Chapter Twenty-five
THEY DID NOT venture back to London until the following springtime, and Georgiana came out in society and immediately caught the eye of a young viscount who courted her fervently until Georgiana agreed to marry him and all was well.
If there were whispers about what had befallen Elizabeth and her husband, Elizabeth was unaware.
Everyone was far too polite to speak them to her face, and she professed that she was distracted, for she was increasing again, and her husband seemed to find her belly just as arousing this time as he had before.
She was showing much earlier, which she knew was typical for second babes and which she was not entirely pleased about, but which her husband seemed to find endlessly pleasing.
They were back at Pemberley for the summer again, when she was too round to be seen in public. She even had to miss Georgiana’s wedding, which saddened her.
Soon enough, her labors were upon her again, and she went much faster this time, to her relief, only laboring for about five hours before she gave birth to another little girl, who they named Hannah.
The next babe, born two years later, was also a girl, and Mr. Darcy began to joke that he would not be able to break the entail after all, and that Elizabeth was going to find herself unable to use the dower house in the event of his death, and that they must make haste and make even more babes.
But her fourth and final child was a boy. They named him Bennet, in honor of Elizabeth’s family, and he was as sweet tempered a babe as she had ever borne, she had to say. He seemed to know that they had been waiting for him.
Sometime that year, Caroline came back from the pig farm, because both of her aunts had died and it had to be sold. She was a decided old maid at that point, no prospects of marriage, and was shuffled back and forth between her brother’s and sister’s household.
But Elizabeth heard that Caroline had mellowed, had grown humble, and spent much of her time doing embroidery of bible verses and humming hymns to herself.
Everyone, apparently, was going to have their redemption.
Wickham had a country congregation in Cheshire, and he gave stirring sermons about the wages of sin and how he had been given another chance to turn his life around when he had not succumbed to that bullet wound. If he ever knew he had fathered Patience, he certainly didn’t acknowledge it.
Years later, when Patience was about fourteen, they got word that Wickham had been felled by an illness, that a fever had taken him away. He was dead, and his congregation mourned him.
Elizabeth and Georgiana went to his grave one day, together. They stood over it and there were others around, talking of what a good man he had been.
“I wish I could be charitable and allow him to have that,” said Georgiana, “but I feel as if I wish to tell everyone what a scoundrel he was.”
“Oh, but he was quite open about that,” said Elizabeth. “A reformed scoundrel.”
“Do you think he was truly reformed?”
Elizabeth could not say for certain.
Two years hence, when Patience was old enough for her own season, there was not a word spoken to challenge Mr. Darcy as her father. And Mr. Darcy had been Patience’s father since before the girl was out of the womb, of course, claiming her firmly.
Of course, whenever Elizabeth thought about that, she felt a little warm, because back then, he would often be kissing her, their clothes removed, his hand on her belly, urging her, “Say that it’s my babe now, Lizzy, that’s a good wife.”
But anyway, Patience was quite accepted as Mr. Darcy’s daughter, and the rumors from all those years ago had been washed away.
Sometimes, when Elizabeth thought of all that pain she had endured so long ago, she felt she could only remember the memory of the pain, not the pain itself. It was so far out of reach that it seemed like an echo only, almost unreal.
She wondered if that was the body’s way of protecting a person.
It was like a verse in the bible, the old passing away, all things becoming new. Perhaps it was that way, with all the things in the past. Perhaps everything had a way of fading to something less bright and bold than what it had been.
If so, she could not complain about it, truly.
She had once been lost and afraid and lonely, with no one to turn to. And she was now Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy, the mistress of Pemberley, with four beautiful children and a devoted husband and a life she could hardly have dreamed would be so sweet.
Suffering was a season, that was all. It did not have to stay.
Behold, all things could become new.
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