EPILOGUE #2
In the end, Ned was assigned a term of service rather than transportation, arranged, at Darcy's own quiet expense and without any public acknowledgment of the arrangement, on a farm at the far edge of the Pemberley estate, where a boy with more fear than wickedness in him might, given honest work and a fair master, make something better of the years remaining to him than the ones just past.
"It was good of you to do that," Elizabeth said, riding home from the assizes in a silence that had held, for some miles, more feeling than either of them had yet found words to properly discharge.
Darcy, looking out the window, turned to reply to face his wife and replied.
"I found I had no wish to let that boy's whole life be decided by the worst week of it, when I have had, myself, some private occasion to be grateful that my own worst weeks were not always the ones the world chose to judge me by. "
Elizabeth reached over and took his hand, saying nothing further for a while, for she found there was nothing further that words could add; and it was some miles more before either of them spoke again, the carriage rattling on through a countryside neither of them troubled to watch pass, both occupied instead with thoughts that required no audience but their own.
Aside from the trials, that year was a season of quiet reckonings in more households than the one directly touched by the assizes.
Kitty, freed at last from Lydia's livelier and more careless influence, for Lydia had gone, within the year, to a household of her own with a young officer of steadier character than the regiment's general reputation had led anyone to expect she might secure, and had removed, in the going, the particular gravity that had always pulled her sister along in whatever direction her own restlessness happened to be tending.
Thus, Kitty found herself, in the two years following, gradually but genuinely transformed.
She spent a full season at Pemberley under Elizabeth's own quiet, patient correction, and returned to Longbourn considerably improved in both sense and bearing, so much so that Mr. Bennet remarked, with something nearer wonder and had begun almost to suspect a changeling had been substituted for his third daughter in the interval.
Mary, too, found herself unexpectedly altered by the whole affair, though by a stranger route than her sister's, for it was Mary, of all the family, who had taken it upon herself, in the anxious days of Elizabeth's disappearance, to sit with her mother through the worst of the vigil, offering neither platitude nor moralising but simply a steady, undemanding presence that Mrs. Bennet had found, to her own evident surprise, considerably more comforting than any of her more conventionally sympathetic daughters' company.
It was something in the discovery of her own usefulness, tested by real crisis that seemed to loosen in Mary a self-consciousness she had worn, perhaps without fully realizing it.
She played less for the company's admiration after that, and more, Elizabeth thought, watching her at the pianoforte on a visit some eighteen months later, for the plain pleasure of the playing itself, which suited her considerably better.
Caroline Bingley did not marry that year, nor the year following, and bore the delay with a brittleness that softened into something Elizabeth found she could regard with more pity than resentment.
She came, eventually, some three years after the wedding, to accept an offer from a widowed gentleman of good fortune and modest ambition, a Mr. Fenwick, whose chief virtues appeared to be a comfortable income and an entire want of any inclination to notice, let alone remark upon, his wife's occasional sharpness.
And, if the match carried little of the romance Caroline had once hoped to secure through her brother's connexions, Elizabeth found it carried what she believed to be a peace that had perhaps eluded her longer than her own pride had ever permitted her to admit wanting.
It was some four years after that terrible and transforming winter that Elizabeth stood again at a window overlooking Pemberley's grounds, considerably changed in her own circumstances since the last occasion this account has troubled to record.
Her son of nearly three years old was asleep upstairs under his nurse's watchful eye, and a second child not many months from making his or her own arrival known, a fact that had occasioned, in her husband, careful attentiveness she found touching and faintly exasperating in its thoroughness.
She was thinking of none of this, however, when the scene occurred that she would come to think of, turning it over afterward, as the truest measure yet of how completely the man she had married had made his peace with his own temper.
Instead, she was thinking of nothing more consequential than the letter in her own hand, from Jane, full of news of Bingley's latest enthusiasm; a new breed of sheep he had determined would answer very well for Netherfield's home farm, when the sound of raised voices from the drive below drew her attention to the window.
Her son, William, had escaped his nurse's supervision long enough to reach the stable yard, where he had contrived, in the manner of small determined children the world over, to place himself directly in the path of a cart being unloaded, and had been retrieved, unharmed but thoroughly muddied, by a groom whose own alarm at the near miss had produced, in the retrieving, rather more roughness than he had anticipated.
Darcy, arriving on the scene a moment after Elizabeth had reached the window herself, took in the whole business at a glance; his son's tears, more from fright at the shouting than any actual hurt; the groom's own white-faced apprehension, braced, plainly, for whatever consequence a gentleman's temper might visit upon a servant who had handled his heir too roughly, and Elizabeth watched, from her window above, the same old signal gather at his jaw that she had learned, across four years of marriage, to read so precisely.
It was a flash of real anger, quick and entirely understandable, at the sight of his own child in even momentary danger. Although, Darc did not go cold, and he did not go silent.
He knelt instead to gather William up, checking him over with the same thoroughness he had once brought to her own turned ankle on a dark riverbank, and said, when he had satisfied himself the boy was whole, "I am considerably more frightened than angry, and I expect, Davies, that you found yourself in much the same state, which I collect accounts for the roughness.
I am obliged to you for reaching him as quickly as you did.
We will see the yard gate kept properly latched after this, and I will speak to his nurse myself about the escaping, which is rather more her charge to answer for than yours. "
The groom's whole posture eased, visibly, at the reprimand delivered careful fairness rather than the sharp, cold correction he had braced himself to receive.
When Elizabeth came down, she found him still crouched in the drive, William now recovered enough from his fright to be more interested in the mud on his own hands, stood chattering to his father in an earnest manner about his fingers, and Darcy listened with quiet patience.
He looked up as she approached. "He escaped Nurse again," he said to her. "I begin to suspect he has inherited rather more of your own disregard for sensible caution than either of us should probably encourage."
She laughed at his tease. "I think you are quite mistaken, my love. I think he has inherited a father who cannot quite bring himself to be properly stern about it.”
Darcy smiled at her remark, and turned to his son, “I cannot deny the claim so fully; your mama might be partially right.”
He rose, William settled on his hip, and offered Elizabeth his free hand. Darcy's hand steady in hers, his son's muddy fingers already working themselves into the collar of his father's coat. And, the three of them walked back slowly toward the house together.
Before they entered, Darcy stopped and turned to face her properly, William now somewhat drowsy and heavy against his shoulder. He reached his free hand to draw her close against his side. "I love you, dearest, forever and always." Then, he took his free hand, and gently caressed her belly.
Elizabeth smiled, as she looked at him, and said, "That is a very great deal of feeling for a man who once told a whole room he found me merely tolerable."
He saw the bright glint in her teasing eyes, and replied, "I have been trying to correct that account every day since," and then he bent his head and kissed her, unhurried, William murmuring some small sleepy protest between them that neither bothered to heed.
When she drew back she rested her head a moment against his shoulder, her hand still in his, their son's breathing gone slow and even where he had finally surrendered to sleep against his father's coat, and thought that whatever else the years still had to ask of them, she did not believe she would ever doubt exactly how thoroughly and how permanently she was loved.
"Come," she said, at last, straightening. "Let us put him to bed, and then I find I am not yet finished wanting your company this evening."
"I do not think I have ever once been finished wanting yours," he said, and they went on together, unhurried, toward the house and whatever the rest of the evening still had left to offer them.