Chapter Seventeen
Colonel Fitzwilliam proposed to Georgiana in the rose garden at Pemberley on a bright October afternoon, and made a thorough mess of it, by his own later admission, fumbling the ring and forgetting half the speech he had rehearsed on the ride over from his father's estate.
Elizabeth heard the whole story secondhand, from Georgiana herself, breathless and glowing, bursting into the morning room where Elizabeth sat with her correspondence.
"He dropped the ring in the rosebush," Georgiana said, laughing and near tears both at once.
"He had to go searching for it on his hands and knees while I stood there not knowing whether to laugh or help him look, and when he finally found it he was so flustered he simply held it out and said, well, there it is, will you have me, as though he were offering me a parcel rather than a proposal. "
"And did you accept the parcel?"
"I accepted the parcel." Georgiana's smile was radiant. "I have never seen him so undone by anything. It rather suited him."
Darcy, informed of the engagement that evening, took the news with a gravity that lasted precisely until Fitzwilliam, red-faced, admitted the business of the rosebush, at which point Darcy laughed properly, the first time Elizabeth had heard him laugh without restraint since their wedding.
"I proposed a great deal more elegantly the first time," he said, "and was refused for my trouble. Perhaps there is something to be said for fumbling it."
"Do not," Fitzwilliam said, "encourage the comparison. I have suffered enough this evening without you reminding the room of my superior romantic instincts."
"I said nothing of superior instincts. I said only that elegance was, in my experience, no guarantee of success." Darcy's eyes found Elizabeth's across the room, warm and private. "I have found, since, that honesty served rather better."
The committee, when informed of the second Darcy match to fall within its purview, offered its approval with considerably less ceremony than the first, Lady Catherine's objections having apparently exhausted themselves entirely on Elizabeth's account, leaving nothing left for Georgiana's.
"I find," Lady Catherine said, at the small family dinner celebrating the engagement, "that I have grown too old for further battles over matters of the heart.
Let the young people marry as they please.
I have learned, this past year, that fighting it accomplishes very little beyond exhausting the fighter. "
"A wise conclusion, Aunt," Darcy said.
"Do not sound so surprised, Fitzwilliam. I have been wise a great deal longer than you have been willing to credit me for it."