Chapter 12
THE WEDDING
They were married at nine in the morning at Netherfield, by special license, with the parson come over from Meryton.
Mrs. Bennet's voice arrived ahead of the bride. "From Doctors' Commons, Lady Lucas, with the Archbishop's own seal upon it. The first families are always married so. I always said Lizzy would marry greatly. You will remember my saying it."
Darcy stood at the far end of the grand hall with Bingley while the chairs filled. Caroline had ordered hothouse flowers and the good plate. She was directing footmen with the energy of a general and the smile of a hostess, and had been at it since seven.
"She offered the hall before I had finished asking," Bingley said, watching his sister reposition a chair nobody had moved. "I cannot decide whether it is kindness."
Darcy had every confidence it wasn't.
Caroline crossed to them. "I hope it will all do, Mr. Darcy. We had so little notice." She surveyed her arrangements. "Weddings are so much a matter of the telling afterward. I mean to remember every detail."
"I am sure of it," Darcy said, and she went away satisfied, which they both understood was not the same as friendly.
Caroline had lost the man and meant to keep the houses. A woman who intended to spend her Christmases at Pemberley had flowers to arrange.
Lydia's voice carried from the second row. "Not one officer in the whole party. At a wedding! When the regiment is not three miles—"
"Lydia." Mr. Bennet's voice was mild and final. He came to Darcy at the hall door, gray about the mouth. He was dressed with more care than Darcy had yet seen on him.
"You have the license?"
"And the ring."
"Then we are short nothing but the joy. Wait there."
He brought his daughter in with a face Darcy recognized, the face of a man performing composure. The room rose. Charlotte Lucas, alone at the edge of it, caught Elizabeth's eye and held steady. From Charlotte, that was worth more than smiling.
Elizabeth wore blue and her mother's pearls. She gave her responses clearly. She gave her hand when the form required it. She gave Darcy the words, every one, correct and on time, and he stood before the parson receiving them and understood he was being given everything except what the words meant.
Her hand was cold through her glove, and it did not shake. He thought of the cottage, where her hands had shaken at the ends of her arms while the rest of her stood straight. He could not decide which morning was worse.
Mrs. Bennet wept through the whole of it, from the front chair, in perfect triumph.
Afterward the parson laid the register open on the writing table by the window. She signed it: Elizabeth Bennet, in a clear hand. She looked at it a moment after she had written it. It was the last thing the name would ever do.
The breakfast was Caroline's in every plate and flower. Mrs. Bennet presided over it anyway, directing the company to chairs in another woman's house. Caroline let her, with the smile of a woman lending her stage to an amateur.
There was bride-cake and chocolate, and toasts.
Sir William rose with his glass and gave them "Mrs. Darcy of Pemberley, capital, capital," and Elizabeth lifted her glass with the rest and drank to her own new name.
Darcy watched her do it. She laughed where laughing was wanted and answered every toast. Only a man who had spent an autumn learning her face could have said how little of her was at the table.
"When I am married," Lydia announced over the cake, "my breakfast will be twice as long as this one, and there will be officers at it."
"Nobody has offered to marry you," said Kitty.
"Nobody has offered to marry you—"
"Girls," said Mr. Bennet. "Your sister has secured ten thousand a year. Allow the rest of us one quiet morning to digest it."
Mary observed that matrimony was a solemn institution. She had got as far as Fordyce when Lydia buried her under a list of regiments.
Jane sat at Elizabeth's other side and held her hand under the table through the whole of it. Neither sister remarked on it.
Outside, under a thin sun, the trunks went up onto the carriage.
His own luggage went up last, and with it a flat wooden case, corded.
He had told no one about it. The second carriage took the boxes and the lady's maid he had engaged from town.
She was shy of her new mistress by about as much as her mistress was shy of the title.
Jane held her sister a long time and said nothing where anyone could hear it. Bingley came to stand at Darcy's shoulder while the horses stamped.
"I wish you joy," he said, and meant it, because he meant everything. Then, lower: "Are you certain this is what she wants?"
By the house door, Elizabeth stood with her hand on her father's arm, assuring him of something.
Darcy did not answer.
"Then be certain soon," Bingley said, which was the hardest thing Bingley had ever said to him, and they both knew it. "Jane and I will come in the spring. Whatever this is, we do not mean to let it keep."
Mrs. Bennet arrived at the carriage in full sail. "Mrs. Darcy! Oh, how grand it sounds. You will have such carriages, my love, such pin money, and you will think of your poor sisters when—"
"Let her go, Mrs. Bennet," said Mr. Bennet.
He handed Elizabeth in himself. At the door he kept her hand a moment.
"Write to me, Lizzy."
"Every week, Papa."
"Not the weather. The truth."
She kissed his cheek and went in quickly, and if her eyes were wet, the carriage was dark and nobody was obliged to know it.
As they came down the avenue she looked away south, toward Longbourn. It could not be seen from Netherfield. She looked until the hedges closed the view, and then she faced forward and did not look again.
They had a hundred and thirty miles and the better part of three days of them. Elizabeth watched the window. Somewhere past the first milestone Darcy asked whether she was warm enough. She said quite, thank you. The subject of warmth being exhausted, Hertfordshire went by.
He had imagined this road, in the weeks when imagining was all the courtship he allowed himself.
There had been conversation in the imaginings.
There had been her laugh, which he had heard across ballrooms and card rooms and one cold cottage.
It did not ride north with them. The woman in the carriage sat where his wife should sit and answered what he asked and was polite the whole length of Bedfordshire.
Her politeness was the worst thing in the carriage.
They lay that night at the George in Northampton. The landlady curtsied them in with rooms for Mr. and Mrs. Darcy. Elizabeth answered to the name on a half-second's delay, like a woman called in a language she was still learning.
At the foot of the stairs she stopped.
"Two rooms," she said. "You wrote ahead."
"Yes."
"When?"
"From London. The same day I took the license."
She looked at him. Whatever the question had been holding, she did not spend it. "Good night," she said, and went up, and her door closed with a softness he sat with for some time, downstairs, over wine he did not drink.
She spoke first the next morning, which had not happened since the cottage.
"Will your sister be at Pemberley?"
"At Christmas. She is in town until then."
"I am told she plays." Her eyes came up briefly. They both knew who had told her, and on what floor, to what music. "I should like to hear her."
"She will be afraid of you," Darcy said. "For a week, perhaps two. It is not personal. She is afraid of everyone."
"Then we shall get on. I am told I am frightening." It was almost a joke. It was the first almost since the cottage. It lasted half a mile before she put the window between them again.
They lay the second night at Derby, and turned north into the hills with the third morning.
The hedges gave way to gray stone walls, the fields tilted, water started showing at the bottoms of valleys, and Derbyshire sat her up.
She had been still for three days. Now she leaned at the glass like a reader at a good page: the bare oaks, a sheep bridge, a river going somewhere fast. In the window her reflection forgot itself.
He watched the reflection rather than the woman.
Mile by mile it opened, and he let himself think, for exactly that long, that the county might do what he could not.
Then her eyes found his in the glass.
The window emptied.
They turned in at the lodge at dusk. The keeper came hurrying out, called Darcy by name, welcomed her as madam, and got a kind word back. She had kindness for everyone in the county except the man beside her. The gates closed behind the carriage.
There were three miles of park between the gates and the house. She watched the dark go by, and he watched her, and the carriage carried the portrait, boxed and corded, toward the house where all three of them would have to live.