Chapter 22 #2
"You are not alone in that. I have preferred my own conclusions many times.
I preferred them at the assembly, when I said something unforgivable about a woman I had barely looked at.
I preferred them at the dinner, when Caroline asked about the pig and I gave an answer that was cowardly and wrong because I was afraid of a roomful of people. "
He stopped walking. He turned to face her. The pig was between them, warm and solid, her presence the bridge it had always been. The buffer. The excuse for proximity. The small, warm creature who had brought them together in spite of everything they had done to stay apart.
"I was kind to Truffles in private," he said.
His voice was lower now. Not the formal, controlled tone he used in company.
The other voice. The one he had used in the library at Netherfield, talking to a pig.
"I talked to her in the library. I let her into my room.
I fed her bread crusts and discussed Latin translations with her and let her sleep beside my chair.
I carried her home from a farm where she had been taken by a woman who could not bear the thought that I might care about something she considered beneath me. "
He paused. He took a breath. The morning air was cold in his lungs.
"But I was not brave enough to be kind in public. I was not brave enough to stand in a room full of people and say what I felt. I have spent my whole life being careful, and the care has made me a coward, and the cowardice has cost me the regard of the only woman whose regard matters."
Elizabeth was very still. Her eyes were bright. The frost glittered on her bonnet. The pig between them was quiet, listening, as though she understood that something was happening that required silence.
"There is something else," he said. "About Wickham.
About why I could not speak." He paused.
The words came slowly, each one carrying a weight she could see.
"Last summer, at Ramsgate, Wickham attempted the same thing with my sister.
Georgiana is fifteen. She is shy and trusting and she has thirty thousand pounds, and Wickham saw all three and moved on her the way he moved on Lydia. I arrived in time. But only just."
Elizabeth's hand went to her mouth. The pieces fell together: Darcy's silence at the card party, his rigid face when Wickham spoke, his inability to expose the man without exposing his own sister.
He had been holding a secret that would have destroyed Georgiana to share, and he had held it while Elizabeth praised the man who had nearly ruined her.
"I am sorry," she said. "I did not know."
"You could not have known. I made certain of that." His voice was quiet. "I chose Georgiana's safety over the truth, and the cost was your good opinion, and I would make the same choice again."
He paused. The pig shifted in his arms.
"But that is not the only thing I have been hiding behind. Georgiana was a reason. The rest was pride. The rest was standing in rooms full of people and choosing the safe sentence over the true one, every time, because the true one frightened me."
He looked at her. His jaw was tight.
"I am done with that. I am going to be the man your pig thinks I am. In public. In front of everyone. Regardless of what it costs."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The lane was quiet. The morning held its breath.
"I love you," he said. The words came out rough and plain, without elegance, without the polish he would have given them if he had been rehearsing, and they were better for it. "I love you and I love your pig and I would very much like to take both of you to Pemberley, if you will have me."
Elizabeth's face went through something.
Not the careful, controlled expressions she had been wearing for weeks.
Something unguarded and complicated and real, passing through surprise and recognition and relief and joy, each one visible, each one honest, and settling finally into an expression he had never seen on her before.
An expression that was warm and open and undefended, as though she had set down a weight she had been carrying for a long time and discovered that the ground beneath it was solid.
"You understand," she said, and her voice was not entirely steady, "that she will sleep outside your bedroom door."
"She already did, at Netherfield. I believe my valet has recovered from the shock."
She laughed. It was the real laugh, the one he had heard across rooms and through walls and in his memory during the weeks when she would not look at him.
The laugh that crinkled her eyes and shook her shoulders and carried across the morning like a bell.
And then her eyes filled, and she pressed her face against the pig's neck to hide it, but she was smiling, and she said, with her face buried in Truffles' warm neck:
"Yes."
The word was muffled by pig. He heard it anyway.
The pig, sensing the shift in the air the way pigs always did, lifted her head. She looked at Darcy. She looked at Elizabeth. She looked at Darcy again. And she made a sound of absolute contentment, a deep, satisfied grunt that vibrated through her whole body and into both of theirs.
Darcy leaned forward over the pig between them and pressed his lips to Elizabeth's forehead.
She was cold from the morning air. She smelled of lavender and soap and the familiar warm scent of the Longbourn house.
She leaned into the kiss, and her hand came up to rest on his arm, and then she lifted her face, and he kissed her mouth.
Gently. Briefly. Her lips were cold and then warm, and she tasted of the tea she had drunk at breakfast, and the whole of the kiss lasted perhaps three seconds, and it was not enough, and it was everything. His hand trembled against her sleeve.
The pig was warm between them, and the morning was cold and bright and perfect.