Epilogue
Nine Years Later
“Mama,” said seven-year-old Mary Beth, “I have something very important to discuss with you.”
Elizabeth glanced down at her daughter, who had many, many ideas about what was important and how often they should be discussed.
In looks, she resembled her mother, which made her father almost incapable of disciplining her…
not that she required much in the way of correction.
But it did lead to her belief that she was aeons older than her two brothers, ages five and eighteen months, respectively, and worthy of a number of extra privileges due to her role as long-suffering eldest sister.
“Allow me to bring Edward back to his nurse, as it is his naptime. If you wish to expedite the conversation, you might pick up his blocks for me before I trip over them.”
Since Edward had redecorated her entire sitting room with every single block he possessed, Elizabeth hoped this would occupy her daughter for a good while.
“Perhaps Rosie would prefer to put them away?” Mary Beth asked hopefully.
Elizabeth only looked at her daughter; she knew better than to shuffle off chores she had been assigned onto servants, who already had plenty to do without adding Edward’s obsession with extravagant building displays.
“You dragged them all in here for him, you can take them all down.”
Edward helpfully demolished the tallest tower with a kick of his little booted foot, scattering blocks everywhere.
“Edward!” Mary Beth groaned. “You just made it a hundred times harder!”
The baby laughed gleefully.
“Naptime,” Elizabeth said, scooping him up before he could flatten another one. “Let us take you to Mrs Roberts before you raze the entire city.”
Mary Beth grumbled but in the resigned manner that meant she would obey. Elizabeth headed for the nursery; Edward laid his curly head upon her shoulder. Darcy met her at the landing and held out his arms for his son.
“I will take him on up,” he said, transferring the weight of his sleepy son from her arms. “Frost is giving Thomas another riding lesson.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth sighed. “That child is growing so heavy, I wonder if I will be moving the nursery downstairs to accommodate him soon. He will be as tall as you before his second birthday, at this rate.”
Her husband smiled. “Where is our little Miss Inquisitive? I received a note, delivered to my study, that she ‘begs my attention to an important matter’.”
“At this moment, she is cleaning up the mess she helped Edward make in my sitting room, but I, too, have been warned that she has ‘important things to discuss’.”
“Did she give you any clue as to which important things?”
“No. But I fear she is going to bring up the idea of making the rounds to all my sisters again. Edward is not a good traveller, and the idea makes me weary.”
Darcy looked at her with some concern. The woman who had eagerly accompanied him to Venice and Switzerland would never have said it.
But Edward’s birth had been difficult, the recovery more so; she was only recently finding her energy again, and travelling with a toddler, a five-year-old, a nurse, extra servants and trunks and carriages was not her idea of amusement, even if Mary Beth was ripe for the adventure.
“All is well,” she reassured him, touching his cheek.
“It is only that with Georgiana and Lord Darnleigh in Suffolk, Lydia with Colonel Denny in Scotland, Jane and Mr Collins at Longbourn, and Mary and Milton in Kent…well, they are scattered too far apart to see them all. How I wish they were all coming to Pemberley again this summer. The house is so alive, with everyone here!”
“I believe the word you meant to use was ‘overrun’,” he teased.
“Who told all of your sisters to be with child at once, restricting their travel this summer? But think of how much fun you will have when they are all safely delivered and you have four new nieces or nephews invading…er, visiting next summer?”
“Hush, or I shall just invite Mama,” she warned with an impish grin.
“My lips are sealed,” he said good-naturedly, bending to give her a kiss. “I shall come to you both shortly, and do my best to distract our daughter from the Grand Tour of her dreams.”
Darcy approached his wife’s sitting room, hearing his daughter’s chattering through the slightly open door.
For a moment he simply watched them both, marvelling at how quickly Mary Beth had grown so tall.
The second the midwife had placed her in his arms, he had fallen in love for the second time in his life.
He adored all his children, and would not say that he loved her best; but he had loved her the longest, and she held a special piece of his heart.
“Papa!” she cried, jumping up when she caught sight of him and grabbing his hands to lead him into the chamber. “You are just in time! We must talk!”
“Must we?” he said with a feigned impatience. “I am certain that Mr Andrews requires my attention.”
“Oh, please?” she said, looking up at him with her big brown eyes, so like her mother’s.
“Well, I suppose,” he said, seating himself beside his wife and placing an arm about her shoulders, pulling her in close.
Mary Beth stood before them, her hands steepled as if in prayer. “As you know, I am seven years old now,” she said gravely.
“Surely not!” he exclaimed, turning to his wife. “She jests. Clearly she is no more than six. Perhaps even five.”
“Papa! You know I had my birthday only last week! You bought me a pony!”
“Oh, oh, that. I suppose I do recall, after all. Now, then, what is it that is so important?”
She lifted her chin. “I believe that I am now old enough to read Cousin Anne’s stories.”
Her parents looked at each other with equal expressions of horror. Mary Beth saw it, and immediately began what was obviously a well-rehearsed line of reasoning.
“Catherine and Peter and Elizabeth all listen to Cousin Anne tell her stories, even if they do not read them in her books.”
This was mostly true. Mary and Milton resided in a large, pleasant parsonage in Kent, in a little village called Hunsford.
Lady Catherine, Elizabeth had discovered shortly after her marriage, had a benefice to confer and had not cared for any of the candidates seeking it.
She did not much care for Mr Milton Palmer either, as it turned out; however, Darcy’s favour had not been easily restored, and granting the living to Milton had been a step towards redemption.
The Palmers lived a busy, active life, ministering to the region’s inhabitants and saving as many as they could from Lady Catherine’s well-meant interference.
Anne was a frequent visitor, an avid storyteller at their hearthside, and a much-loved favourite with their children.
“Catherine is only three months older than I am, and she boasts in every letter that she heard The Haunted Crypt of Cornelius in every detail before the book came out in print. Only the hero’s name was Clarence when she heard it. But still.”
Elizabeth, thankfully, had a response. “Your aunt and uncle Palmer are right there when she relates those stories. If the tales become too, um, gruesome for young ears, your aunt and uncle will intervene. I know Mary does not permit Catherine to read the books themselves, so how does Catherine know whether she has heard every bit of it?”
“Because,” Mary Beth announced triumphantly, “her father told her that she had. You surely do not accuse Uncle Palmer of lying, do you? Mama, he is a vicar!”
Darcy felt that on this subject, Palmer would lie through his teeth. But it was not something he could admit to his innocent daughter.
“And Papa,” she continued, “it was you that helped Cousin Anne find a publisher, was it not? Surely you would not have allowed, practically encouraged the world to read her stories if they were not…” she hesitated, as if trying to recall words she had memorised. “Not fit for public consumption!”
Elizabeth gave him a look that he read perfectly. It was a ‘Now you have done it’ sort of look, although this was all truly her fault, since he could just see a seven-year-old Elizabeth Bennet flummoxing her parents in any such discourse. But his daughter was not finished.
“Mama, Papa, when I tell you the great honour I have only just this very day received, I am sure you will see my point. I have received a birthday letter from Cousin Anne, and she told me that she intends to dedicate her forthcoming novel, Beatrice and the Belltower of Blanchford Lane to me, her dear cousin. Of course, she can just put ‘To MBD’, she said, because I am a lady, but only think! What a tribute! Should I not be able to read a book adorned with my own initials?”
Elizabeth’s brows were raised nearly to her hairline as she looked at him meaningfully. Her mother might be insufferable, but when it came to relations, his were by far the most troublesome.
“I shall read the book to you,” Darcy said at last. “But I reserve the right, should I find that she has written something I deem ‘unfit for public consumption’, to stop reading altogether.”
“Oh, I am certain she has written the most elegant of novels! Thank you, Papa! You are the best papa in all the world.” She wrapped her arms about him and squeezed. “Thank you so much!”
When she had departed—probably to tell everyone from Nurse to Mrs Reynolds of the ‘great honour’ bestowed—Elizabeth met his gaze.
“Just when I think she cannot cause any more mischief,” Elizabeth sighed.
“Forget about Anne. I have a different sort of honour to bestow.”
“I would bet you do.”
He laughed. “Not that. Well, I mean, yes, always that. But something else.” He withdrew a letter from an inner pocket and handed it to her.
“From Mr Cowdery,” she said, naming one of his men of business.
“Yes. Open it.”
She did, flattening the letter upon her knee. There was only one line on the page, as he well knew. “‘Stoke is let at last,’” she read. “What can this mean?”
“It means that Cowdery has at last succeeded in leasing, with the right to purchase if we so desire, the great estate of Stoke.”
Elizabeth’s eyes widened. John Ashwood had died of heart failure some five or six years past, and Fanny had promptly moved to London. The house had been closed for a long while, and there were reports of general mismanagement and unrest within her group of tenants.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I expect Fanny would agree to let us take the estate—she hates us both with the wrath of all the ages, after paying me the ten thousand did little to boost her popularity.”
“Well, she did not precisely know who it was she dealt with. Your uncle Gardiner was looking for a project that would take his children out of London, and has agreed to take it on as his most significant ‘varying venture’ yet. He will see that it becomes a paying, profitable estate. Meanwhile, she was happy to rid herself of it, since she is the worst mistress it has ever had, and an even poorer businesswoman. If she is wise, she will be able to cobble together something for her children on what I am paying her for it. But the place deserves better.”
She looked at him with amazement, and he wondered if he had done the right thing after all. “You are the most wonderful husband in the world,” she said, her pretty eyes lighting, her wide smile beginning. “I hated that she was ruining it.”
“It shall go to our children, or Gardiner’s children, or wherever you decide it shall go. But nothing you worked for and suffered over shall ever go to waste, not for as long as I live.”
She launched herself into his arms. And then her mouth was upon his and the passion that they still shared so easily lit and sparked and fused.
It was not long until they were in the chamber they shared, the bed they shared—he almost frantic for her, impatient, urgent.
She responded in kind, helping him assuage the need, the fire, the two of them becoming one in a loving completion—begun in tempestuous haste, but finishing, as always, in lingering beauty.
She gave a little contented sigh, and he felt her soft kiss at his throat. “Sometimes I wonder, dearest,” she said quietly—and then hesitated.
He gathered her in even more closely. “Wonder what?” he asked, kissing her forehead, her bare shoulder.
“What if…what if Papa had lived? And I had never married elsewhere, and experienced so much, become the person I did, who was, miraculously, someone you could love?”
He tilted her chin up. “I do not know if we would have happened in the same way, but of one thing I am certain: ours is a love that was begun before the world was, and if ever two people were meant to find each other, it is you and me. You always would have become the girl I love so passionately. We always would have chosen each other. We always would have become the miracle we are.”
Their mouths met again, more slowly this time—not just a kiss, but a promise of always and forever.