Epilogue What Cinnamon Chose #2
The kitchen went silent. Mrs. Jolliffe’s spoon stopped moving. Jane’s egg-beating halted, and Mama Bennet set down her rolling pin.
“Mr. Clark,” Fitzwilliam said.
“Mr. Darcy.” Thomas held his gaze without flinching, which was, Georgiana thought, the single most important thing a man could do when meeting Fitzwilliam Darcy for the first time—hold still and be seen. “Your sister has told me a great deal about you, sir.”
“And my sister has told me nothing about you.”
Thomas looked down at his flour-covered hands, then back up. “Then perhaps you should try the biscuits first, sir. A man’s pastry is a more honest introduction than anything his sweetheart might say in his favor.”
Mama Bennet resumed her rolling pin. “The boy bakes with Clark hands, Mr. Darcy. You can tell a great deal about a baker’s character by his puff pastry.”
Thomas reached behind him and lifted a dish from the cooling rack—a Bakewell pudding, its puff pastry shell golden and flaking, the almond filling risen and set to a trembling custard beneath a glaze of apricot jam that caught the kitchen light like amber.
The pastry was layered so finely that Georgiana couldn’t count the laminations—dozens of them, each one a fold of butter and patience, the kind of work that could not be faked or hurried.
Cutting two slices evenly, he handed them across the table on plain kitchen plates—one to Fitzwilliam and one to Elizabeth.
Her brother gazed at his wife and took a bite.
The left eyebrow rose—the fatal eyebrow, the one that had reduced earls to stammering and sent Caroline Bingley retreating to the music room. Thomas stood with dough drying on his knuckles and met that eyebrow the way he met a hot oven.
“Georgie,” her brother addressed her. “What do you see?”
Her throat tightened. Not who is he or what are his prospects but what do you see. The question Elizabeth had taught him. The question that turned the telescope around and trusted the person looking through it.
“I see a man who was building a pastry tower four feet tall while singing a folk song, in the Prince Regent’s kitchen, without caring in the slightest who might be watching.
He had flour in his hair and sugar on his chin, and when I appeared in the doorway, he looked up and offered me a ginger biscuit without asking my name first.” She kept her voice level.
“I ate it standing in a palace with flour on my gloves, and I knew. Fitzwilliam—if he had known I was an earl’s granddaughter, he would have thrown flour at me, and I would have thrown it back, and we would have been exactly where we are now, only faster. ”
“How long?” Fitzwilliam took another bite.
“Six months.”
“You have kept this from me for six months.”
“I have kept this for myself for six months, because you taught me, at considerable personal cost, that my choices are my own. And I am making one.”
Cinnamon chose that moment to drop from the windowsill. She crossed the kitchen floor, passing Mrs. Jolliffe, Elizabeth, Georgiana, and even Darcy before sitting at Thomas’s feet—delivering her verdict.
Fitzwilliam looked at the cat and then his sister before addressing Thomas. “Mr. Clark, will you walk with me? There is a crossing I should like to show you—a place where my sister crossed a stream in a rainstorm. I should like you to see it.”
Having gained the cat’s approval, Thomas stood taller. “I should be honored, Mr. Darcy.” He wiped his hands on his apron and set it aside.
Glancing at Georgiana, reassuring and confident, he set off through the garden door with her brother, matching in height as well as strength.
Elizabeth sidled over, noting her tension as the two men she loved most in the world walked off into the bright daylight.
“He asked him to walk,” she said. “He’s not interviewing him or evaluating him, only walking. Do you understand what that means?”
“I don’t know.”
“Walking alongside, man to man, to see him and to know him, Georgie. Fitzwilliam does not invite people he intends to refuse to walk beside him. He sends them away standing.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he invited me to walk,” Elizabeth said, “to that exact stream, to show me his regard, to say what was in his heart, and I said yes.”
“I’ve already said yes,” Georgiana whispered. “But I will not go against my brother’s wishes.”
“His most fervent wish is for you to be happy and lively. Come, let’s follow them.”
Not closely—Elizabeth held Georgiana’s arm and kept them at a distance, far enough that the two men ahead were figures against the hedgerow, walking side by side, and Cinnamon trotted ahead of them all, tail high.
“What if the pastry was not enough?” Georgiana said, because old anxieties die slowly, even in women who have crossed streams in rainstorms.
“The pastry,” Elizabeth stated calmly, “was more than sufficient. And the tasting of it was the point. Honest, and how he stood at the end of that table with flour on his face and held your brother’s gaze without arranging himself into something more impressive first. People have been managing Fitzwilliam his whole life, Georgie. He recognizes those who don’t.”
Ahead, Fitzwilliam had stopped at the bank where the stones caught the afternoon sun. He pointed at the flat stones, and Thomas listened. The words didn’t matter, perhaps, only the expressions.
Thomas’s baker hands moved, open and expressive, as he spoke, shaping the words much like he shaped the pastry, sincerely. Darcy’s shoulders relaxed, his demeanor easy, and she knew.
The two men crossed the stream on the way back. Side by side, stepping from stone to stone. The crossing was the answer before Fitzwilliam put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder and laughed.
“There,” Elizabeth noted. “That is approval expressed in the only currency your brother entirely trusts.”
“What currency is that?”
“The walk itself. He showed Thomas the place where you were brave. That is Fitzwilliam Darcy saying: You are worthy of her story.”
Jane’s Michaelmas dinner filled the dining room with candlelight and the warm, overlapping conversation of people who have chosen each other.
Sir William was telling Thomas about the time he had been presented at St. James’s.
Mary extolled the benefits of nappy-changing for fathers to Bingley.
And Fitzwilliam, at Elizabeth’s side, ate his second slice of Bakewell pudding.
“You have had two slices,” Elizabeth observed.
“I have had three. The first was in the kitchen. I am being thorough.”
“You are being greedy.”
“I am appreciating my future brother-in-law’s craft. There is a distinction.”
Lydia leaned across the table. “Mr. Darcy, will Thomas make the wedding cake? Because if Thomas makes the wedding cake, I insist on a tower. Georgie told me about the fairy princess tower, and I want one at least five feet tall with sugar roses.”
“Lydia,” Mary said, “the wedding has not been formally announced.”
“It has been announced by the cat,” Lydia said. “The cat sat at his feet even though Thomas dislikes cat hair in the kitchen. I’d say that’s binding.”
“Cats do not make binding declarations.”
“This one does.”
Cinnamon had been sitting on the windowsill since dinner began, watching. Now she rose. Stretched and dropped to the floor.
She crossed the carpet with the unhurried purpose of a creature who had been planning this since the day she first walked into Elizabeth Bennet’s life, chose her, and launched her toward Darcy, then transferred to Georgiana, briefly occupied Thomas’s feet, and was ready for the next assignment.
She passed Lydia, who dangled a bit of cheese. “Here, puss, come to Lydia. I am clearly the superior choice—”
Cinnamon did not pause.
She passed Mary. Leaped over Sir William’s boots. Swished around Charlotte and her sister, Maria.
And lowered her tail at Kitty’s slippers, wound once around her ankles, and then continued to John Lucas’s shoe, sitting down between them. She tucked her tail around her nose and closed her eyes.
“Oh,” Kitty said softly, glancing at John.
“Your cat,” John said, addressing no one and everyone, “appears to have opinions.”
“She is not my cat,” Kitty confessed. “She was Lizzy’s, and now she’s attached herself to Georgie.”
“But now that Georgiana is settled,” Elizabeth added. “She moves on.”
“And she goes where she is needed.” Georgiana gazed at a blushing Kitty. “She always has.”
Lydia stared at the cheese in her hand. “This is a betrayal. I offered Stilton.”
“You cannot buy a cat’s loyalty with cheese,” Mary said. “Cats are motivated by conviction, not commerce.”
“Everything is motivated by commerce,” Lydia retorted. “Papa said so.”
“I said nothing of the sort,” Mr. Bennet replied from behind his wine glass. “I said that your mother’s matchmaking operates on principles that would put the Exchange to shame. That is an entirely different observation.”
Mama Bennet set down her napkin. She surveyed the table—Jane and Bingley at the foot, Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam at the head, Georgiana beside a baker whose pastry had won a brother’s respect, Mary content, Lydia outraged, and Kitty, dear overlooked Kitty, blushing while a cat purred at her feet and a young man pretended not to notice.
“I always knew that cat had sense,” she said. “Mr. Bennet, did I not say so?”
“You did, my dear. Frequently.”
“And have I been wrong?”
Mr. Bennet regarded his wife over the rim of his glass.
“Not once,” he said. “It is your most alarming quality.”
“My most alarming quality, Mr. Bennet, is my patience.” She picked up her wine glass and raised it toward the table. “And it has been abundantly rewarded. Cheers!”
THE END