Epilogue
The morning was doing its best. This, Elizabeth had come to understand, was all January mornings in London could be expected to do, be grey and close and faintly grudging about the whole enterprise of sunlight.
She was at the breakfast table, feeling properly dressed for the first time in five weeks.
Three more days to her churching and then London again, calls, cards, all the machinery of the season cranking slowly back to life as Parliament returned.
She was ready for it. She had not expected to be ready for it, but forty days confined to Bereford House had adjusted her outlook significantly.
Jane and Aunt Gardiner had visited regularly, and Mary, when she had come to stay with the Bingleys for a month, but it had not been enough.
Her husband was reading the paper. She spread jam on her toast and admired how handsome he was. And proud too, of her and their son. Elizabeth could not fault him here, for little Thomas was stout and hearty and the prettiest little babe she had ever seen.
She might be biased, but she did not think so.
Georgiana was in the nursery every day wanting to hold Thomas, which he appeared to tolerate reasonably well. The other day she had shown Elizabeth the list of pianoforte pieces she had compiled that would be suitable for his first lesson. Thomas would be six weeks old on Thursday.
Elizabeth had told her it was an excellent list.
In three days, Elizabeth would be churched, Thomas would be presented to the world, and Mr. and Mrs. Darcy would begin this new part of their lives in earnest.
She still was not entirely used to being called Mrs. Darcy, and now she was a mother. How much her life had changed since she left Longbourn!
While she had been sequestered at Bereford House, the world had moved on without them. The ton, she was pleased to report, had entirely lost interest in the Darcys. This had taken less time than she might have feared.
The baby had been born the second week of December, healthy and loud and in possession of a full head of dark hair. The arithmetic was unassailable: well over a year of marriage before the heir, and without Mrs. Younge or Mr. Wickham present to stir up trouble, the ton had nothing to judge.
There had been other, more delicious scandals to discuss, as there always were.
The first was Lord Halford, discovered in October to have contracted a second marriage in Bath without troubling to inform his current wife.
Compared to bigamy, a slightly accelerated wedding between a gentleman and a gentleman’s daughter in Ramsgate, no matter how unequal in wealth or family connexions, was not worth the ink.
The second was more typical for London, but Town was still new enough to Elizabeth that she could delight in such follies.
Mrs. Cecily Lane, a woman of strong opinions and considerable leisure, had spent the autumn circulating what she described as an anonymous satire in verse, lampooning several prominent hostesses.
The verse was anonymous for approximately eleven days, at which point it emerged that she had sent the same copy to two of its subjects, each with a different stanza altered to suggest the other was its principal target.
The two ladies had compared their copies and determined the identity of the author at Mrs. Lane’s own card party, in Mrs. Lane’s own drawing room, while Mrs. Lane was still in it.
London found this exquisitely satisfying in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Darcys.
She had told Fitzwilliam the full story of Mrs. Lane. He had rolled his eyes but also listened with the expression he wore when he was genuinely amused, even though she knew he must have heard similar stories a hundred times before.
“I like the way you tell it,” he said when she asked him about it.
Now she was in the library, writing to Jane while her husband attended his own correspondence.
In her letter, Elizabeth described the exact shape of Thomas’s hands, the precise arrangement of his dark lashes, and an expression he had recently begun producing that she could only call contemplative.
She laid down her pen, considered the two full pages she had composed on the subject of a six-week-old infant, and acknowledged that she had become precisely the sort of mother she had promised herself she would not.
Which was why she had reached, again, for Mrs. Morgan’s letter.
It had arrived a week after Thomas was born and now lived in Elizabeth’s writing box, carried from room to room with her and slightly creased along the fold from frequent reference.
Elizabeth had taken to re-reading it whenever the urge struck her to tell a correspondent about the particular intelligence in her son’s gaze.
It was not, she freely admitted, a wholly effective corrective.
My dear Mrs. Darcy,
I hear you have a son. I congratulate you warmly and trust you will spare me any of the particulars.
I have already received three letters this month from acquaintances whose grandchildren are, in each case, the most beautiful, intelligent, and remarkable infants ever born.
My constitution is not equal to a fourth.
I shall therefore thank you in advance for declining to send me any descriptions of your own child’s perfections and shall content myself with the knowledge that he exists and that you are both in good health.
I trust Mr. Darcy is similarly restrained. I confess some doubt on this score, for in my limited experience, serious men undone by small children are amongst the most tiresome creatures in creation. If his dignity shows any sign of failing him, I rely upon you to prop it up.
I have enclosed a small packet of the chamomile you liked at Ramsgate. A weak infusion is useful for fretting infants, and a stronger one for their fretting mothers. Use it as you have cause.
Yours,
M. Morgan
Elizabeth refolded the letter. She had not decided whether she would begin Jane’s letter again or permit her sister the pleasure of reading it. She suspected she would not alter it. Jane would be kind.
Fitzwilliam was concentrating very intently on his correspondence, and so Elizabeth decided to test him.
“I have a new theory about Tracy,” she said.
It worked, for his eyes immediately rose to meet hers.
“I believe he can hear perfectly well and always could, and that the deafness began as a strategic measure sometime around 1804 and became permanent because it was successful.”
Fitzwilliam just held her gaze and said nothing.
“I cannot prove it,” she admitted. “But consider. Has Tracy ever misheard anything that was to his advantage?”
He opened his mouth, but hesitated as he thought it through. “No,” Fitzwilliam said slowly. “Not that I can recall.”
“I thought not.” She reached for her toast. “I intend to test him.”
“You will not test him.”
She did not intend to test the butler, for she was very fond of him. But she did enjoy convincing her husband that she would. “I will be very subtle.”
“Elizabeth.”
“He will never know.” She gave him an innocent look but could not hold it and smiled. “You are very easy to tease this morning.”
He shook his head at her. “I am always easy to tease when it is you.”
They sat for a moment and when he reached for the paper again, she took a deep breath.
“I am nervous,” she announced.
He nodded as though he had expected something of the sort. “About the churching?”
“About all of it. Coming back out.” She stared at him.
He began to say something but she was still speaking. “Do not tell me there is nothing to be nervous about.”
“I was not going to tell you that,” he said gently. “I was going to say that I will be there.”
It was, she thought, extremely inconvenient to love one’s husband this much when she had not yet been churched.
Tracy appeared then to supervise the clearing of the breakfast things.
He adjusted the position of the cream jug. He surveyed the room. Elizabeth, watching him, felt suddenly that something was different.
The butler was looking at things as though he was doing so for the last time. Not mournful, not slow, just . . . thorough.
“I would like to request ten minutes of your time this morning, sir,” Tracy said loud enough to be heard in the hall. “Would ten o’clock be convenient?”
“It is convenient,” Fitzwilliam replied.
“Very good, sir.” Tracy withdrew.
Elizabeth watched him go. She looked at her husband.
“He was looking at everything,” she said. “In a different manner than usual.”
Fitzwilliam picked up the paper and then set it down. “Yes.”
They regarded each other across the table for a moment. She watched her husband’s face. He knew. Their eyes met briefly across the table.
“Would you like me to be there?” she asked softly.
He nodded once. “Yes.”
At ten o’clock, Tracy addressed them both.
“I have given the matter considerable thought,” he said, at volume, “over an extended period. I believe the time has come.” He paused, as though allowing them to raise an objection.
Neither of them did. “I have identified my successor, as you know. He has been in the household six years and I have been preparing him for the better part of one. He is sound.” Another pause. “I have put this in writing.”
Her husband made a creditable attempt to argue. He mentioned the baby. The household still finding its footing. Parliament’s return next week and the demands it would bring on the house.
Tracy, who could not always hear what people said, was reading her husband’s expression and offered him one brief, kind smile. “You will manage, sir.”
When Tracy withdrew, she waited for Fitzwilliam to look at her.
“I knew it would be soon,” Darcy said. “So I asked Franks to have something ready.”
She looked at this man, who never ceased to surprise her. She did not respond, merely put her hand over his.
The night before Tracy was to leave their service, Elizabeth was on the landing when she caught sight of Tracy in the entrance hall below.