Epilogue Spring at Pemberley
The daffodils had appeared overnight, or so it seemed. Elizabeth walked the lakeside path in the late afternoon light and counted them, golden heads nodding along the water's edge, so many that the bank looked as though someone had spilled a pot of paint across it.
Four months ago this had all been white.
She wore her shawl loose around her shoulders and thought about the woman she had been in that storm. That woman had been running. From Mr. Collins. From her mother. From the particular cage that marriage without love represented.
This woman was walking toward something. She was not entirely sure what it was yet, but it had been making itself known for two weeks now, in the mornings, with a persistence that could not be attributed to the richness of Pemberley's cook.
She had not told Darcy. Not yet. She wanted to be certain first, wanted to hold the possibility close and private for a little longer before she gave it to him and watched it become real.
She turned away from the lake and took the path that led through the kitchen garden, past the hothouse, to the small stone building at the edge of the formal grounds.
The glass roof caught the afternoon sun as she approached, and the warmth hit her when she opened the door.
Trapped beneath the north-facing panes, the air was almost summery despite the April chill outside.
Easels stood where the light fell strongest. Canvases leaned against the walls.
The smell of linseed oil and turpentine hung faintly in the air, though Elizabeth had no particular talent for painting and the supplies were largely untouched.
It did not matter. It had never been about the painting.
He had built her the cottage.
Not a copy. Not precisely. But the bones of it were here.
The glass roof. The small stone hearth, cold now in the spring warmth but blackened from the winter months when she had come here to read and think and be alone with the memory of the place where everything changed.
He had taken the Keeper's Folly and rebuilt its heart at the center of his estate, and the first time she had stood in this doorway and understood what he had done, she had wept so thoroughly into his waistcoat that he had been genuinely alarmed.
She stood in the center of the room now and tilted her face toward the light and closed her eyes.
She could hear the house from here. The distant clatter of preparations, the bustle of servants readying rooms. Jane and Bingley were expected before dinner, their first visit to Pemberley since the wedding, and the household had been in a state of pleasant agitation for two days.
Georgiana had been particularly anxious.
She had changed her dress three times and asked Elizabeth twice whether her hair was suitable, and Elizabeth had taken the girl's hands and told her that Jane was the kindest person in England and would adore her instantly, and Georgiana had smiled with the shy, hopeful trust that was slowly replacing the nervous reserve she had worn like armor when Elizabeth first arrived.
They were building something, she and Georgiana.
Not the easy warmth of sisters who had grown up sharing secrets, but something quieter, more deliberate.
Elizabeth brought laughter into rooms that had been silent too long, and Georgiana brought a sweetness that made Elizabeth want to be gentler than she naturally was, and the combination was producing a relationship that surprised them both with its steadiness.
Darcy watched them with an expression that Elizabeth had learned to recognize as the face of a man who is receiving something he wanted so badly he had been afraid to ask for it.
The door opened behind her.
She did not turn. It was not necessary for her to. The sound of his step was as familiar to her as her own breathing, and when he embraced her from behind, she instinctively leaned into him, sensing the comforting solidity of his chest and the pulse of his heart against her shoulder blade.
“You escaped,” he said against her hair.
“I did not escape. It was a strategic retreat.”
“From what?”
“From Mrs. Reynolds, who wished to discuss the dinner menu for the fourth time. And Georgiana, who has changed her dress again. And perhaps from myself, because I find I wanted five minutes of quiet before the house fills up.”
His arms tightened around her. His chin rested on the top of her head, and they stood in the golden light.
“Do you know what I have never told you?” he said.
“You have told me a great many things, Fitzwilliam. I could not begin to catalogue what you have left out.”
“When I had this room built. I told you it was because you see things clearly. That you should have a room where the light matches.”
“I remember. I ruined your waistcoat.”
“You did. Comprehensively.” His thumb traced a slow line along her forearm.
“But that was not the whole of it. I built it because I wanted you to have what Mrs. Harlow had. Not the painting. The room itself. A place that was entirely yours. That existed for no other reason than because someone who loved you wanted you to have it.”
Her throat tightened. Four months of marriage and he could still undo her with a sentence.
“You built me a glass house,” she said, “because a man built his wife one a century ago, and the story of it moved you.”
“I built you a glass house because I wanted to be the kind of husband who builds glass houses. The kind who pays attention. The kind who does not retreat into his library and let the distance grow until it cannot be crossed.” He pressed his mouth against her hair.
“My father would have built my mother one, if she had asked. But she never asked, and he never thought to offer, and by the time he understood what she needed it was too late.”
She turned in his arms. Looked up at him.
The late light caught his face, and he was not the man she had met at the Meryton assembly.
He was the man who had ridden into a storm for her.
Who had held her in a freezing cottage and told her the truth about his wounds.
Who was standing in a glass room he had built because he refused to make his father's mistakes.
“It is not too late for us,” she said.
“No.” He kissed her forehead. Her temple. The bridge of her nose. “It is not too late for us.”
She rose on her toes and kissed him properly.
With the unhurried attention of a woman who knows she has a lifetime to do this and intends to make every instance count.
He responded in kind, one hand sliding into her hair, the other settling at the small of her back, and when she pulled away his eyes were dark and his breathing had changed.
“The light is the same,” he said. His voice had dropped into the lower register she knew as well as she knew her own pulse. “In here. When the sun comes through the glass at this angle. It is the same light as the cottage.”
“I know.” She settled against his chest, her head beneath his chin, and let the warmth of him and the warmth of the glass room hold her. “That is why I come here.”
His hand moved to her waist. His thumb traced a slow circle against her hip through the fabric of her dress, and the intention in the gesture was unmistakable.
“Jane and Mr. Bingley will arrive within the hour,” she said.
“Yes.” He kissed her ear.
“I should change for dinner.”
“You should.” He kissed her throat.
“You are not making any effort to release me,” Elizabeth protested.
“I am not.”
She was about to answer when she felt it.
Low in her belly. Not the morning nausea that had plagued her the previous month. This was a flutter, as though a bird had brushed its wing against the inside of her.
She went still.
It came again. Like bubbles rising, or the brush of a fingertip from within. So faint that if she had been walking, if she had been doing anything other than standing still in his arms, she would have missed it.
She pressed her hand to her stomach.
“Elizabeth?” His arms tightened around her. He had felt her go rigid. “What is it? Are you unwell?”
She could not speak. The flutter had stopped, but the knowledge of it had not.
“Elizabeth. You are frightening me.”
“I am not unwell.” Her voice came out strange. Thick and unsteady. She took his hand and drew it from her waist to her stomach and pressed it flat. He would not be able to feel what she had felt. It was too early for that. But she needed his hand there, anyway.
“I have something to tell you,” she said. “I have been waiting to be certain, and I think I have just become certain.” She took a breath. “I felt it. I think… I am with child.”
“You are...” He sank to his knees. His shoulders shook.
She put her hands in his hair and held him and let him have this, because she understood what it meant.
Family. The family his father had lost. The proof that love did not have to end in devastation, that it could build something instead of destroying it, that the wanting he had been so afraid of could create life instead of grief.
“Fitzwilliam.” She tilted his face up. His eyes were wet and his expression was wrecked and she loved every line of it. “Are you happy?”
He laughed. The sound was thick and raw and beautiful.
“I spent most of my life believing that happiness was something that happened to other people,” he said. “That the best I could hope for was a tolerable existence, carefully managed, with as little feeling as possible.”
He stood. Took her face in both hands. Kissed her with a tenderness that made her chest ache.
“I was spectacularly wrong.”
Through the glass roof she could see the sky turning gold. Neither of them moved. His hand had not left her stomach.
“We should go in,” she said. “We have guests to dress for.”