Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
Caroline had arranged everything with the conviction that she was the right woman for the right man, and what her designs had produced was this. The person she had underestimated at every available opportunity was standing in the early spring light, being married to Fitzwilliam Darcy.
As Caroline Bingley looked at the church, at the faces that had become familiar over the past months of countryside residence and which she had once so easily dismissed as beneath her, thoughts of consequences were inescapable.
Her position was intact, her prospects recoverable.
She had not lost everything she had feared losing.
She had only lost the thing she wanted most; but then, it had never really been hers.
She was painfully aware of what had been extended to her and by whom.
Not forgiveness, which had not been offered, and which she had not sought.
But Elizabeth Darcy had made the choice not to destroy her, and made her decision because she did not deserve to be reduced to the worst thing she had done.
Caroline had been sitting with this since Mr Darcy had brought it to her attention, and she had not found a comfortable position in which to hold it. She did not expect to find one today, but some things are impossible to set down, however much one might wish to forget.
The ceremony ended, the congregation rose, and the recessional began.
She stood with everyone else and watched the two couples process down the aisle.
As they passed by in their respective states of marital bliss, Caroline Bingley resolved not to do it again.
Not the act in itself, but the thing beneath the act.
The conviction that wanting something entitled her to engineer it, the willingness to use people as instruments, the certainty that she knew better than the situation what the situation required.
She would not do that again. She was not certain she was a better person for the past several months, but she was, she thought, a more honest one, and honesty was somewhere to begin.
∞∞∞
Outside the church, the neighbourhood arranged itself into a confusion of noisy triumph. Elizabeth stood in the middle of it with her hand on Darcy’s arm and thought about Jane.
She thought about the girl who had ridden to Netherfield in the rain at her mother’s enthusiastic encouragement, and the woman who had walked down the aisle this morning with the expression of someone in full possession of her own happiness.
Elizabeth also thought about appearances.
She had spent a long time, in the past several months, in the company of things that were not what they appeared to be.
An accidental locking that was not accidental.
A man who appeared indifferent and was not, and a woman who appeared generous and was not that either.
A woman who appeared calculating, which was what the neighbourhood had said and what she had refused to be.
An engagement that appeared to be an obligation and had become, by a route she would not have designed, something entirely different.
She had believed, once, that clarity and honesty would always prevail; that the truth of things was visible to those who looked directly, and that this was enough.
Elizabeth had been proven wrong repeatedly, and the proof had been instructive.
It had arrived, ultimately, here, at this exact moment.
Darcy’s arm under her hand and Jane’s face across the churchyard, turned toward Bingley with the light in it that had been there since October and was now, finally, not required to be managed or held back.
Appearances deceived. They deceived the careful and the careless alike, and the antidote was not simply to look harder but to remain willing, when what you saw did not resolve into what you expected, to revise.
To allow that the person across the room might be different from the person you had assembled from the available evidence, and that the difference might be worth the difficulty of the revision.
Darcy looked down at her and smiled. “What are you thinking?” he asked quietly. It was not a demand but an invitation, one she was under no obligation to accept.
She considered giving him the version she had been working through. Then she considered that the occasion perhaps did not require the full philosophical account, and told her new husband a different truth.
“I am thinking,” she said, “that I am looking forward to spending the rest of my life with you.”
Darcy’s smile broadened. “I entirely agree, my dearest, loveliest Elizabeth. In fact, I think that will be my first toast at the wedding breakfast — to many, many years together.”
Elizabeth laughed. “It is perfect.”
With that, she looked at the churchyard, at the familiar faces of people she had known all her life, at Charlotte and her father and the neighbours and the bright blue sky above all of it.
Elizabeth felt the weight of the past several months.
Not as a burden, not anymore, but with the gravity of something that has been survived with difficulty only to produce, at the end of it, something worth any amount of struggle.
She took Darcy’s arm more firmly; he covered her hand with his, briefly, in the way he had in the garden.
Then they walked together under the gentle warmth of the spring sun, the lane ahead winding free, open, and entirely theirs.
THE END