’s blonde head beside Lady Catherine’s black bonnet. Elizabeth straightened her back, arranged her hands, and composed her face.
The congregation rose. Silk rustled, fans closed, heads turned. From the rear of the nave came the first notes of the organ.
Lord Lofton was already at the altar. He stood with his brother at his shoulder, and he had the pleasant, slightly bewildered expression of someone about to receive a blessing he could not quite believe was worth it. His brother murmured at his ear and Lord Lofton nodded once.
Elizabeth faced forward. She could not see Georgiana, nor Mr Darcy. They were behind her, at the back of the church, waiting for the music to release them down the aisle.
The organ shifted into the bridal air.
Everyone’s attention moved to the back of the church. Elizabeth held her eyes on the altar. The congregation turned as they passed, head after head, a slow wave travelling up the nave in their wake.
They drew level with Elizabeth’s pew.
Georgiana was radiant. The white satin caught the morning light and the Brussels lace at her throat was worth more than everything Elizabeth had ever owned, and none of it registered, because Georgiana was on her brother’s arm.
He turned his head, looking directly at Elizabeth, as though he had known from the moment he had entered the porch precisely where she was sitting, and had been waiting for this measured, impossible minute to look at her.
Their eyes held. It lasted one step, perhaps two.
Elizabeth did not drop her gaze.
Then they passed.
Elizabeth became aware, a fraction later, that she had not been breathing. She drew a slow breath and her chest ached with the held-back weight of the minute that had just ended.
At the altar, Mr Darcy placed his sister’s hand in Lord Lofton’s. He inclined his head to the bridegroom, murmured something to his sister that drew a small bright nod from her, and stepped back. He walked to the front pew and took his seat beside Lady Catherine, on Anne’s other side.
Anne reached for her father’s hand, and Mr Darcy took it without looking. Lady Catherine did not react. The three of them sat in a row, and from Elizabeth’s pew at the back of the church the arrangement was perfectly symmetrical and perfectly false.
The rector began.
Elizabeth heard the words without hearing them.
The rector pronounced them married, the newly-weds turned, and the organ swelled.
The couple began their procession back down the aisle with the slow, grateful pace of two people who had survived a ritual designed to unnerve them.
Lord and Lady Matlock followed, then Mr Darcy, with Anne’s hand in his, and Lady Catherine behind them.
They passed Elizabeth’s pew.
Mr Darcy did not turn his head this time.
Anne did. She had been instructed not to, but her small, serious face lifted, and her eyes found Elizabeth. She offered the tiniest, gravest nod, the way one professional acknowledged another across a crowded room.
Elizabeth nodded back.
The Pulteney Hotel in Piccadilly was the finest in London, the same establishment that had hosted the Tsar four years earlier.
Its private salon, engaged for the Darcy-Lofton wedding breakfast, glittered with crystal and silver.
Eighty guests moved through the room in a slow, elegant current of silk and superfine, their voices rising and falling beneath the high ceiling.
Champagne flowed from silver coolers, and the long tables groaned under platters of lobster, quail, and early strawberries arranged with mathematical precision.
Darcy performed his role solely out of habit.
He accepted congratulations from men whose names he forgot the moment they were spoken.
He smiled when required, inclined his head when addressed, and raised his glass with the appropriate frequency.
The champagne was excellent—dry, golden, imported at considerable expense—and he drank too much of it on an empty stomach. He felt none of it.
Richard remained at his side for most of the morning, a solid, reassuring presence. He read Darcy with the ease of lifelong familiarity.
“You are elsewhere, cousin,” he murmured during a lull between well-wishers.
Darcy did not deny it. “I am precisely where I am required to be.”
Richard’s mouth curved. “Physically, yes. Mentally, you are in Grosvenor Street. Or perhaps in a certain nursery. Or perhaps simply with her.”
Darcy’s fingers tightened around the stem of his glass, but he made no comment.
Across the room, Lady Matlock watched him. She raised her glass in a small, private toast that was also a small, private warning. Her eyes held his for a moment longer than courtesy required, then she turned back to her conversation with the Duchess of Rutland.
Lady Catherine sat at the head table like a monument in black silk. She spoke to no one unless spoken to, and even then, her replies were brief, clipped, delivered as if she were granting an audience rather than participating in one. She had not touched her champagne.
Darcy excused himself at a quarter past two, claiming the need for air.
He stepped onto the hotel balcony overlooking Piccadilly.
The street below bustled with carriages, pedestrians, and street vendors calling their wares.
The noise rose in a pleasant, distant hum.
He rested his hands on the stone balustrade and breathed.
His thoughts drifted, unbidden, to Darcy House.
Elizabeth would be there now, probably in the nursery, reading to Anne after the morning’s excitement.
The image settled a fragment inside him that the champagne had failed to reach.
He could almost hear her calm, patient voice, laced with that quiet humour she reserved for his daughter.
He could almost see the way she tilted her head when Anne asked one of her impossible questions.
The balcony door opened behind him.
Georgiana stepped out, still in her wedding gown, the white satin shimmering in the afternoon light. She was radiant, flushed with happiness, but her eyes were sharp when they found him.
“Brother.”
She crossed to him and laid a hand on his arm. It was not a long speech, she was a bride and she had to return to her guests, but the words were simple and direct.
“Be happy, Fitzwilliam. For once, be happy.”
She squeezed his arm gently, and then she was gone, the door closing softly behind her.
Darcy remained on the balcony a few minutes longer, letting the breeze cool his face. Then he straightened his coat and returned to the salon.
The breakfast wound down with the graceful inevitability of such occasions.
The bride and groom departed for Bath in Lord Lofton’s travelling carriage, showered with rice and rose petals by the assembled peerage.
The guests lingered for a final glass, exchanged final compliments, and began to disperse.
Darcy returned alone to Darcy House in the late afternoon.
The entrance hall was very quiet. The staff moved with the subdued efficiency that followed a major event. Anne was asleep upstairs, exhausted, Alice reported, from the morning’s grandeur and the weight of behaving like a miniature adult for several hours.
He searched for Elizabeth and found her in the library.
She sat in the window seat with a book open in her lap, the late afternoon light falling across her shoulders and turning the cream silk of her gown to warm gold. She looked up when he entered.
He closed the library door behind him.
For a moment they simply stared at each other across the room. Then he crossed to her and pulled her into his arms.
“Please,” he said against her hair, his voice low and rough. “Let me hold you. Just for a moment.”
She did not resist. Her arms came around him, steady and sure, and she rested her cheek on his chest. He held her close, breathing in the faint scent of lavender and warm skin, feeling the solid reality of her against him after hours of performing for a world that did not include her.
Neither of them spoke, but the silence was not empty; it was full of everything they could not yet say. He felt the tension of the day drain from his shoulders, replaced by a different kind of ache—deeper, quieter, infinitely more dangerous.
A minute passed, perhaps two.
Then he loosened his hold. She stepped back, her hands sliding down his arms until their fingers brushed. She looked up at him, her eyes clear and steady.
“Tomorrow we leave for Pemberley, Miss Bennet.”
“I know, Mr Darcy.”
She reached for her book, tucked it under her arm, and walked past him to the door. She paused at the threshold, one hand on the frame, and glanced back at him for a single heartbeat.
Then she was gone.
Darcy stood alone in the library, the echo of her footsteps fading down the corridor. The room felt larger without her, the light dimmer. He crossed to the window seat where she had been sitting and rested his hand on the cushion, still warm from her body.
Tomorrow they would leave for Pemberley.
He closed his eyes.
He was not ready.
And yet he had never wanted anything more.