29. The Hedgerows
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE HEDGEROWS
Darcy arrived at Longbourn a few minutes before nine o’clock. He had checked the knot in his cravat four times, a desperate attempt to impose order on a man who felt entirely untethered. But as he stood at the garden gate, the rhythmic racing of his heart mocked his composure.
The first thing he heard was the scrabbling of paws as Nettle darted from behind a cluster of overgrown hydrangea. She barked and leaped, her eyes fixed on him with the intensity of a devotee.
Darcy didn’t wait. He opened the gate and drew the worn leather ball from his pocket, then threw it high and wide, sailing over the budding rose bushes. It bounced, rolled, and stopped beneath an elm tree.
Nettle reached the ball, examined it with the seriousness of a magistrate, and then, in flagrant disregard of their recent accord, seized it and ran on. No backward glance, no triumph—she scrambled through a gap in the fence and vanished onto the lane.
“Nettle!”
The voice came from the garden bench. Elizabeth stood there, her morning dress a soft, pale splash of color against the verdant green.
She was breathtakingly undone. Her hair, usually confined with such rigorous precision, was a dark, tumbling mess around her shoulders, and she had pulled a thin, ivory shawl over her shoulders against the morning chill.
She looked ethereal, unformed, as if she had just stepped out of a dream and realized she had forgotten how to play the lady.
She moved toward the gate with a grace so unstudied it could only be unconscious, her skirts swirling at her ankles as she broke into a run.
“Where is she going?” Darcy called out, his own heartbeat suddenly echoing in his ears.
“I have no idea. She has never done this!” Elizabeth didn’t stop. She passed through the gap in the fence, her shawl fluttering behind her like the wings of a white butterfly.
Darcy followed. He followed because Elizabeth was running, and because pursuit—toward her or after her—had become the singular order of his existence. The fields beyond blazed with late-spring gold and green, and as they crested the rise, the rest of the world obligingly vanished.
They walked quickly, then slowed, then fell into an awkward, pulsing rhythm. Nettle had slowed to a trot, leading them up a narrow, neglected path that Darcy did not recognize—a track lined with a tangled, impenetrable hedge of hawthorn and blackthorn, wild and indifferent.
Elizabeth walked beside him, breath quick, color high in her cheeks. She did not look his way, but he felt the warmth of her presence as surely as if she had.
“This is the path to Oakham Mount,” she said, her voice breathless. “Nettle and I have walked it a hundred times. She knows every rabbit hole between here and the summit, and she has never once bolted this way without me.”
Darcy looked at her then—truly looked—and saw the wildness in her hair, the brilliance in her eyes, the shawl clutched to her chest as if it concealed some precious secret. It struck him, with a thrill equal parts terror and delight, that they were entirely alone.
His heart resumed its clamor, and he wondered if this was the moment to speak. But Elizabeth, rather than pause, darted toward a bank of hedgerows.
“Nettle! Where are you?”
The terrier had vanished. Darcy pressed a hand to his hat, lest it join the missing, and searched the dense hedge—a wall of thorns and green. Nettle’s nose poked beneath the lower branches, her tail wagging with the satisfaction of one who has discovered a confidante.
“Nettle, what did you find?” Elizabeth bent over to peek, and Darcy lowered himself at the same time.
Their heads bumped, and his hat fell to the ground.
“Pardon me,” he muttered, though Elizabeth’s gasp owed nothing to injury.
At the base, half-hidden by a curtain of new growth, was a hollow, a small dark space where the roots had formed a natural shelter, and Nettle was pushing through the undergrowth toward it with the single-mindedness of a creature returning to a place she knew.
She deposited the ball in the shadows, then sat beside it, looking back at Elizabeth with a solemn, unwavering gaze.
Elizabeth’s hand flew to her mouth, her fingers trembling against her lips.
“This is where we found her,” she whispered, the sound thick with a sudden, aching fragility.
“Two winters ago. She was in that hollow, shivering—nothing but mud and bone. Mamma told me to leave her. She said she was nobody’s dog, a scavenger. But I… I knew.”
She turned to Darcy, and the morning light caught the side of her face, illuminating the raw, unguarded expression he had been searching for through months of silence and pride. It was the face of a woman who had finally run out of witty defenses.
“I carried her home,” Elizabeth continued, her voice fracturing. “I dried her by the kitchen fire and named her Nettle because they are wild, and they sting, and they are generally hated by people who have never troubled to learn their virtues.”
She gestured toward the hollow. “She brought the ball here, Mr. Darcy. She brought her favorite thing to the place where she was found.”
“Dogs do not assign symbolic meaning to locations, Miss Bennet.”
Elizabeth let out a short, wet laugh, her eyes flashing with a sudden, familiar spark. “You and your cold, immutable facts. This dog does. She chose you long before I did. She has been right about everything—about my sisters, about the path, about you.”
She stepped closer to him, the distance between them shrinking until he could smell the damp earth and the lavender on her shawl.
“If you tell me that animals do not possess judgment, I will remind you that Nettle bit your trousers the day you arrived at Longbourn. She has since decided you were acceptable, and her assessment has proven far more reliable than mine. She required one afternoon to know you, Darcy. I required two months.”
“Miss Bennet?—”
“Do not speak.” Her voice was shaking. Not with anger, not with the controlled fury of Hunsford, but with something he had never heard in Elizabeth Bennet’s voice before, something that sounded like courage assembling itself for a leap.
“I have something to say to you, and if you speak, I will lose my nerve, and I have very little nerve remaining.”
Darcy did not speak. He stood beside a bank of wild hedge with a terrier sitting in a hollow, and the woman he loved trembling with something that was not anger. And so he closed his mouth because he had spent months honoring what she asked.
Elizabeth squared her shoulders. The gesture was familiar—the same stance she had taken at Hunsford before she demolished him. But the face above the squared shoulders was open, and terrified, and brave.
“Mr. Darcy.” Her gaze held his. “Be not alarmed, Sir.”
He swallowed a gasp at the words—his words. The opening line of the letter he had penned in a parsonage while his world burned.
“Be not alarmed,” her voice found its footing, “by the apprehension that this conversation contains any repetition of the sentiments I expressed at Hunsford. I do not intend to call you proud. I do not intend to call you ungentlemanly. I have no plans to mention your arrogance, your conceit, or your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, because I have spent two months discovering that none of those words apply to a man who dances with the sister nobody dances with and pours tea for the mother nobody endures and rides twenty-four miles to protect the family he once called an obstacle to his own happiness.”
Darcy could neither move nor breathe, compelled to stand in a hedgerow and witness Elizabeth Bennet take his letter and render it wholly unrecognizable.
“You told me, in a parsonage in Kent, that you had struggled. In vain,” Elizabeth murmured, her mouth curving into a smile that was not quite joy, but something far more.
“That your feelings would not be repressed. I find myself making a similar confession. I suspect I shall make it with considerably less vanity and rather more struggle, because I am Elizabeth Bennet, and I rarely do anything gracefully that I could do with wit—and the wit is all that is keeping me upright at this moment.”
The world contracted to the space between them. Somewhere in the thorns, a blackbird sang—a sharp, liquid note marking time. Nettle sat in her hollow, the silent witness to a covenant in the making.
“You loved me, you said, against your will, against your reason, and even against your character. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” he said, his voice barely a rasp.
He would remember those words until the day he drew his final breath. They were the worst thing he had ever said and the truest thing he had ever felt, inextricably tangled, and she had heard only the arrogance, while he had been too broken to offer her anything else.
“I wish to inform you, Mr. Darcy,” Elizabeth continued, her breath catching as she steeled herself, “that I find myself in a similar predicament. But I must improve upon your version, because your version was frankly terrible, and I believe I can do better.”
She took a breath, like a woman standing on the edge of a precipice, deciding that the fall was worth the flight.
“I love you,” she said. The three words hung in the air, distinct and crystalline.
“I love you not against my will but with every stubborn, defiant particle of it. I love you not against my reason, but because my reason has spent months assembling evidence, and the verdict is absolute. And I love you not against my character, but entirely in keeping with it. My character has always been to argue with the people I respect most, to walk through mud for the people I hold dear, and to carry home the things I find in the hedgerows that others believe are not worth saving.”
Her voice fractured on the final word—a small sound of surrender that she caught and held.
“You once asked if you were the last man in the world I would be prevailed to marry,” she said, her eyes locked onto his, unblinking, searing.
“But you haven’t been for a long time. You are the first. You have been the first for longer than I dared to know, and the knowing is terrifying—it is the most terrifying thing I have ever endured.
If you do not say something soon, I am going to blame this entire situation on the dog, turn my back on you, and walk home, and I shall never speak of this again. ”
Darcy stood motionless. He looked at the woman before him—her hair, wild, dark waves falling over her shoulders, her shawl clutched in white-knuckled hands, her eyes bright with either tears or victory, and her heart offered without disguise, and every defense he had constructed since Hunsford dissolved like morning frost in sunlight.
“You are shaking.” He moved at last, his composure in tatters. He reached out, fingers hovering near her shawl, as if a touch might shatter the moment.
“I am shaking,” she breathed, her eyes darting to his trembling hands, “considerably.”
“You are the steadiest person I have ever known. You walked three miles through mud for your sister. You refused two proposals when you had nothing. You are standing in a hedgerow, being braver than anyone I have ever met.”
“You are deflecting with compliments. I proposed. An answer is customary.”
He didn’t answer with words. He lifted her hand, his fingers trembling slightly. He pressed his lips to the center of her palm—not the back of the hand, but the very pulse of her, the skin warm and rapid. Elizabeth’s breath hitched, a sound of pure, unadulterated release.
“Elizabeth.” He spoke the name against her skin, his breath a soft tremor. “I have loved you since Hertfordshire. I proposed to you badly in Kent. And it seems you are better at proposing than I am.”
“Would you accept or refuse? That is the question.”
He lowered himself to his knees, in the mud at the hedgerow, and looked up at her.
“I would accept you in a ditch, a parsonage, and yes, I would accept you in the hedgerows where your mother predicted you would all perish, because where has never mattered. Only the who. And that has been you since I watched you cross a field with mud on your petticoats and thought, this woman will be my undoing. I was right, and the undoing has been the making of me. I accept, Elizabeth. I accept you.”
Elizabeth kissed him.
She had not planned it, but it happened. With him kneeling, she drew him into her arms and pressed her mouth to his. The kiss was brief and fierce, tasting of salt, of spring, and of the dizzying sweetness of a woman who had spent two months falling and had, at last, landed.
Darcy’s hand rose to cradle her face, his palm against her cheek, fingers threading through the dark tendrils of her hair.
He kissed her back with the thoroughness of a man who had imagined this moment through a thousand solitary nights and now meant to do it justice.
His attention was full, unhurried, and entirely hers.
They separated because breathing required it. Elizabeth’s face was flushed, and her eyes were impossibly bright, and Darcy did not wish to stop gazing at her, because she was the most impossible and most beautiful creature to ever grace his world.
“You have disarranged my hair,” she said.
“Your hair was escaping before I touched it.”
“I have just proposed to you, and you are critiquing my coiffure.”
“I have just accepted, and you are critiquing my critique.”
He caught her eyes, and the humor between them was a bridge. “We are to do this forever, are we not?”
“I am rather counting on it.”
A growl sent Darcy retreating from the hedgerow, mindful of his trousers, but the sound was accompanied by a tail wag so vigorous that Nettle’s entire hindquarters joined in. Approval and warning, affection and ferocity, all contained in one small body—much like her mistress.
“She approves,” Elizabeth said, laughing.
“Of the message or me?”
“Both.” She wrapped her arms around him, and then she growled.
And he covered it with a deeper kiss.