Epilogue #2
As far as Elizabeth could tell, Richard and Arabella had spent nearly all the time since their wedding disagreeing about horses and sheep.
This was done, however, with the greatest satisfaction Elizabeth had ever witnessed in a married couple except herself and her husband. Well, and perhaps the Wickhams.
“Have you heard about Sir John?” Richard asked.
“No,” Uncle Gardiner said.
He set his glass down. “My aunt found him his huntswoman. Russian father, English mother, brought up in Leicestershire, rides like a hussar. Sir John took her out to see how she would do.” He paused, plainly relishing it. “She took a fence he refused to jump.”
“And?” Elizabeth asked.
“And he proposed at the second covert. She would not answer him until the ride was finished. They were married a fortnight ago.”
“He talks of her precisely as he talks of the mare,” said Arabella. “A pretty seat. Good hands. Does not scream at a wet ditch.” She turned to Richard. “It is a good thing I have broken you of that habit, for I am not as forbearing as she seems to be.”
“My dear, I could never mistake you for a horse,” he said. “A horse is easier to manage.”
“It is good that you did not marry a woman who requires managing.”
He smiled into his wine. “Indeed it is.”
Fitzwilliam shook his head. “At this rate there shall hardly be a couple in all of the ton who was not matched by my mother.”
The room was completely filled with guests now, but because they would come and go over the course of the evening, the rooms felt animated rather than oppressive, and Elizabeth did not become overheated.
Lord Milton came to stand by the window. Lady Milton, the former Lady Honoria, stood nearby, engaging in lively debate with Sir John’s half-Russian wife about whether Bonaparte was at last weak enough to be toppled.
Just to the left of Elizabeth, Mr. Bingley was telling a story that made Jane laugh. Mr. Aldridge stood at Jane’s shoulder, wholly undisturbed by it.
Mr. Bingley had come back from Yorkshire after Easter last spring and had somehow never got round to going away again.
He was out every night of the week, he had given up Netherfield without a pang, and in November he had told Fitzwilliam that he did not mean to marry anybody until he was thirty.
He looked so contented now that Elizabeth believed him.
Lady Anne appeared at her elbow.
“He has been very pleasant to Jane,” Elizabeth said.
“He treats everyone precisely the same, which means he is not yet ready to wed. I shall allow him a few years and see how he gets on.” Lady Anne lifted her wineglass and took a sip.
“It would seem that your interference in the Netherfield visit accomplished very little,” Darcy said.
“On the contrary. You went there with your friend, and there you met your wife. My theory held beautifully. I always said you were most likely to find her through a connection you already trusted.”
“You meant Miss Bingley.”
“I was mistaken about the lady, not the principle.”
Fitzwilliam clasped his hands behind his back and held his tongue.
“Which reminds me,” his mother said. “Neither of you have asked me about Miss Bingley.”
Fitzwilliam relaxed at this and offered Elizabeth a little smile. “We have been more agreeably occupied, madam.”
“An excellent reply.” Lady Anne set her glass down. “But I must crow a little on this score. She was becoming very nearly unmarriageable, but I have matched her despite it.”
“Whatever happened?” Elizabeth asked.
“She was beginning to speak with some bitterness about you, your sister, and the Gardiners,” Lady Anne said.
Elizabeth was unsurprised, but she could actually feel her husband’s glower.
“Not to worry. She was only feeling slighted,” his mother said.
“And so I found her Mr. Havard’s cousin.
Four thousand a year clear, a house in Berkeley Square, and searching for a wife.
He is not the cleverest of men, to be sure, but he is passably handsome.
Better still, he holds a firm conviction that Miss Bingley is the most fascinating creature he has ever encountered.
He repeats her remarks to other people, which is wise, for his own are a great deal duller.
” Lady Anne permitted herself one sip. “Other than George and Emmeline, I consider it the finest work I have done. But I shall never claim the credit of it to anyone outside the family.”
Elizabeth understood why they were not to speak of it. “You have done well, Lady Anne.” Her husband grunted, and so Elizabeth added, to both his mother and to him, “A contented Miss Bingley is a great deal safer for everybody. Even Miss Bingley.”
“Precisely,” said Lady Anne.
After seven months of marriage, Darcy had learned that his wife would follow him very nearly anywhere, provided he refused to tell her where they were going. She was a very curious woman. And she trusted him. It was still a wonder to him that she did.
But it did not keep him from using the trait to his advantage.
The small drawing room was cold and dimly lit. A holland sheet had been thrown over the sofa, and the whole room smelled of new plaster. He shut the door.
“This house is your mother’s triumph,” Elizabeth said rather wryly, considering a hole in the floor.
“It is my mother’s expense.” He had been civil for three hours. “There are so many people here. Five minutes, Elizabeth. That is all I ask.”
She regarded him seriously. “You have been magnificent. Lady Macomber herself informed me that you were quite altered.”
“I am not altered. I am the same man, happily married.” He drew her in close and touched his lips to hers. She returned the kiss, and they were thus engaged for a good deal longer than five minutes.
She pulled away at last. “I have done something,” she said, and caught her lip in her teeth.
“I am delighted to hear it.”
“You have not yet heard what it is.”
“I have no need.”
Her next words were spoken quickly. “I wrote to your mother a fortnight ago and asked whether Mary might move from Gracechurch to Mount Street in the spring.” She did not lift her head. “I did not ask Mary if I might, and now I feel guilty about it.”
Darcy said nothing for a moment. If he spoke before he brought himself under regulation he would laugh, and Elizabeth might have taken it badly. She was still hiding her face in his chest.
“Elizabeth.” He put his hands on either side of her face and gradually tipped it up to his. “You wrote to the most formidable matchmaker in London and asked her to take your sister up?”
She closed her eyes. “That is not what I did.”
He kissed her nose. “That is precisely what you did.”
Her voice was not perfectly steady. “I only wished Mary to be somewhere she would be asked what she would like in a husband. No one ever has, you know. And now that your mother has promised to ask permission before she promotes a match, I am sure Mary can be persuaded. I would have had her with us, but frankly, your mother and Georgiana are better for her just now. You and I are often . . . absorbed in other activities.”
Darcy bent his head and kissed her again, for as much as he admired the woman Miss Mary Bennet had become, he did not want anyone else in their house just now.
“We must go down,” Elizabeth said.
“We must.” He did not move.
“Fitzwilliam.”
“One minute more,” Darcy whispered in her ear.
When they returned to the saloon, they entered by separate doors, which had been Elizabeth’s notion. Most of the guests did not notice, but those who did were not fooled for a moment.
Em looked up from the card table the instant Darcy appeared. Her gaze moved to where Elizabeth was arriving without him, lingered upon his wife’s heightened colour, and came back to Darcy. Then she looked down at her cards and said nothing, for which he was grateful.
Her husband was not possessed of the same restraint.
He caught Darcy’s eye across the room, vastly entertained by this evidence of Darcy’s reserve breaking into pieces when it came to his wife.
Darcy glared at him. Wickham only smiled the wider, and then, with remarkable consideration, bent to whisper something in Em’s ear.
She smiled, made her excuses, and then the Wickhams made an exit of their own.
Darcy took a glass of wine he did not want and observed the room.
Mr. Cresswell stood near the fire with his new wife while she described their parsonage to a small group of women.
He had been the first man produced for Elizabeth in the autumn of the year eleven, to no effect whatever.
His mother had produced him again in April for a Miss Ellice of Bath, who accepted him inside six weeks.
Darcy continued his silent count. Lady Euphemia in the corner with her Scottish peer. Colonel Marsden, newly engaged. Young Jacobsen, who had sworn through three seasons that he was indifferent to matrimony and had proposed to Miss Dell within a fortnight of meeting her.
He stopped somewhere past fifteen. Fifteen couples he could pick out without having to move a single step, all of whom owed their marriages to his mother.
And more, too, for as far as the ton was concerned, his mother had succeeded in marrying off every eligible young man in her own family in one season.
All she had needed to do, the gossips said, was take some time and put her mind to it.
His mother’s reputation as the ton’s most illustrious matchmaker had never been more secure.
Only Darcy knew that his mother had made two matches, not three. But he was content to let the rumours persist. He and Elizabeth had the match they had both wanted, and that was what mattered.
Next season would be Georgiana’s come out, though even his mother had said his sister ought to take her time. Darcy planned to hold her to that.