Chapter Thirty-Seven
Longbourn
Elizabeth
“Lizzy! Lizzy, wake up. Julia is here!”
Elizabeth opened her eyes to find Kitty standing beside the bed, one hand still upon her shoulder and her face flushed from having apparently run upstairs.
For several seconds Elizabeth merely stared at her. She had fallen asleep sometime before noon with a book beside her and the curtains partly drawn against the pale winter light, and Kitty’s words seemed to belong more properly to whatever dream she had interrupted.
“What?”
“Julia Harding.” Kitty was nearly breathless. “She is downstairs.”
Elizabeth sat up so quickly that the book beside her fell to the floor. “Julia?”
“Yes. Your Julia. The one you have been writing to all these months. She has come with Mr. Bingley, a Colonel Fitzwilliam and her father.”
Elizabeth was out of bed before Kitty had finished. “She is downstairs?”
“In the flesh.”
“This had better not be one of your pranks, Kitty.” Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at her sister. “You know Julia is not a subject upon which I would tolerate a jest.”
“Have I ever joked about Julia before?” Kitty interrupted. “She is downstairs, Lizzy, and she has been asking for you since she arrived.”
Elizabeth scarcely heard her. She crossed to the looking glass, pushed several loose curls back into place with unsteady fingers and abandoned the attempt almost immediately. Three weeks of wondering what had become of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s enquiries, and the answer was downstairs.
The weeks since the Netherfield ball had passed slowly for Elizabeth despite everything that had occurred around her.
Mr. Collins had proposed to Charlotte Lucas and been accepted, Mr. Wickham’s arrest had occupied Meryton until another piece of gossip began to replace it, and Jane and Mr. Bingley had continued so happily in their courtship that Mrs. Bennet had already begun speaking of wedding clothes whenever Jane was not present to stop her.
Elizabeth had watched it all with the uncomfortable impression that everyone’s life had continued while her own had somehow stopped.
Her first anger with Darcy had gradually lost some of its heat, though not its cause, and in its place had come the far more troublesome discovery that she missed him.
She had forbidden him to approach her and could hardly complain when he obeyed, yet more than once the sound of a horse upon the road had drawn her towards the window before she remembered that the rider would not be him.
Julia had troubled her almost as much. Elizabeth had ceased writing to Somerset after discovering that Darcy had been receiving and reading her letters, but she had not ceased wondering what had become of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s investigation.
Darcy had told her before their quarrel that his cousin had discovered something which might prove useful, and however angry she remained with him, she could not believe he would abandon the search for Julia merely because of what had passed between them.
Still, three weeks had passed without word from either gentleman.
And now Julia was downstairs.
Elizabeth hurried from her room with Kitty close behind her, scarcely conscious of descending the stairs until she reached the hall.
Voices came from the drawing room, Bingley’s amongst them, followed by her mother’s considerably louder enquiry concerning how long their visitors intended to remain in Hertfordshire.
Elizabeth stopped outside the door. Suddenly she was afraid to enter.
For months she had imagined finding Julia in a hundred different ways.
She had imagined receiving a letter, travelling to Somerset, discovering that Julia sickness had worsened, and, in her darker moments, learning that she had died.
Never once had Elizabeth imagined being awakened from an ordinary sleep and told that her friend was simply waiting downstairs.
Kitty nearly collided with her. “Lizzy?”
Elizabeth drew a breath and entered, ignoring Kitty’s impatient hand at her back.
Mr. Bingley stood near Jane, while a gentleman Elizabeth assumed to be Colonel Fitzwilliam was speaking with her father. Beside them sat an older man she did not recognise.
Then her eyes fell upon the young woman beside him, and Elizabeth forgot everyone else.
It was Julia.
She was thinner. Her face had lost much of its former softness, and the gown she wore seemed almost too large for her diminished figure, but Elizabeth would have known her anywhere.
The same dark eyes met hers across the room, uncertain for only a moment before something in Julia’s expression changed.
“Lizzy?”
The sound of her name was enough.
Elizabeth crossed the room before remembering propriety, company or anything else and caught Julia in an embrace.
Julia held her just as tightly, and Elizabeth buried her face against her friend’s shoulder as months of unanswered letters, imagined disasters and hopeless enquiries collapsed beneath the simple reality of having her alive in her arms.
“You are well.” Elizabeth drew back only far enough to look at her, both hands still gripping Julia’s arms as though she feared she might disappear again. Tears blurred her vision, and she laughed through them. “You are truly here.”
“I am.”
“I have written you so many letters.”
Julia’s own eyes filled, but this time her smile came easily. “I know, Lizzy. I have them.”