Chapter Twenty-Seven
The weddings were held on a Thursday in March, when the lanes had firmed from February’s muddy impassability and the hedgerows showed the first tentative hints of green.
Though not yet warm, there was a softness in the air, and the light through the church windows had a hopeful quality, something that suggested that better, warmer days were coming.
Mrs Bennet had wanted St James’s. She had wanted, at various points in the preceding weeks, the church at Meryton, a grander ceremony in London, a breakfast of such ambition that it had required three separate revisions, and flowers of a quantity and variety that would have required the services of every hothouse within fifty miles.
What she had received was the local church, a moderate breakfast, flowers from Netherfield’s glasshouse, and two daughters married on the same morning.
By any reasonable accounting, this was considerably more than she had any right to expect, and despite all protestations to the contrary, Mrs Bennet seemed to find it entirely satisfactory.
Mr Bennet gave away both his daughters with the expression of someone who has arrived at an outcome he finds he cannot argue with.
He pressed Elizabeth’s hand before they walked in and said nothing, which communicated more than most speeches would have.
She pressed his hand in return, and they understood each other in the way they always had, namely completely and without the requirement of elaboration.
Half the occupants of Hertfordshire seemed to have filed into the church to witness, for all their neighbours were attending with the avidity of those who have followed a story for several months and are now attending its final chapter.
The Lucases were there, and Charlotte caught Elizabeth’s eye as she came in and gave her a look of such genuine happiness that Elizabeth carried it with her up the aisle.
The ceremony proceeded with all the quiet orderliness of long tradition.
Jane was married first because she was older and because Mrs Bennet had very decided opinions about the order of things.
Bingley had agreed to everything anyone suggested with the uncomplicated willingness of a man whose only requirement was that the ceremony end with Jane as his wife.
He stood at the front of the church looking so delighted that Elizabeth really thought he deserved every blessing, even so great a blessing as Jane.
Jane moved through the ceremony with grace, entirely at ease. Her lovely face was flushed; her eyes bright. She said her vows with clarity and steadiness, and when it was done and she turned with Mr Bingley to face the church, her expression was one of unrestrained delight.
It was exactly right.
Then the church rearranged itself, and the guests transferred their interest from one subject to another.
Elizabeth felt the shift in the room’s attention, the way thirty pairs of eyes moved toward her.
She had stood under the neighbourhood’s attention before, in worse circumstances and with rather less to show for it, and she had learned, over the course of a winter that had required a great deal of her, how to face it with grace, undiminished by scrutiny.
Elizabeth was not diminished now. She thought of November, the cold dread that had for long weeks infected every waking moment, and then she thought of the garden in January, and found that the distance between those two moments was both the longest and the shortest she had ever travelled.
Her father offered his arm. She took it. They walked to the front of the church.
∞∞∞
As Darcy stood at the front of the church and watched Jane Bennet becoming Mrs Bingley, he gave a small, private nod of satisfaction.
It was well that things had resolved themselves correctly; he was confident that his friend’s happiness and respectability would only be promoted by the match, and indeed, the radiant smiles of the pair as they were being wed seemed to promise as much.
Then the first of the two ceremonies concluded, and Darcy had to laugh at himself for such a transparent attempt at cool, measured control. It was their turn, and he stopped thinking about Bingley entirely as Elizabeth came down the aisle on her father’s arm.
He had seen her in many states over the past several months.
Flushed from a three-mile walk, her hair disordered, as she arrived at Netherfield with her boots splashed and her attention entirely on Jane.
Across a supper table, her composure worn like a mask, giving him nothing.
At the edge of a dance, managing the room with the focused effort of a woman who has decided to endure with grace.
In the anteroom after Lady Catherine, composed and pale and telling him she would be all right in a tone that he did not entirely believe.
In the January garden, bright-eyed and direct, saying yes without qualification in the thin winter light.
Darcy had seen her in all of these states and had assembled from them the true picture of a woman he had once been foolish enough to dismiss.
He had revised the picture incrementally, then substantially, then entirely, until what he had now bore no resemblance to the first version — except that both involved the same person.
She looked, walking toward him, simply like herself. Not a ceremonial version, not a performed one. Simply Elizabeth, carrying the occasion without being diminished by it.
And looking entirely like herself, she was beautiful.
Her father placed her hand in his, which was the work of a moment. Then the old, familiar words of the vows, touching him to his core with the weight of what he vowed, and what Elizabeth vowed to him in return.
Throughout the ceremony, Darcy was aware of the neighbourhood arranged behind him and the accumulated attention of every person who had spent the winter constructing a version of this engagement that bore varying degrees of resemblance to its actual nature.
Yet to his mild surprise, Darcy found he was entirely indifferent to it.
He had been too long in the habit of thinking about how situations appeared from the outside, of managing the perception before attending to the substance.
The substance was beside him, and the perception could arrange itself.
He had not expected to be happy in this way.
He had expected, for most of his adult life, a version of happiness that was composed and considered and arrived at through the correct channels, and what he had received instead was something that had come through entirely the wrong channels: a locked door, a ruined reputation, a months-long education in the cost of his own careful silences.
This was entirely different and entirely sufficient. More than sufficient.
Darcy looked at Elizabeth, and she looked at him. And in the one frozen moment before the witnesses and well-wishers ranged before them broke into cheers, Darcy knew boundless joy that she was his forever.
∞∞∞
Caroline stood in the third pew from the back, on the left side of the church.
She had chosen the position deliberately.
It was far enough from the front that nothing would be required of her expression at close range, yet near enough that retreat would not have been conspicuous, had it been required.
She had dressed carefully. That much could not be denied.
Her gown was excellent. Her posture was irreproachable.
Both of these things took considerably more effort than they had previously taken from her.
She might have lost most of what she had striven for, but cost what it might, she intended to keep her dignity.
Caroline watched Jane Bennet become Mrs Bingley.
She watched her brother’s face, which was the face she remembered from their childhood when he had wanted something very much and had not known how to want it quietly.
She had not expected to feel something closer to relief than she was entirely comfortable with.
Not for herself, but for him. Whatever her decisions had been, Charles was happy.
She was not, she found, without feeling on the subject of her brother’s happiness.
For that much, at least, she could be honestly happy.
Then she watched Elizabeth Bennet become Mrs Darcy.
She observed Mr Darcy say his vows and studied his expression as he said them. She had known him long enough to read that expression with accuracy. What it contained was everything Caroline had told herself over the course of their acquaintance might be hers.
Now she knew it never could have been. Not in this form, and not with this quality.
She had wanted him, or she had wanted what he represented and confused the two.
The confusion had produced a locked door, a bribed maid, and ultimately Elizabeth Bennet standing at the front of a Hertfordshire church in March as Mr Darcy looked at her with an expression that was clearly nothing more or less than love.
All at once, Caroline understood she could never have received that look from Mr Darcy, could never have looked at him with an affection entirely free from triumph.
The understanding was not pleasant. She received it in the third pew from the back and kept her expression composed and her posture irreproachable.
Yet a greater surprise was waiting for her when she looked at Elizabeth Darcy’s face.
There was no triumph there, no performance, nothing borrowed or assumed.
But she was indisputably happy. Elizabeth stood at the altar as a woman standing in her own life, in a moment she had neither asked for and nor flinched from.
A moment she had made, by the force of her own form of intelligence and generosity, into something worth standing in.