Epilogue
Elizabeth Darcy, Thirty Years Later
Pemberley was at its best in June.
Elizabeth had thought so the first time she saw it, though at the time she had not wished to admit how much the house pleased her.
She had been a guest then, determined to be sensible, determined not to be impressed, determined above all not to fall any more deeply in love with the man to whom it belonged.
Pemberley had not assisted her in that resolution.
Its woods, its water, its rising grounds, and its easy, natural beauty had all conspired against her judgment, just like their master’s dry wit, surprising compassion, and unshakable honour.
She had thought it beautiful again as a bride, when she arrived not as a visitor but as mistress, still astonished by the word and not entirely certain she would ever feel equal to it.
Pemberley had seemed too large then, too old, too full of expectations.
She had wandered its rooms with keys at her waist and servants waiting for direction, and she had wondered more than once whether the house would always feel as if she had been lent someone else’s life.
Thirty years had done what thirty years will do.
They had filled quiet rooms with voices, worn paths into certainty, and taught Elizabeth every beloved habit of the house.
Pemberley no longer felt like Darcy’s house, or even like the grand place she had once visited with such determined indifference.
It was home, and on this June morning, it was overflowing.
Elizabeth stood at the window of her sitting room and looked out over the lawns, where several branches of the family had scattered themselves with very little regard for order.
A pair of children were chasing one another near the shrubbery.
Someone’s bonnet had been abandoned on a bench.
Three young ladies were pretending to sketch while plainly talking too much to make any progress.
Near the gravel walk, Bingley was laughing at something Darcy had said, which meant it was either very dry or not funny at all, and Bingley had generously decided to improve it. She simply smiled.
The house had been filling for days. Though they had visitors in almost every season, it had been many years since nearly all the family had come at once. But then, Elizabeth thought with a smile, it was hardly surprising. Not when they all had such an inducement to come.
Their own children had arrived first, which was proper, since they had the best claim upon the house and the least patience for ceremony.
She and Darcy had been given four children.
Two sons, two daughters, and thirty years of discovering that parenthood did not become simpler merely because children grew taller.
Thomas, their eldest, was nine-and-twenty now, married a little over a year and still occasionally startling Elizabeth by looking so much like his father when he was serious.
He had Darcy’s height, Darcy’s sense of duty, and, to Elizabeth’s private satisfaction, more than a little of her own, more mischievous sense of humour.
His wife, Clara, was smiling, tired but as lovely as ever, and very much the centre of carefully disguised attentions.
Their second son, William, six-and-twenty, had spent the previous evening in the library with his father discussing improvements to the north farms. Elizabeth had paused at the door long enough to hear him say, in a tone alarmingly like Darcy’s, that drainage could not be taken lightly.
She had gone away laughing before either gentleman could demand the cause.
Anne, their eldest daughter, was four-and-twenty, married these two years, and possessed of a calm authority that had once made Darcy say, with great satisfaction, that she had Elizabeth’s courage and his own good sense.
Elizabeth had replied that he was very generous with the inheritance of virtues, especially for a man who still liked to believe that caution and correctness were the same thing.
Darcy had accepted the rebuke with the dignity of long practice.
Margaret, their youngest at twenty, was the only one not yet married, and not in the least troubled by the fact.
She had her mother’s eyes, her father’s stubbornness, and a talent for making both appear innocent.
She had spent the morning leading a party of cousins toward the stream and had promised her mother that no one would get wet, which Elizabeth considered among the least reliable assurances she had ever heard.
Jane and Bingley had arrived the day before with three of their five daughters, the other two following with husbands and children of their own.
Jane was silver-haired now, but still so lovely that strangers often looked twice before remembering she was old enough to have married daughters.
Bingley had grown rounder, happier, and no more capable of entering Pemberley without declaring it the finest place in England than he had been thirty years before.
Not long after their marriage, they had moved to an estate only four miles from Pemberley, and Elizabeth had never ceased to be grateful for it.
Mary came from Longbourn with two ledgers, three questions for Darcy on suggested improvements for the property, and a basket of strawberry jam from the garden.
She had never married and had never shown the least regret over it.
Longbourn had prospered under her care in a manner that silenced even those who had once wondered whether a woman could manage an estate without a husband.
Mary knew every field, every account, every tenant child likely to need a place, and every fence her father had once neglected because books had seemed more interesting than the land.
She was still solemn, still exacting, still occasionally inclined to improve the conversation with a moral observation no one had requested, but she was happy.
That happiness had given her gravity a warmer shape.
Mr Bennet, who had lived long enough to see Mary prove him right and wrong in equal measure, had once told Elizabeth that he had spent half his life underestimating his middle daughter and the other half being corrected by her accounts.
He had died five years ago in his library at Longbourn, with Mary nearby and a book open on his knee.
Elizabeth still missed him most sharply when something absurd happened and he was not there to make it worse by enjoying it.
Georgiana had come with her husband and two of her three children, her eldest being detained by a confinement of her own.
She had grown from the shy girl Elizabeth first knew into a woman of gentle confidence, still quiet, still musical, but no longer afraid of taking up space in a room.
She and Mary had played together the night before, and Darcy had listened with an expression every bit as proud as he had worn when Georgiana had been sixteen years old.
Kitty, now Lady Ashbourne, arrived with great fluttering and greater consequence, though she wore both much better than she would have done in youth.
Her husband, a baron of good sense and limited imagination, adored her in precisely the steady way she needed.
Kitty had become affectionate, a little fussy, and surprisingly capable when anyone she loved was in difficulty.
She still worried, but she no longer seemed likely to be carried away by every feeling that passed through the room.
Lydia arrived last, loudly, splendidly, and with enough luggage to suggest she was either staying a month or preparing to clothe the county.
Her husband, Mr Hargreaves, was extremely wealthy, endlessly indulgent, and vulgar in a manner that had proven, over time, to be more generous than offensive.
He bought too many things, laughed too loudly, and loved Lydia with such uncomplicated good nature that Elizabeth had long ago surrendered any expectation that Lydia’s life should serve as a moral lesson.
Lydia was happy, rich, and surrounded by several loud, handsome children, and no argument had ever persuaded her that this was anything less than a personal triumph.
“Lizzy,” Jane said from the doorway, “you are hiding.”
Elizabeth turned from the window. “I am observing.”
Jane came into the room smiling. “That is what you call hiding when you are older.”
“No, not I.”
“And what do you call it?”
“Wisdom.”
Jane laughed at that and held out her hand.
Elizabeth took it, and for a moment they stood together as they had so often stood in girlhood, shoulder to shoulder and slightly apart from the noise.
It seemed impossible, sometimes, that they had once been two young women at Longbourn with uncertain futures and very little power over them.
Jane’s hand was thinner now, the skin softer with age, but the touch was the same.
“You are happy?” Jane asked.
Elizabeth looked out again. Below, Darcy had turned to listen to something Bingley was saying, his head inclined in that attentive way that had once undone her in a church in London.
His hair was silver now. The years had deepened the lines about his mouth and eyes, but age had not made him less handsome to her.
It had only made his face more familiar, and familiarity had become its own form of beauty.
“I am,” Elizabeth said. “Very.”
Jane’s expression softened. “I remember being so afraid for you.”
“In general, or on a particular occasion? There were several.”
“When I thought Mama would make you marry Mr Collins, and when you fled the house for London. When you travelled all across the country looking for our father. Not to mention when you married after three days and wrote to tell me only after it was already arranged.”
“You had become engaged with almost equal haste, if I remember correctly.”
Jane smiled. “That is different. Charles was being romantic.”
“Fitzwilliam was being practical.”
“And you were being?”