Epilogue — The Family Portrait
Brook Street smelled of paint and coffee, the same as it had. Darcy went up the painter's stairs with his daughter on his arm and no umbrella anywhere in the story.
He had climbed these stairs once with a lie in his mouth, two and a half years ago, to look at a portfolio he had no business looking at twice.
The portfolio still lay by the workbench.
An admiral still ruled the far easel, or a new admiral.
The navy kept Ashford fed. The painter came around his easel, older at the temples, charcoal behind one ear.
He surveyed the three of them with a craftsman's open satisfaction.
"Mr. Darcy. Mrs. Darcy." He bowed to the small person on Darcy's arm, who regarded him with the frank suspicion of fifteen months. "And the principal subject. Madam, I am honored."
Rose hid her face in her father's collar, then immediately looked again, because hiding was dull.
"How does my study do?" Ashford asked Elizabeth, taking her cloak himself. "I think of her in January, when trade is slow."
"She hangs in our sitting room, beside the gentleman you painted at Pemberley," Elizabeth said. "They keep each other civil. She is very patient with us, and she never gossips."
"The best of women." Ashford was arranging chairs before the north window, turning one a few degrees, exiling another.
"I warn you both, I have not painted a family group since the spring, and that one had four pug dogs in it and a grandmother who directed the sittings through an ear trumpet. You will find me hungry for it. Sit."
They sat. Rose did not.
She had her mother's eyes and her mother's opinion of being managed.
She conducted a survey of the chair, the window, her own shoe, and the dazzling forbidden country of the paint table.
Elizabeth gathered her in and settled her.
She stayed gathered for the length of one held breath and then began to climb.
"Rose," Darcy said, in the voice that quieted horses, and his daughter looked at him with delight and did not quiet at all.
Be still, something in him began, out of an old habit two hundred years deep.
The words were already forming, the words said over every small Darcy ever carried into a painter's room and pressed flat into a frame: hold still, be careful, give the man your good face.
He looked at his daughter, who had never once in her life been careful with her face.
He closed his mouth and let her climb.
Across her bright head, Elizabeth caught it, the whole exchange and its outcome, because she caught everything. Her eyes went warm.
"Let her move," Elizabeth told the painter. "We are not a still family. You will have to manage."
"Madam, I hoped you would say so." Ashford was already working, fast, glancing and striking, the charcoal making its dry small sounds. "Sitters always apologize to me for moving. I never paint the holding still. Nobody lives there. I shall paint the blur, and the blur will be the likeness."
So the sitting went forward in motion. Rose climbed her mother like a small relentless alpinist and was retrieved, twice, laughing.
Elizabeth's hair came loose at the temple, where it had always come loose.
A painter had caught it loose two springs before she was married.
Darcy stood behind her chair with his hand on her shoulder.
Her hand came up and held it there, bare to bare, and stayed.
It was Elizabeth who saw the moment the picture happened.
Rose said a word that was almost a word.
Darcy bent to hear it, grave as a privy councillor receiving intelligence.
Whatever his daughter said into his ear, his face opened.
Elizabeth watched the look arrive: the private amusement, the wit banked warm at one corner of the mouth, the expression of a person mid-thought, about to say something clever and in no hurry to say it.
She knew that look better than any face in England.
She had sat for it once, without knowing she wore it.
It had hung in a portfolio for a year and a half and on a sitting room wall for two more.
Now it had moved house for good, and lived on her husband.
"There," Ashford said, to his easel, and struck three lines.
The end of it arrived as ends arrived in that family.
Rose, dismissed from her mother's lap on parole, navigated the table leg, gained open floor, and arrived at the paint table with both hands before any adult in the room had finished standing.
She turned to face them in triumph, conducting an invisible orchestra, holding the largest brush Ashford owned.
"That brush is sable," Ashford said, with the calm of a man with four pug dogs behind him, "and worth more than the admiral."
Darcy crossed the room and knelt and held out his hand, and negotiated.
He attempted sternness on the way. Elizabeth watched it fail in stages, eyebrow, eyes, mouth, gone.
His daughter paid the brush over into his palm like a duchess conferring a favor.
She added, unasked, a streak of ochre down his cuff, and the master of Pemberley thanked her.
"I shall paint that in," the painter said. "The cuff. Fair warning."
"Paint it all in," Elizabeth said.
She sat in the north light with her family reassembling itself around her, her daughter's shoe in her lap, her husband's laughter still in the air with the paint smell, and gave the painter her one instruction.
"When it is finished, it goes in the gallery at Pemberley. The long one, with the ancestors." Darcy went still behind her, and she went on. "Hang it low, at the far end, beside a boy with a wolfhound. He has been waiting two hundred years for the family to laugh where he could see it."
Darcy's hand found her shoulder again. It was not steady, and he did not hide it.
Rose escaped, shrieking happily, in the direction of the admiral.
Elizabeth let her go and sat still, smiling, mid-thought, in no hurry. They could chase her. They could chase her for years, all over Derbyshire, and never catch her, and never once want her framed. A painter had known it first: the blur was the likeness.
This was what love looked like, when it stopped being safe.
THE END
Thank You for Reading! This book was a delight to write, and I hope you found it a joy to read as well.