22. Three Answers #2
Mrs. Bennet erupted before everyone else. “Elizabeth has the pea! Elizabeth is the Queen! But this is… this is most irregular. I had thought surely Jane and Mr. Bingley—but Mr. Darcy and Lizzy? Mr. Bennet, did you arrange this? Mr. Bennet!”
“I arranged nothing, my dear. I merely observe the hand of Providence, which appears to have a sense of humor.”
Elizabeth, meanwhile, held Darcy’s gaze with an expression that blazed with a fierce joyfulness, as if she believed Providence had indeed made her his queen.
Hill placed the paper crowns on the table—homemade affairs, cut from gilt paper, slightly lopsided, clearly the work of worn scissors and overenthusiastic hands. Lydia grabbed the larger one and thrust it across the table toward Darcy. “Here, Your Majesty. Try not to look so terrified.”
The crowns were clearly absurd, but he allowed Mrs. Bennet to place it on his head of disheveled, road-worn hair as befitting a monarch.
Across and down the table from him, Elizabeth placed her crown on her dark curls.
A paste jewel dangled by a thread, the gilt crinkled, and his pink ribbon peeked from beneath it all.
As she looked up at Darcy across the ruins of the cake with that private smile again—the one meant only for him—the perennial ache he had held in his chest cracked, not painfully but with the slow, irreversible certainty of ice breaking in spring.
“Magnificent,” Mr. Bennet said, raising his port glass. “The King of Twelfth Night. May your reign be brief and your subjects merciful.”
“The King and Queen must lead the wassailing!” Mrs. Bennet declared, apparently recovering from her disappointment with remarkable speed. “It is tradition! They must walk first to the orchard, and the company follows, many paces behind.”
“An excellent tradition,” Mr. Bennet agreed. “The King and Queen must go first to the orchard. With lanterns. In the dark. Unchaperoned.”
“Mr. Bennet!” Mrs. Bennet’s scandalized protest was undercut by the gleam in her eye.
“I jest, of course. A crowd of revelers tramping through the apple trees with guns is the very essence of chaperonage.”
“I believe I know my duties, Mr. Bennet.” Darcy rose from his chair, crossed to Elizabeth’s side of the table, and offered her his arm. “Miss Elizabeth? May I have the honor?”
“You may, Mr. Darcy,” she said. Her hand settled on his sleeve—light and warm, exactly where it belonged. “Though I warn you—the orchard path is uneven, and your London boots may not survive.”
“I have survived worse than Hertfordshire mud, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Have you? I shall remind you of that statement when you are ankle-deep in a puddle.”
They walked together toward the door, the company streaming behind them, and Darcy felt his paper crown slip slightly to one side and did not care at all.
The walk toward the apple orchard reminded Darcy of the Widow Pratt’s cottage, close by where he had raced Elizabeth over a stile.
Mr. Bennet and Uncle Philips loudly discussed their ancient fowling pieces, and Mrs. Bennet organized the cider distribution while Kitty stayed close to Georgiana and provided the necessary orientation to the orchard, the surrounding stiles, and how to avoid mud puddles, which were by now frozen patches.
Darcy was quite aware of Elizabeth’s warm hand steady on his arm, walking beside him and leaning against him much like the cat who had taken residence on the armchair he’d favored.
Gradually, as the gunshots sounded and voices rose in song, he and Elizabeth drifted away toward a quieter part of the orchard, where great gnarled trunks with their bare branches reached for the clear night sky twinkling with faint stars above.
The moon was not quite full, missing a sliver on its left, but in its light, Elizabeth’s face was luminous as she looked up at him with those extraordinary eyes—the eyes he had defended to Lady Catherine, the eyes that had haunted him since that first assembly at Meryton—and this time, she was smiling.
The joyous voices grew fainter, guns receding in the distance. The frosty ground crunched beneath their feet, silvered in the moonlight, and their breath rose together in small white clouds.
“I must confess, Mr. Darcy.” Elizabeth’s voice had shifted—still warm, still teasing, but carrying resonance underneath, a tremor that matched the one in his own chest.
“I am at your disposal.”
“When you left Longbourn in December, you departed in rather a hurry.”
“My sister was ill. The express—”
“Yes, I know. You left very quickly, and very nobly, and everyone was very understanding.” She paused. Her fingers tightened on his arm, a pressure so slight he might have imagined it. “But you left something behind.”
His heart, which had been managing a serviceable rhythm, missed a beat. Then another.
“A shaving kit, perhaps?” Elizabeth continued, her tone light, conversational, the tone of a woman discussing the weather or the quality of the roads. “Your valet must have been beside himself.”
“I am quite sure Vernon was thorough.” Darcy’s voice caught in his throat.
“I wonder.” She drew a finger across her chin. “You might find you are missing a cravat. One cannot simply leave cravats scattered about other people’s cottages, Mr. Darcy. It is most irregular.”
His heart faltered—perhaps only pausing, because she had been to the cottage—which meant…
“Or perhaps,” Elizabeth said, and her voice was no longer teasing—it was steady, as brave as anything he had ever heard, “you dropped something on the desk when you were there last. An inkblot. Rather a large one, in fact. One might almost think a gentleman had been writing in some haste, and his hand had not been entirely steady.”
She had discovered it—the words never intended for any eyes but his own, the fragment of his heart he had left hidden, wedged behind cracked plaster.
“You found something in the cottage.”
She tilted her head, her eyes never leaving his. “I found the cat, you know. Cleo. She had been waiting there since you left.”
“She always did have questionable judgment.”
“She hid underneath the desk, and I sat with her, on that cold stone floor, feeding her Christmas giblets.”
“Is she… is she well?”
“Very well, as I believe she led me to hidden treasure, and so I provide her with treats—so much so that Cook says she is no longer a good mouser.”
Darcy had to chuckle. “If she was a better mouser than a tree climber…”
“And you a better blotter than dripper of ink…” Her voice dropped, the teasing edge softening. “I found something behind the wall. Though I confess I do not know if you meant for anyone to find it.”
“Elizabeth.” Her Christian name, spoken aloud for the first time, carried the weight of everything he had suppressed since the day he knelt in her father’s parlor and signed away his inheritance because he loved her and could not bear the thought of her losing her home. “I—”
She reached into the pocket of her cloak and drew out a folded paper—soft from handling, the ink smudged where her thumb had pressed against it. His letter. “I have been carrying this since Christmas Day, Mr. Darcy. Waiting for the chance to give you an answer.”
The world narrowed to the two of them, the frost-laced ground, and the distant echo of gunfire. Darcy found himself wordless, motionless, his paper crown askew and his heart entirely exposed, while Elizabeth Bennet held his confession between her hands.
“You wrote three questions,” Elizabeth said.
Her chin was up, and now, her voice was not entirely steady.
“And a postscript. You hid them in a wall because you are the most honorable, the most infuriating, the most impossible man I have ever met, and you would rather seal your heart in plaster than risk pressing a woman who had given you nothing.”
Darcy had no words. His throat constricted as he recalled her face in the small parlor. Confusion, but more than that. A reaching out without knowing how—hence the nod.
“Fitzwilliam, you asked me three questions. May I answer them now?”
He could only nod, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Will you think of me?” she quoted the words he had written, then looked up, her chin high and brave, lifting herself on her tippy toes.
“Yes,” she breathed as her lips touched his, the word going through him like lightning.
Her mouth was cold from the January air and warm underneath, and she tasted of cider and fruitcake and what might have been tears. He kissed her, or perhaps he kissed her back.
She pulled back. Not far—her fingers still twisted in his coat, her breath warm against his chin.
“Will you miss me?” she whispered, and answered it with another press of her lips over his, and this time, he kissed her deeper, pouring the hours he wished he was by her side into it.
Her hand pressed against his chest, over his heart, and he wondered if she could feel it hammering, and he supposed she could, and he could not bring himself to mind.
“Will you not think too ill of what I confessed?” She was smiling now—a tremulous, brave, devastating smile. “Yes. I do not think ill of it at all.”
And then she kissed him—unmistakably Elizabeth, her mouth warm and insistent, her hands sliding over his shoulders, fingers curling into his cravat.
His crown toppled, then hers, as his hands found her curls, and their lips answered every question, translated every silence, forgave every reproach.
The kiss lingered, unhurried and unrepentant, for in this shadowed orchard, his future was contained entirely within her grasp and he did not mind it at all.