Epilogue
ELIZABETH DARCY
Darcy frowned and stood from the breakfast table as the lowering clouds outside gently began to release their burden. He moved to the large windows overlooking the rear terrace and gardens, clasping his hands behind his back and glowering at the landscape as though it had personally offended him.
Elizabeth laid her serviette and fork aside and rose to join him, slipping a hand through the crook of his elbow and leaning companionably into his side. His irritation faded into a fond smile as he looked upon her upturned face.
“What has soured your mood, husband?” she asked lightly, having some suspicion as to the answer. He was not nearly so adept at subterfuge as he believed himself to be. She had caught him hastily breaking off conversations with Mrs Reynolds several times in the past four and twenty hours.
He sighed and shook his head. “I had planned an excursion for us today, my dear, but unless this rain is very brief, I fear it will not be possible.”
Just as she had thought. Poor man, he was always engaged in some new attempt to surprise and delight her and was too often thwarted by the demands of the estate or—as today—the weather. It would be particularly disappointing to him today, their final day of solitude following their wedding.
Darcy had appeared, an eager Mr Bingley in tow, upon her uncle Gardiner’s doorstep the day after Elizabeth’s arrival from Kent.
Jane and Bingley had settled everything between them within a fortnight; Elizabeth and Darcy had required the additional weeks their visit was then extended, ostensibly to allow Jane to shop for her trousseau with Mrs Gardiner, but truly because that lady had seen whither the wind blew with her younger niece, and recognised that the unacknowledged couple would fare better in her parlour than Longbourn’s.
Darcy had courted her most assiduously, displaying a new openness with her and positively revolutionised manners with all about him.
Gone were the haughty stares and long silences, which she now understood had covered a deep discomfort when in the presence of those not well known to him.
He instead admitted openly that he was uneasy in company, and found that many people were happy to greet such an admission as charmingly humble rather than view it as a weakness to be mocked or exploited.
The consequences of returning to Hertfordshire engaged to a man easily twice as wealthy as Jane’s betrothed, and closely related to an earl, had been entirely predictable but no less tiresome for it.
Mrs Bennet had insisted upon showing off both her engaged daughters, with particular attention to Mr Darcy and Elizabeth, to all her neighbours nearly every day.
Following a month of dinners, parties, picnics, and calls, during which both were continually mortified by Mrs Bennet’s exultations, they were wed in early July.
They had been in perfect accord that they required no more society for the present, both preferring to forego a wedding tour in favour of secluding themselves at Pemberley.
For the past weeks, Darcy had unfolded the beauties of the manor and the estate to her with an almost boyish eagerness, delighting in her every exclamation and smile as she became acquainted with her new home.
Tomorrow, the earl and countess were to arrive for a month’s stay, bringing with them Miss Darcy and Miss de Bourgh as well as their companions, along with the earl’s eldest son, his wife and young daughter, and Colonel Fitzwilliam to round out the family party.
There was some question as to whether Miss de Bourgh would continue on to her uncle’s estate at the conclusion of their stay or instead remain at Pemberley.
She and Miss Darcy had become very close during their time under their aunt’s care, and both had expressed a wish in their letters that they remain in close contact.
Elizabeth had every reason to hope that her budding friendship with her new sister would continue to grow while they lived under the same roof, and she was perfectly willing to love Miss de Bourgh just as tenderly.
Regardless, Miss Darcy would certainly remain at Pemberley when the Fitzwilliams departed.
Thus, their time inhabiting Pemberley as a couple, in solitude, would be entirely at an end after this day.
“What was it you had planned?” she asked cheerfully. “You may as well tell me, for I do not think these clouds will depart any time very soon.”
He glanced outside again and sighed. “There is a little pond in the woods, where I often went as a boy when I was in need of solitude. It was one of the few places Wickham did not know to look for me,” he added.
She leant a bit harder into his side. He had become easier with telling her of the troubles of his early years—his mother’s poor health, his father’s increasing distraction with any ‘business’ that would take him from the home where his wife daily lost strength, and Wickham’s increasing resentment of the gulf between Darcy’s future and his own—but the ghosts of the previous master and mistress, and the shade of Wickham’s youthful presence, were still very much present at Pemberley, shadows she hoped would in time be banished by the happiness they had brought here between them.
“You wished to show me this place?”
“Yes. I had a gazebo built there when I inherited, so that I might continue to spend time there without returning to the house with grass-stained breeches,” he explained with a self-deprecatory smile.
“I planned before we even arrived that it would be the last I showed you of my favourite things at Pemberley. Once the date for my relations’ arrival was set, I arranged for quite an extravagant picnic on our last day alone together. But it was all for nought.”
Elizabeth gazed out across the back gardens, blooming and vividly green in the gentle summer rain. “Is it very far?”
“Perhaps a quarter hour’s walk.”
“Well, then, let it not be said that a bit of rain got the best of us,” she announced.
“I shall don one of my older walking dresses, and you will have Mrs Reynolds condense your ‘extravagant’ arrangements into a single hamper. We will appropriate a pair of umbrellas and end very cosy in your gazebo, I daresay.”
His astonishment at her proposal was clear, as was his struggle to set aside cherished visions of a sunny day beside a pond and accommodate himself to this new plan.
But after a moment, as she had fully expected, a smile bloomed across his handsome face and he nodded eagerly.
“If you are willing, then so am I. Shall we meet at the front in half an hour?”
“That sounds perfect.”
He took her hands. “Elizabeth, whatever would I do without you?”
“Spend the day glowering at the clouds, I imagine,” she replied with a laugh.
He chuckled and acknowledged that it was likely. “Thank you for being willing to endure the weather to salvage my plans.”
She squeezed his hands. “My dear Fitzwilliam, do you not recall that it was a rainy day which brought us together? I will happily venture out into much worse than this, if you are with me.”