Home from Above
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Elizabeth watched for the cat, and sure enough, after about a quarter of an hour, maybe more, she observed Cleo emerge from the garden door, her tail held high with the supreme air of a creature privy to gentlemanly business.
She and Jane exchanged glances across the bare winter rosebushes while her heart tried to keep its measure behind her ribs.
Her father would not reject Darcy in a quarter of an hour.
His wit would not allow it—not with his particular brand of interrogation, which typically involved at least three literary allusions, two pipe lightings, and one devastating observation that made the recipient question their entire existence.
Which meant Darcy kept her father to the main issue at hand, the question of whether he would allow Elizabeth to make her own decision, and Elizabeth knew her father well enough to know he would have injected obstacles to test Darcy’s mettle.
“He is coming out,” Jane said quietly, her hand finding Elizabeth’s arm.
“And I have been admiring the frost for fifteen minutes,” Elizabeth remarked, her gaze drifting, with studied nonchalance, toward the side door.
Darcy’s coat was his finest, dark against the pale stone, and he approached with a purposefulness that stopped just short of haste—his stride long, his expression resolute, his eyes fixed upon her with a gravity Bingley would never have attempted.
“Go,” Jane said softly. “It is well.”
And so Elizabeth took her steps steadily.
She would not run, like she had when his carriage had driven up.
Her mother and sisters would be watching from the upper landing, and her father from the library.
Cleo had already scaled the garden wall, off on her own errands, not at all concerned that Elizabeth’s heart fluttered like a fledgling teetering at the edge of a nest.
And then she saw his mouth curve—that slight, devastating curve which meant he would proceed—and she hastily scrambled with her skirt, or her hair, gloves, or cloak, her hands not knowing which to smooth and tuck.
He was upon her before she had even arranged her wool hat, that grin giving him an insouciant air.
“Miss Elizabeth, your father has given me his blessing.”
The words were like sunlight breaking through the winter clouds.
Elizabeth was aware of Jane stepping back, and then her mother and sisters creeping from the garden door, tugging on cloaks and gloves.
She swallowed, prepared for the flourish and the drop to the frozen gravel, or perhaps he would bow and take her hand, and…
But Darcy stood still before her, as if waiting for a response to a question he had not asked.
“I believe, Mr. Darcy, that this is when you are allowed to make an inquiry?”
“Do you now understand my character, Miss Elizabeth?” He offered his arm, and she took it to mean he would not be dropping to his knees and offering that bumbling proposal Bingley had upon exiting her father’s study, practically bouncing onto the floor with all the enthusiasm of a spaniel.
She took his arm, slipping her gloved hand into the crook of his elbow.
“Yes, I believe I have made a thorough evaluation of your character, and it had mystified me completely. But when you returned from Pemberley with your sister in tow, and I had stopped studying you, tore up the ledger in my mind, then I found I had no reasons to like or dislike you, or tally up whether you gave me cream or let me have the seat by the fire, or any number of things Cleo might evaluate, which she doesn’t—because she simply jumps in your lap and purrs. ”
“You are evaluating my character as a cat would?” Darcy raised an eyebrow as he led her toward the far end of the garden, where she supposed they might have a modicum of privacy.
“I am answering your question, Mr. Darcy, and I hope I haven’t exhausted you.”
“No, but I shall like to show you Longbourn.”
“You wish to show me my own home?” Elizabeth was not sure why the notion delighted her. “Very well, then, my boots are sturdy enough, but yours perhaps are such fine riding boots, they may not survive our frosty muck.”
“Then it is a good thing I asked the grooms to saddle Jane’s Molly for you, for we are riding to the northern boundary. I believe you shall need to see the fallen tree before you can fully make your decision.”
“Mr. Darcy, you hold me in such suspense, as you have not yet asked my opinion, whether it is good or bad, I do not know.”
“I do not require more than a nod from you, dearest,” he whispered as they approached the stable yard, and Elizabeth was all too aware of his warm breath on the shell of her ear.
“Insufferable man,” she muttered, turning toward the horses.
Darcy’s bay stallion stood ready beside Molly, who bore a side saddle.
Elizabeth had never been a proficient rider, and she possessed neither a riding habit nor the inclination to acquire one.
Yet Darcy’s eagerness was infectious, and she found herself quite determined to see the fallen tree obstructing the stream.
“I trust you will not challenge me to a race.”
“I promise. Sedate walking, as befitting the lady of Longbourn.” He cupped his hands for her to mount.
“Molly and your horse are a well-matched pair.” Elizabeth gathered her skirts and attempted a graceful ascent, all too conscious of her rather determined grip on Darcy’s shoulders.
The height proved greater than anticipated, and she shifted her hold from him to the pommel with as much dignity as she could muster.
“Molly is gentle. She will carry you at a walk, and I shall be beside you.” Darcy swung onto his stallion with the easy competence of a man who had been riding since childhood.
“I am unaccustomed to riding.” Elizabeth arranged her skirts, feeling the mare shift beneath her. “I walk everywhere—it is swifter, and I am spared the necessity of negotiating with a creature who holds strong opinions about puddles.”
“Molly is very sensible about puddles.”
“So Jane assures me. She also claims Molly has a penchant for abrupt halts whenever she encounters particularly interesting grass, so I shall prepare myself for an impromptu luncheon.”
“No grass or any greenery in January to tempt her.” Darcy took Molly’s lead rope and nickered for the mare to walk alongside. Together, they walked out of the stable yard and onto the Longbourn lane.
Longbourn looked different from horseback.
The stable yard, the kitchen garden wall, the bare branches of the pear tree by the scullery window—everything she knew was still there, still exactly where it had always been, but from Molly’s back it all sat at a different angle, as though someone had lifted the lid on a house she had lived in all her life and shown her the rooms from above.
Elizabeth had not anticipated this transformation, nor prepared herself for the way the familiar landscape reordered itself from above.
The hedgerows she had pressed through a thousand times now displayed their patterns, their careful interlacing, the handiwork of generations of Bennets shaping boundaries and windbreaks.
The tenant cottages, once so close and self-contained, appeared now as neat little boxes against the winter fields, their chimneys sending up slender columns of smoke.
“You are quiet,” Darcy said.
“I am looking at my home in a way I have never seen.” She kept her eyes on the horizon, where the bare trees of the copse stood silver-grey against the pale sky.
“I have lived here my entire life. I have walked these paths since before I could properly walk at all—my father used to carry me on his shoulders, pointing out the birds and the wildflowers and the places where the hedgehogs liked to sleep. And yet I have never seen it like this.”
“Like what?”
“It is hard to say.” Elizabeth felt her eyes welling as she blinked at the meadows unfolding before her, the patchwork of winter fields, the interlocking hedges, and the stone walls that crossed the terrain.
“On foot, I know every inch of it. The streams, walls, gates, and the paths that cut through thickets, around ponds, and over hills—an endless maze of trails, shortcutting to the orchard, skipping over stiles to the tenant farms, along the stream to the mill, the smithy, and winding back through the home farm.”
“And?” The horses passed the great, stubborn oak, the ancient one Mr. Bennet claimed predated the house and the family, possibly the county.
“I have no words,” she admitted. “The possibility of never walking this way again…”
“You will come home, Elizabeth.” Darcy drew his stallion so close that his leg brushed against her skirts. “I promise you visits as often as you like.”
Elizabeth’s hand strayed to her pocket, where Darcy’s letter lay folded—his three questions, his confession—and she knew, with a certainty that surprised her, that she would go with him.
“I do not believe I have agreed to anything yet, Mr. Darcy.” She could not help the wit or the grin, the combination that tempered her most vulnerable moments. “If you had supposed I had nodded, I wish to inform you that I was merely stopping Molly from plodding into an icy patch.”
“Noted,” Darcy said, but he, too, was grinning, because he now knew her tease meant affection, and that knowledge had blunted Elizabeth’s most effective weapon. Perhaps she required a different tactic.
The boundary stream came into view as they crested the northern ridge—a ribbon of silver threading between the fields, its banks still white with frost. And there, sprawled across its width like a fallen giant, was the elm.
It was larger than Elizabeth had expected from the reports.
The root plate had torn from the frozen earth, leaving a ragged crater on the Netherfield side, and the crown had tangled in the branches of the trees on the Longbourn bank where it would dam up the water behind it.
The trunk lay across the water like a bridge, its bark dark and wet, its branches reaching toward the sky as though still hoping to grow.
Darcy dismounted and came to assist Elizabeth. His hands found her waist, steadying her as she slipped from the saddle, and they stood so near that she could see the pulse at his throat, the faint tension in his jaw, the searching in his eyes.
“You have been crying,” he said.
“I am not grieving.” She heard the words come out sharper than she intended, and she softened her voice. “I am saying goodbye to my home. The only place on earth I am rooted.”
The horses stood behind them, patient and still. Hercules lowered his head to nose at the frozen ground. Molly pressed close to his flank, and their breath rose together in the cold air, two matched plumes that mingled and dissolved.
Darcy had not released her waist. His hands rested there, light and warm through the wool of her pelisse, and Elizabeth looked up at him—at the face she had once considered merely proud, then grudgingly handsome, then privately devastating, and now simply his.
The face she wished to see across the breakfast table and beside the library fire and in the doorway of every room she would ever enter for the rest of her life.
“Tell me about Pemberley,” she said.
Darcy’s gaze stayed on her, the deep orbs of his eyes like pools she could easily get lost in.
“There is a library,” he said, “with windows facing east. In the morning the light comes across the water—there is a stream, wider than this one, running through the grounds—and it fills the room with a kind of brightness you can feel against your skin, even in winter. My mother used to sit in the window seat and read while I played on the floor beside her. The cushion is faded where the light has touched it. I have never allowed it to be moved.”
Elizabeth felt the image settle behind her breastbone—the stream, the light, the faded cushion, the boy on the floor beside his mother’s chair.
“There is a kitchen garden,” he continued, “behind the south wing, where my mother grew her roses. Mrs. Reynolds maintains them still, though she says they were never the same after my mother died. The beds are laid out in the old formal style, and in June they bloom all at once—white and pink and a deep red my mother called Pemberley crimson, though I suspect the name was her own invention.” His voice had changed.
The careful formality had dropped away from it, and what remained was lower and more private, the voice of a man speaking not to impress but to share.
“The stream runs close enough to hear from the garden. My mother said it was the reason my father proposed there, so the stream would cover the sound of her answer in case she refused him.”
Elizabeth made a sound—not quite a laugh, but its warmer cousin.
“She did not refuse him,” Darcy said, unnecessarily.
“I gathered.”
“And then there is the lake, a peaceful, serene lake—seen from every south-facing window. My mother built a pavilion on the shore where she liked to sit and read, take a basket and pass an afternoon with the swans. The sunsets from that pavilion—I think of her painting the sky with her watercolors. I used to bring Georgiana when she had nightmares, and we would count the stars.”
Elizabeth’s hand went out to Darcy, touching his chest, resting against his heart.
“Pemberley means the world to you. And now, you are going to make me cry, not because of the place or the lake or the library—but because your people lived and loved there. Your parents, grandparents, even back to George, a boy lent to Longbourn, and the meaning of it is too immense.”
She was ready. It was what every woman did when her heart belonged to a man worthy to love, cherish, and honor. And so, she placed her hand in his, and nodded.
“Come home with me, Elizabeth,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you. I will go with you to Pemberley and make it mine, and I will come home to Longbourn when my heart requires it, and I will love you for the rest of my life.”
Darcy’s breath caught, a small, sharp sound, and then his hands cupped her face, and his mouth found hers.
Elizabeth’s own breath faltered, a gentle hitch in her chest, and then the January air vanished, replaced by the mingling of cold and warmth—the frost on his lips, the heat beneath.
With the last lucid corner of her mind, she thought this must be what the stream sounded like when it ran clear: steady, bright, and inevitable.
Behind them, Hercules lifted his head from the grass and nickered softly. Molly flicked an ear in acknowledgment.
Elizabeth, standing at the threshold of her old life with Darcy’s arms around her, looked back at Longbourn in the distance—small and beloved, its chimneys smoking, its windows catching the pale January light—and felt a bittersweet gratitude for the home she would always carry within her, and for the man who would be taking her home with him.