Chapter 16
Mr. Darcy
Mr. Bennet read the marriage settlement twice through, without hurrying.
Darcy sat across from him in the Longbourn library and tried not to watch his face for a verdict.
The papers lay between them, drawn up by Darcy's solicitor and reviewed by Mr. Bennet's attorney in Meryton.
They settled Elizabeth's pin money to her own separate use, secured a jointure, and made provision for daughters as generously as for sons.
No engagement existed yet. Darcy would not ask Elizabeth to accept him before the material terms of it sat ready for her own inspection. Every line, every figure, hers to question before she ever answered him.
Mr. Bennet reached the final page. "You seem very certain of her answer."
"No."
"And yet you have brought terms."
"If she refuses me, the papers cost nothing but my solicitor's time and my own disappointment. If she accepts, she ought to know the material consequences of it before any announcement is made."
"You expect my daughter to examine a marriage settlement on the very day of a proposal?"
"I expect her to know that it exists. She may examine it whenever she pleases — today, next month, never, if she prefers."
Mr. Bennet set the pages down and looked at him properly. "You have learned caution somewhere."
"Elizabeth has been an expensive teacher, in that particular respect."
"Do not tell her I said so."
"I value my chances too highly for that."
The older man very nearly smiled. Darcy watched him fight it and half lose. Then he removed his spectacles and set them on the desk, and something in the room went quieter.
"She loves you."
Darcy's breath stopped.
"Has she told you so?"
"No. Lizzy has told me very little on the subject, which is precisely how I know the little she has told me matters." Mr. Bennet's eyes were kind, and shrewd, and entirely too perceptive for comfort. "She has never been a girl to waste her words on something that did not."
Darcy wanted the answer with a force that felt, for one unguarded second, almost humiliating. He kept both hands still on his knees, by an act of will he would not have admitted to a week ago.
"I love her," he said.
"That has been plain since roughly the moment you began enjoying my wife's conversation."
"I do not always enjoy it."
"Better. A dishonest son would exhaust me within the fortnight."
Mr. Bennet's gaze drifted to the open window. Elizabeth walked in the shrubbery below with Jane, their heads bent together, and Bingley stood near the gate, pretending not to be waiting for his own interview about a wedding date.
"You understand that Elizabeth's attachment to her family will not end the day she marries. Her mother will visit. Lydia, I imagine, may simply follow her home."
"I know." Darcy considered promising pleasure in the prospect, and chose honesty instead. "I will prepare myself for Lydia."
"You will not punish Lizzy for seeing the faults she already sees perfectly well herself, nor demand she defend them to your satisfaction."
"No."
"You will be taking her from a house where laughter is common as breathing to one where it may frighten the servants half out of their wits."
"Pemberley's servants are resilient, sir."
"Your valet arranged your courtship for you. I should think they would have to be."
Darcy stared at him.
Mr. Bennet's expression turned frankly amused. "Lizzy showed me the reading list some weeks back. Two hands, two households, and a suspicious amount of interest in blue thread for a household that had none to spare. I am indolent, Mr. Darcy — not blind."
"McKeever and Sarah have been expressly forbidden to interfere."
"And how successful has that prohibition been, precisely?"
"They expanded into music."
"Then marriage may be your only remaining line of defence."
Darcy laughed. A real laugh, startled out of him, and unplanned, in the middle of what he had been certain was the most serious interview of his life.
Mr. Bennet folded the settlement closed. "You have my consent to ask her. The answer remains entirely hers to give."
"Entirely."
"If she refuses you, you will not go and drown yourself in my pond. It is shallow, the fish are opinionated, and the inconvenience to the household would be considerable."
"I will remember that, sir."
Darcy left the library with the papers locked in Mr. Bennet's desk and no certainty at all except permission.
Permission, he was discovering, felt like everything and nowhere near enough at the same time.
Elizabeth saw him through the garden door and said something to Jane.
Jane went back into the house, collecting Bingley on the way past the window, and the two of them settled at the nearest pane, visible through the glass and doing a very poor job of pretending otherwise.
Darcy walked into the shrubbery.
Elizabeth wore the blue shawl.
The day had turned clear and cold, winter holding fast in the shade of the hedges, and she had wrapped the wool close around her shoulders against it. The repaired fringe lay bright against one gloved hand, catching what little sun there was.
"My father detained you," she said.
"He read the settlement."
Her brows rose. "There is a settlement."
"A proposed one." He made himself go slowly, though his pulse was doing nothing of the kind.
"Your pin money and your jointure are secured to your own separate use, with trustees.
There is provision made for children. You may have your own adviser review every line of it before you agree to anything at all. "
"You prepared all of that before you had even asked me."
"Yes."
"Fitzwilliam." Something warm moved behind her eyes. "You are proposing to me by way of a legal document."
"I am attempting very hard not to."
Her smile, small and sudden, steadied him more than he had expected it to.
They walked together to the far turn of the shrubbery.
Jane and Bingley remained visible through the window behind them, and Mr. Bennet had taken up Jane's old post there too, a book held open in his hands that he was not reading a word of.
Darcy stopped. He had rehearsed nothing this time. Bingley's practice proposals, delivered twice over in Darcy's own hearing, had taught him something useful after all. The danger of a sentence spoken first to the wrong person, worn smooth before it ever reached the right one.
"Elizabeth." His voice was rougher than he meant it to be, and he let it stay that way. "I offered you marriage once because a storm gave me the courage and duty gave me the shelter to hide behind. I loved you even then — but I did not trust the love enough to name it honestly, not even to myself."
She watched him without moving, without breathing, it seemed to him.
"Since then you have corrected me. Refused to flatter me, not once, not even when it would have been easier for both of us.
You have trusted me with your family, and let me trust you with mine — with the one thing in this world I guard most closely.
You have made me less certain of my own judgement, and far more certain of my own character than I had any right to be before I met you.
" His hands were not quite steady. He let them stay that way too.
"I am not asking because of weather, or gossip, or gratitude, or the hopes of two servants who ought to know a great deal better than they do.
I am asking because I love you — because I want to build every ordinary day of my life with you standing next to me in it. Will you marry me?"
Silence followed. It lasted no more than a single breath, but inside that breath Darcy lived an entire future all at once.
The exact shape her face would make across a breakfast table for forty years running, the sound of her laugh loosed somewhere inside Pemberley's library where no one had laughed properly in a decade, the particular, specific quality of a life that had her in it at long last.
"Yes," Elizabeth said, and her chin came up, and her eyes were bright and certain and standing at the very edge of tears. The colour flooding her face had nothing whatsoever to do with the cold.
She said yes. She said yes to me.
He did not touch her. Not yet. He had promised himself, walking out here, that he would wait to be invited nearer, whatever it cost him to wait. Elizabeth understood him well enough by now to know it. She closed the distance herself and put her hand in his.
"I love you," she said, and her voice shook, just slightly, on the words. "I began by revising an opinion of you. I ended by discovering that every better opinion I have ever had of anything, since, has had your face somewhere in it."
Darcy bowed over her hand. His lips brushed her glove, and even through the kid leather he felt the small tremor running through her fingers, matching his own.
"May I kiss you?"
She glanced toward the window. Jane and Bingley had turned their backs with suspicious, perfect unity. Mr. Bennet's book had risen to cover half his face.
"Once," she said.
Darcy touched her cheek. It was cold from the wind and warm underneath, and he kissed her. The kiss was brief, careful, and nothing whatsoever like the composure he had spent a lifetime practising. Elizabeth's hand caught his lapel and held on. When they parted, she laughed against his jaw.
"Your valet will know."
"McKeever knows things before they happen. It is his single most objectionable quality."
"Sarah will claim the shawl predicted the whole thing."
"The shawl has already carried enough responsibility for one winter."
He offered his arm. Elizabeth took it, and they walked back toward the house together, unhurried, as if the day had all the time in the world to give them.
At the garden door, Mr. Bennet lowered his book at last. "Well?"
"I have accepted Mr. Darcy," Elizabeth said.
"Then I suppose I must grow accustomed to being pleased with you both at once. It will take some adjusting."