Chapter 24
A year on, Pemberley in late spring was a green and noisy place, and Elizabeth Darcy, who had once spent untold days in a room with one grey blanket and a barred window, woke most mornings to so much light and so much sound that she sometimes lay still a moment simply to be amazed at the quantity of it.
The grounds were in full leaf, the long lawns running down to the water gone deep and lush, the trees that had thrown their shadows toward the house on her wedding day now in their whole summer weight.
The house was full. Her father was visiting.
Mr. Bennet had taken to Pemberley with a thoroughness that surprised everyone but Elizabeth, who understood that a man who loved books above all things had simply discovered the finest library in the country and a son-in-law who would let him sit in it undisturbed from breakfast to dark, and had concluded that there were worse uses for the autumn of a life.
He came for a month and stayed two and threatened to make it three. Jane and Mr. Bingley were there as well, settled now at an estate a half-day’s ride off that Mr. Bingley had taken largely so as to be a half-day from Jane’s sister.
They had brought with them the newest and loudest member of the family, a red squalling scrap of a babe some three months old, over whom the whole house went foolish and around whose sleep the whole house now arranged itself, as houses do.
Georgiana was eighteen now and at home, and had turned out to have a gift for babies that surprised no one but herself.
She was to be got through a London season soon by the combined generalship of Lady Matlock and her new sister Lizzy, an arrangement she regarded with a resignation that fooled nobody.
There was a great deal of coming and going, of letters and visits and the ordinary days of a family that had decided, after the year they had, to hold one another rather closer than families generally trouble to.
Lady Matlock came often and held the baby with the competence of a woman who had once held babies of her own.
She and Mrs. Gardiner, when they were at Pemberley together, would put their heads together over the tea things in a friendship that had been forged in the worst of times and had turned out, to the mild astonishment of both, to be one of the great pleasures of their lives.
The Gardiners came in the summers. The Colonel came when Rosings, which he still managed and was slowly, carefully setting to rights, could spare him. It was a full house and a happy one.
A letter had come from the north that spring, the first in the whole year, not from Lady Catherine, who had kept her silence as completely as she kept everything, but from Anne.
It was brief and strange and entirely characteristic, a few dry lines that asked for nothing and apologized for nothing and reported, in the flat clear voice Elizabeth remembered from a barred room, that her mother’s health was failing, that the Highlands were colder than anyone who had not lived in them could be brought to believe, and that she had, with her own portion and her own hand, begun to buy books.
I find I am acquiring a taste, Anne had written, late, and badly, and entirely on my own authority, which I am given to understand is the only way the thing is got.
You were right about that, as it happens.
I do not expect you to answer this. I only found I wished you to know that the shelf is no longer locked.
Elizabeth had read it twice, and folded it away, and answered it, against Anne’s expectation, with a list of books.
That was the whole of the traffic between them, and it was enough, and neither of them ever spoke of the rest.
On the morning the news came, Elizabeth woke late, which she had been doing, and lay a while in the great bed watching the light move on the ceiling and listening to the house come awake below.
She noticed that she had heard the housemaid’s key in the morning-room door downstairs without the smallest catch in her chest.
It had taken the better part of the year. There had been a season, early on, when a turned key or a shot bolt would stop her heart for a beat before her reason caught up.
Darcy had quietly had a word with the household, and the locks at Pemberley had gone soft and seldom, and somewhere in the green middle of the year the flinch had simply worn away, the way the doctor had said most of it would.
She could lie in her own bed of a morning and hear a key turn in a door and feel nothing at all but the comfortable knowledge that the day was beginning.
Darcy was still mostly asleep beside her, face down and disreputable, one arm flung across the place where she had been, a man who in the first weeks of their marriage had slept like a sentry and had only recently learned to sleep like a husband. She had grown very fond of him asleep.
Awake, he was still to the world, the contained and formidable master of Pemberley. Asleep, with his hair every direction and his dignity entirely surrendered, he was simply hers, and she took a private daily satisfaction in being the one person alive who got to see the second man.
The tray came up, their own small ceremony a year in the making, breakfast in their room on the late mornings, brought by a maid who knocked and was answered and left it on the long table by the window.
She got up, and put on her dressing gown, and let down and loosely retied her hair, and poured the chocolate and Darcy surfaced by degrees at the smell of it, as he did every morning.
He made his way up out of sleep complaining mildly about the hour and reaching for her before his eyes were properly open, which was the part of the day she would not have traded for any other.
They had a way, by now, of being together in the mornings that needed very little said. He drank his chocolate and read his letters as she sat in the window with hers with the green morning beyond the glass.
Elizabeth had learned its value the hard way, and prized it accordingly, and did not let many such mornings go by without noticing on purpose that she was happy.
This morning she had something to add to it.
She had known for above a week and had been holding it, not from any wish to keep it from him, but because she had wanted to be sure, and then, once she was sure, had wanted to choose the moment, having developed in the last year a connoisseur’s appreciation for moments and a determination to spend the good ones well.
Elizabeth had thought she might tell him at dinner, with wine and candlelight and ceremony.
She found now, watching him over the rim of her cup in the plain morning light with his hair absurd and a letter from his steward in his hand and chocolate going cold at his elbow, that she did not want ceremony for it after all.
She wanted exactly this, the ordinary morning, the unguarded man, the two of them in the quiet before the day, because the ordinary was the thing they had won, and this belonged to it.
“I have something to tell you,” she said, “and you are to put the letter down for it, because I shall want your whole face. I want to see it when you have heard my news.”
He put the letter down. Something in her voice had reached him. She watched it reach him, watched the master of Pemberley set aside the morning and turn the whole of his attention to her in the way that had undone her across a breakfast table once before, a lifetime ago.
“I have your attention,” she said, and found, now that the moment was on her, that the words she had rehearsed had gone, and that she did not need them.
“Toward the end of the year, Fitzwilliam, the winter the doctor thinks, there is going to be one more of us at Pemberley. A small one. Ours.”
For a moment he did not move at all, and she watched the meaning of it go through him. The total arrest of a man’s whole being turned now entirely toward joy, and it was the finest thing she had ever seen.
The cup was in his hand. He set it down, afterward neither of them could say quite how, only that it went over, and the chocolate ran across the tray and neither of them so much as glanced at it.
He had crossed the small distance between them and had hold of her, carefully, with a new and sudden carefulness that made her laugh even as her own eyes filled, gathering her in as though she had become the most fragile and precious thing.
He had no more words for this than he had had for the worst of it; the great things took him that way, struck him silent, drove the speech clean out of him and left only the holding.
So he held her, in the window, with the chocolate spilled across the tray and the baby grumbling down the hallway.
The whole full happy house was going about its day around them and she stood in the circle of her husband’s arms and felt his heart going hard against her cheek, and the silence between them was not the silence of a barred room nor the silence of a wedding-hour endured apart, but the other kind.
The kind that does not need filling, the full and ordinary and entirely sufficient silence of two people who have come all the way through the worst of it and out the far side into the plain astonishing dailiness of life.
Elizabeth meant to spend the whole long rest of it exactly here, in the light, on the right side of every door.