Chapter 23
They went north to Pemberley by easy stages a fortnight later, when Elizabeth was strong enough to sit a carriage a half-day at a time and impatient enough to insist she was strong enough for more, which Darcy, who had appointed himself the unbending guardian of her recovery, would not hear of.
She was mended, the doctor had been right. She ate, and slept the night through more often than not, and the nightmares that had jerked her awake in the first days came seldom now and woke her less violently when they came.
But she was not quite the woman who had walked into a modiste’s a month before, and she knew it, and did not pretend otherwise to the one or two people she would have told the truth to.
There was a watchfulness in her now that had not been there before, a way of marking the exits of a room, a flinch, small, mastered, but real, at the sound of a key in a lock.
Elizabeth thought it would fade. She thought most of it would fade. She had decided not to grieve the small remainder, whatever it proved to be, because it was the price of having survived a thing, and she would rather pay it and be alive than not.
She said so to Darcy once, on the second day’s drive, and he had taken her hand and said that he would learn the parts of her that stayed, and love them too, and they had left it there.
Jane and Mr. Bingley travelled with them, in the next carriage and the next inn, Jane unwilling to be parted from her sister by so much as a county and Mr. Bingley unwilling to be parted from Jane.
Lady Matlock had gone on ahead to Pemberley some days before, to see the house made ready and, Elizabeth suspected, to have the ordering of things in hand so that the bride should arrive to a house already turned toward a wedding and not have to lift a finger of the arrangement herself.
It was the kind of fierce managing love the countess did instead of speeches, and Elizabeth had learned to receive it in the spirit it was given.
Mr. Bennet had been sent for, by a letter careful enough to bring him without frightening him, and he reached Pemberley a day after they did, ahead of the rest of the family, exactly as Elizabeth had arranged it for she would not have him hear the thing in a houseful of people, and she would not have her mother in the room when he did.
She took him into the library the morning after he came, the great quiet book-lined room that was the one room in any house her father was sure to love, and she shut the door, and she told him the truth.
Elizabeth told it plainly and entirely, from the cordial to the locks to the stairs, sparing herself nothing and him only the very worst of her own fear, because he did not need to carry that and she did not want him to.
And Mr. Bennet, who had a remark for every occasion of his life, who had met every grief and every folly of his fifty years with a dry word held up between himself and the feeling of it, Mr. Bennet heard the whole of it without one word.
He sat in the leather chair by the cold morning hearth and listened, and his face, which she had watched make light of everything since she was old enough to watch it, did not make light of this.
He simply took the blows, one after another, the cordial and the carriage and the barred window and the long days of it, and went grey, and older, and very still.
When she had done, the silence went on a long time. He looked at his hands. And when at last he spoke it was not any of the things she had braced for, not the self-reproach, not the fury at Lady Catherine, not the dry deflecting joke that was his way.
He said only, in a voice she had never heard from him, stripped clean of every defense, “And you are well? You are truly well, Lizzy? Not telling me you are well, the way they have all been telling me you were ill, but well in yourself, truly?”
“I am truly well, Papa,” she said. “Mended. Worn a little, and changed a little, but well, and getting better every day, and very much alive, and about to be very happy.”
And her father put his face in his hands and wept. Mr. Bennet, who had not wept in front of her in her life, who she would have said could not, wept silently, his shoulders going, in the library at Pemberley, for the daughter he had nearly lost without ever being told she was in danger.
Elizabeth went and knelt by the chair and put her arms around him, and held her father while he shook, the second time in a month she had held someone steady through the spending of a grief too long carried, and thought that she was becoming, through no choice of her own, a person who knew how this was done.
“I knew,” he said, when he could, into the dreadful muffled voice of a man talking through his hands.
“Not what, I could not have dreamed what, but I knew the letters lied. I read Jane’s careful letters and I knew, the way you know a tooth is going bad, that something underneath them was wrong, and I told myself I was an old fool starting at shadows, and I let them keep me in Hertfordshire because it was easier to be reassured than to get in a carriage and find out.
I sat in my library reading novels, Lizzy, while you — ”
He could not finish it. “I shall not forgive myself the sitting still. A man knows his own child’s hand is missing from a letter and he sits still.”
“You will forgive yourself the sitting still,” Elizabeth said, “because I am going to require it of you, as your favorite daughter, and because the sitting still was the right thing, Papa, though it does not feel so. If you had come, my mother would have come, and the whole of it would have been in the papers within the day, and Lady Matlock spent her health and Jane spent her conscience precisely so that you should be able to sit still in Hertfordshire and not bring that down on me. Your staying away kept my name. It was a gift, though no one could tell you so at the time. I am telling you so now.”
She tightened the embrace. “And you are here now. You are going to give me away the day after tomorrow, on your own feet, in a chapel full of trees, and that is the part that signifies, and not one hour of the part before.”
He came round, by degrees, as she had known he would.
By the time they left the library he had found his way back to himself far enough to say, drily, blowing his nose, that he supposed he must now be grateful to the man who had carried her out of that house, and that gratitude to a son-in-law was a most disagreeable sensation and he hoped Darcy would have the decency not to make a habit of deserving it.
Which was Mr. Bennet’s way of saying the thing he could not say straight, and Elizabeth, who spoke her father’s language fluently, heard the whole of it, and was content.
The rest of them came the next day, the whole Longbourn family, and the cover held to the last. The family arrived believing in a long illness now happily mended, and were given no reason in the calm of Pemberley to believe in anything else.
Mrs. Bennet swept in restored to her full glory, her nerves entirely forgotten in the splendour of a daughter marrying ten thousand a year and a house she walked through with her mouth open.
Her one true grievance, aired to anyone who would stand still for it, was that the wedding was to be in Derbyshire where none of her Meryton acquaintance could see it, which she considered a waste bordering on the criminal.
Elizabeth bore it, and was even, to her own surprise, glad of it for her mother’s loud ordinary silliness was the surest sign in the world that the secret had held, that whatever else those days had cost, it had not cost her the thing it was spent to save, and there is a comfort in a mother’s nonsense when the alternative would have been her knowing.
The morning of the wedding was bright and still, the Derbyshire hills shone green beyond the windows, and Elizabeth dressed for it in a quiet upper room of Pemberley with Jane to attend her and her Aunt Gardiner standing by, and was, to the astonishment of both, perfectly calm.
She had thought she might not be. She had thought the morning might bring back the other morning, the gown on its form, the church she never reached, and she had braced for it.
But it did not come. There was only this room, and Jane’s hands quick and sure at her hair, and the deep settled certainty, steadier than any nerves, that the thing so long prevented was about to happen, quietly, among the people who loved her, in the country that was to be her home.
When she was dressed, Mrs. Gardiner came forward with the small, folded handkerchief she had carried from London, and unfolded it, and there in her palm was Lady Anne Darcy’s brooch recovered from the woman who had stolen it, carried six hundred miles, kept against this morning.
“Lady Matlock gave you this,” Mrs. Gardiner said, “and it was taken from you, and now it is yours again, and she asked that I be the one to pin it on you, because I held you when you were small. So hold still, my love, and let your old aunt do this one thing.”
And she pinned Lady Anne’s brooch at Elizabeth’s throat. Elizabeth put her hand over it, and over her aunt’s hand, and the three women stood a moment in the upper room and did not need to say any of it.
The chapel at Pemberley was small and old and full that morning of loved ones. Mr. Bennet walked her in, his hand over hers on his arm, and gave her away in a clear voice that only Elizabeth, who knew his language, could hear the cost and the joy beneath.
Georgiana played them in, on the small old instrument at the side of the chapel, having asked to and been told she might. She played very well and stopped in the right place, and then went and sat down beside her aunt, on the far side of the small unfilled space where Lady Anne might have sat.
The Colonel stood up with Darcy. Richard, who had taken Rosings in hand and a great deal else, looked at his cousin’s face through the vows with the quiet satisfaction of a man watching an account come right at last.
Lady Matlock sat in the front pew, and beside her she had left, whether by accident or design no one asked, a small unfilled space, the place where Lady Anne might have sat were she still with them.
And then it was done, the plain enormous words said in the small chapel, the ring on her hand, the thing that a month of locks and lies had been unable to prevent now simply and irreversibly true, and Elizabeth Darcy walked back out into the happy morning on her husband’s arm, married, mended, and home.
The wedding breakfast was small and went on a long time, the Longbourn noise and the Pemberley quiet meeting somewhere in the middle and getting on better than anyone expected.
And in the afternoon, when the eating and the toasting had wound down and the guests had scattered through the great house and out into the bright grounds, Darcy found his wife standing alone on the terrace at the back of the house, looking out over the lawns running down to the water, the very gravel sweep curving away below them.
“I made you a promise,” Elizabeth said, when he came to stand beside her, “though you could not have heard it, because I made it in a room you had not found yet, on a piece of paper I hid under a table.”
She did not look at him, she looked out at their family scattered across the lawn.
“I told you, wrote to you, that I meant to recite the whole of it back to you one morning on the gravel sweep at Pemberley, and make you feel every hour of it. I kept the letter. I am going to give it to you to read, one day, when we are both old enough to bear it, all of them, all the letters I wrote you in that room and could not send. But not today. Today I find I do not want to recite a single hour of it. I only want to stand here, on the gravel sweep, on my own two feet, married to you, with your mother’s brooch at my throat and the whole of my life on the right side of every locked door there is, and feel that it was true after all, that you came, and this is the part that lasts. ”
Darcy put his arm around her, and she leaned into him, and they stood on the terrace above the sweep where she had promised to stand.
Below them the water took the late afternoon light, and the long shadows of the Pemberley trees came across the lawn toward the house, and the day that locks had tried to prevent went down quietly and entirely happy over the hills of the place that was, from that morning, her home.