Chapter 16 Day
DAY
Mr. Darcy returned on the fifth day.
The thaw had turned Hertfordshire into a muddy mess.
Most of the snow had gone, reduced to gray slush in the lanes and stubborn patches in the shadows of walls and hedgerows, and the ground squelched underfoot wherever Elizabeth walked.
She was at the front of the house, escaping her mother's latest revision of the breakfast menu, when she heard the hoofbeats.
Before she turned, she knew it was him because her body had apparently developed the ability to distinguish the sound of his horse from every other horse in Hertfordshire.
Mr. Darcy was coming up the drive at a pace that suggested he had been riding hard, his coat splashed with mud from the roads, his cravat loosened, his hair disordered by wind.
Atlas was dark with sweat. Darcy himself looked like a man who had slept very little and ridden very fast and would do worse things than either if it meant arriving an hour sooner.
He swung down from the horse before it had stopped, handed the reins to the startled groom, and crossed the yard to where she stood.
They looked at each other.
Five days. Five days of letters that said everything and nothing, of lying awake in separate beds in separate counties, of the particular torture of knowing exactly what the other person's skin felt like and being unable to touch it.
“You have it?” she asked.
He reached into his coat and produced a folded document. Heavy paper, an official seal, the Archbishop's signature visible beneath the fold.
“My uncle sends his regards,” he said. “He also said, and I quote, that it was about time I stopped being a damned fool and married someone with wit enough to manage me.”
“I find I agree with your uncle.”
“I thought you might.”
She reached for the license. Their fingers touched over the paper, and the contact, after five days without it, sent a jolt through her that was wholly disproportionate to the innocence of the gesture.
"Thursday," he said. His voice was rough.
His eyes had not left her face. "I have spoken with the vicar.
Your father has given his consent. That gives you three days to prepare, and your mother three days to make the arrangements she will insist upon, and me three days to endure the wait without losing my mind entirely. "
"Three days," she said. "You calculated this very precisely."
"I calculated the minimum amount of time your mother would require to plan a wedding breakfast without disowning us both, and then I subtracted a day."
She laughed. He was still holding the other end of the license. Neither of them had let go.
“I should tell you,” she said, “that I have spent the past five days sleeping with your coat. The one you lent me at the cottage. I find this extremely undignified, and I blame you entirely.”
The sound he made was not quite a laugh. It was lower than that, rougher, and it did things to her stomach that had no business happening in her mother's garden in full view of the parlor windows.
“I should tell you,” he said, “that I have spent the past five days in a state of distraction so complete that my uncle's secretary asked if I was ill, and I could not explain that I was merely suffering from an excess of wanting my future wife.”
“An excess of wanting.” She raised an eyebrow. “Is that the Darcy family term for it?”
“It is now.”
Mrs. Bennet's face appeared at the parlor window. Elizabeth released the license. Darcy stepped back to a distance that might charitably be called proper.
The distance did not help. She could still feel the heat of him from two feet away, and she knew, with absolute certainty, that tomorrow could not come soon enough.
The morning of the wedding dawned clear and cold, the sky a pale winter blue that seemed to promise good fortune.
Elizabeth stood before the mirror in her bedroom while Jane arranged the ribbons of her bonnet with careful fingers.
She was wearing her best dress, a pale blue muslin that Jane had spent the past three evenings improving with new lace at the collar and sleeves.
It was not a grand gown. It was not what the future mistress of Pemberley ought to wear.
But it was hers, and it was pretty, and when she looked at her reflection, she saw a woman who was ready.
Mrs. Bennet had wept over the lack of a proper trousseau four separate times this week and would doubtless weep again before the vows were spoken.
“You are beautiful,” Jane said softly.
Elizabeth met her sister's eyes in the glass. “I am terrified.”
“You are not.”
“I am not,” Elizabeth agreed. “But it seemed the sort of thing one ought to say on one's wedding morning. I thought I would try it on and see if it fit.”
Jane laughed, and the sound loosened something in Elizabeth's chest she had not realized was tight. “And does it?”
“Not remotely.” Elizabeth turned from the mirror and took her sister's hands.
“I am not terrified. Nor resigned. Nor dutiful. I am so unreasonably happy that I suspect there must be something wrong with me, because this is not how sensible women feel on the morning they sign away their legal existence.”
“Perhaps sensible women have been doing it wrong,” Jane said, and the quiet certainty in her voice was better than any benediction.
The wedding breakfast passed in a haze of congratulations and toasts, of Mrs. Bennet's raptures and Mr. Collins's grudging felicitations, and neighbors pressing forward with their good wishes.
Elizabeth sat beside her husband. Her husband. The word kept catching her off guard, landing in her thoughts with a small shock of pleasure each time she remembered it was real.
They laced their fingers under the table. He moved his thumb in slow circles against her palm, using the same gesture he had employed the day they were found, and its steadiness anchored her through the noise, the well-wishing, and her mother's increasingly theatrical displays of maternal joy.
She caught Mr. Bingley watching Jane across the crowded room.
He had been watching her all morning, with an expression that had evolved over the course of the ceremony from his usual amiable warmth into something sharper, something more resolved.
Elizabeth had seen the moment during the vows when Bingley's gaze had shifted from Darcy to Jane and stayed there, and she had known, with the certainty of a woman who had watched her own love story play out in the most dramatic fashion possible, what was about to happen.
Mr. Bingley rose from his seat. He crossed the room to where Jane sat. He bent down and said something that Elizabeth could not hear over the noise of the celebration.
But she saw Jane's face.
She saw the polite attention become startled comprehension become radiant, incandescent joy, and she saw her sister say yes before Mr. Bingley had finished speaking, and the laugh that broke out of Elizabeth was so full and so unguarded that half the room turned to look.
She crossed the room to embrace her sister, and Jane held on with a fierceness that was entirely unlike her usual gentle composure, and Elizabeth felt Mr. Darcy’s hand come to rest at the small of her back.
“It seems we shall be brothers as well as friends,” Darcy said to Bingley, and the genuine warmth in his voice was a gift she had not known he was capable of giving in public.
Mrs. Bennet had to be revived with smelling salts. Mr. Bennet retreated to his library with a glass of port and a smile so rare that Mary followed him to the door to make sure he was not unwell.
They left after the wedding breakfast, the early afternoon sun was pale behind thin clouds.
Elizabeth embraced each of her sisters, holding Jane the longest. “Be happy,” she whispered.
“I already am,” Jane whispered back.
Her father walked her to the carriage himself. Before he handed her up, he pulled her into an embrace that was awkward and brief and held the weight of twenty years of complicated love.
She felt his lips brush her forehead. Heard him say, “He trembled, Lizzy. During the vows. I was watching. A man who trembles is a man who means it.”
Then she was climbing into the carriage, and Mr. Darcy was settling on the seat opposite her, and the door was closing, and the horses were moving, and Longbourn was falling away behind them.
The carriage turned onto the London road.
The silence that followed was extraordinary.
Not the comfortable silence of two people who have run out of things to say, nor the awkward silence of strangers trapped in close quarters.
This was the silence of two people who, after being surrounded by other people for five solid days, suddenly found themselves completely and irrevocably alone.
Elizabeth looked at her husband across the carriage.
Mr. Darcy was sitting very straight, his hands resting on his thighs, his jaw set with the particular rigidity she had come to recognize as the face he wore when he was exercising control over something that did not wish to be controlled.
“Well,” she said. “Here we are. Married.”
“Married.” The word came out slightly strangled.
“I believe this is the point at which I sit demurely and contemplate the solemnity of the occasion.”
“And are you? Contemplating?”
“I am contemplating the fact that we are alone in a carriage for the first time since the cottage, and you are sitting as far away from me as the upholstery will allow, and I find this arrangement deeply unsatisfactory.”
Something shifted in his eyes. “Elizabeth.”
“That is my name. Though I believe you may now use Mrs. Darcy, if you prefer.”
“If I come to your side of this carriage,” he said, and his voice had dropped to the register she remembered from the cottage, the one that made her skin feel too tight for her body, “I am not certain I will be able to stop at sitting.”
“I am certain I do not crave your restraint.”
He was across the carriage before she finished the sentence.