Chapter Twenty-Six
The garden offered nothing by way of comfort except the open sky and the privacy of a space that nobody else wanted to be in.
Elizabeth’s breath made small clouds in the air.
The gravel was iron-hard underfoot, and the rose beds contained only skeletons of their former glorious beauty.
The hedgerows stood bare against the pale light, stripped to the essentials.
Elizabeth and Mr Darcy walked together without an immediate destination.
The house was visible behind them through the kitchen garden gate, the drawing room window warm and lit.
Mrs Bennet’s silhouette was intermittently visible as she moved through what was presumably a continuing account of the afternoon’s events to anyone within range.
“She will be at that window for the remainder of the day,” Elizabeth said.
“At a minimum,” Mr Darcy agreed.
“She may sleep there, hoping to shout the news out to any passerby,” Elizabeth went on with a chuckle.
Mr Darcy nodded, mock-solemn. “I would not rule it out.”
They walked a little further, to where the path turned along the near hedge. The house fell out of sight, and the garden became cold and quiet. The sky above them was dull with high clouds, while the frost-stiff grass on either side of the gravel was colourless and shining.
Mr Darcy halted on the path.
Elizabeth stopped beside him. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and she could see that whatever he had come out here to say, he was assembling with care. That was his way, and she had learned to wait for it.
“When I proposed to you,” he said, “I told you I was acting from duty. I told you it was not inclination. Or rather, not inclination alone.” He paused. “I should like to revisit that.”
“It was November,” Elizabeth said gently. “You had known me for little more than a week. I believe some revision is reasonable.”
“It is not only revision,” he replied. “I said what was true at the time, but it is very different to what is true now. There have been far too many misunderstandings between us. I must apologise for that.”
“I have contributed my share of inaccuracies,” Elizabeth protested.
“We have been remarkably well-matched in that respect.” The ghost of a smile flitted across his mouth, but he quickly schooled his features into seriousness.
“What I want to say is this. The engagement was made in November under circumstances neither of us chose, for reasons that were entirely practical and not especially pleasant, and I conducted it, for a long time, as though those circumstances and those reasons were the whole account. They were not. They stopped being the whole account — well, I am not certain exactly when.” Mr Darcy paused for a long moment.
To judge by the abstraction of his expression, he must have been conducting a review of past thoughts and desires of considerable extent — and to judge by the astonishment that gradually came over his features, one with results surprising even to himself.
“Perhaps the study,” Elizabeth said, half breathless. There had been something there, even then, in the way he had handed her his jacket, the manner in which he had taken such care of her.
“Yes,” he said. “Possibly the study.”
She thought about this. The hairpin, the cold floor, the jacket around her shoulders.
The situation had been dreadful, and Mr Darcy had been steadier in it than anyone could have expected.
That steadiness had been the first thing she had filed away in the inventory she had been keeping, before she had even been aware she was keeping it.
An inventory, Elizabeth now understood, of the reasons she loved Mr Darcy.
“For me, also,” she said. “Possibly.”
Mr Darcy nodded, as though this confirmed what he already suspected.
“The engagement as it stands is the engagement of two people who agreed to investigate its origins and dissolve it honourably, if we could. That was what we agreed in the parlour in November. Those are, technically, still the terms.”
“Technically.”
“It seems to me that we could now dissolve that understanding and replace it with a better one,” Mr Darcy said softly.
“Will you marry me, Elizabeth? Not because the neighbourhood requires it. Not because honour requires it, or reputation, or any of the practical machinery that produced this engagement in the first place. I have come to know that I love you with all my heart, and I never wish to be parted from you for all the days of my life. Can I hope that you might feel something of the kind for me? Will you choose me freely, and be my wife not out of necessity, but out of choice?”
Elizabeth, for reasons she still could not entirely explain with logic, felt her breath catch.
The garden, indeed the entire world, seemed to still.
She looked at Mr Darcy with the full attention of a woman who has spent several months looking at a person obliquely, through management and performance and careful self-deception, and who is finding, in the directness of this moment, that looking directly is both easier and more consequential than she had imagined.
She thought about all that had transpired.
The corridor and the servants’ faces and the cold dread of understanding what the situation would require.
The parlour, and the proposal that had been honourable and nothing else, and her acceptance that had been purely practical.
She thought about the investigation and the promenade, their almost-shared-laugh and the warmth of being understood without explanation.
Her paddock circles and the sleepless hours and the painful, complicated process of learning what she actually wanted while being unable to act on it.
Elizabeth considered the housemaid, and the proof, and the choice she had made and held to.
About the choice made for Jane, and how she could not truly claim that Jane’s happiness had been her only motivation.
She thought about the anteroom at the assembly, and Lady Catherine’s attacks, and how much Mr Darcy’s defence of her had meant.
She knew now, with the clarity that can only come from a prolonged period of heartsickness and ill-fortune weathered quietly, that she had been choosing this, choosing Mr Darcy, for quite some time.
“Yes,” she said plainly, without the careful management of feeling she had been undertaking these past months.
Mr Darcy’s face shifted and settled in the way of something that has been held taut for a long time and has finally been permitted to release.
“Yes,” she said again, because it bore repeating and she found she did not mind. “Without reservation or the machinery. Of my own choosing, entirely.” She paused and offered him a smile. “Was that sufficient clarity, or would you like me to continue?”
“That was,” he said, allowing his full smile to arrive, “entirely sufficient.”
“There is one more thing I should like to say,” Elizabeth mused.
“Yes?”
“I love you,” she said then, plainly and openly. “I have been arriving at that conclusion for some time without the courage to use its correct name, but I can do so no longer.”
Mr Darcy’s eyes filled with a desperate emotion that Elizabeth felt flutter against her own ribcage.
He stepped toward her. She did not step back, and the distance between them, which had been the distance of propriety, then the distance of careful management and mutual misreading, was gone.
Mr Darcy took her gloved hand and held it in both of his, caressing it between them.
Elizabeth felt a shiver run through her at the warmth and strength of his hands and the gentleness of that caress.
“I love you with all my heart,” Mr Darcy murmured. “Dearest Elizabeth…I cannot imagine a happier fate than to spend the rest of my life with you.”
They walked on hand in hand, too happy to feel the cold. Elizabeth could see the bright window of the house, visible now as they had moved back along the path, with the drawing-room lit and Mrs Bennet still in evidence at the glass.
A little ruefully, Elizabeth thought it was not how she would have chosen to find the love of her life.
Not the study, not the rumours, not the months of managing something that was always going to arrive here, regardless.
And yet, though nothing she would have chosen, she would not have changed a moment of the past months, for they were months of falling in love with Mr Darcy.
They stalled a little way from the house, not wanting to part.
“We should go in,” Mr Darcy said. He still had not released her hand.
“We should,” Elizabeth agreed, but she did not move to do so.
“Perhaps not quite yet,” Mr Darcy murmured. “Elizabeth…” He caressed her cheek, a question in his eyes.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, and then nothing more, as Mr Darcy kissed her, a kiss full of promise.