Epilogue
The ship came in on a grey morning with the wind still holding fair, and Elizabeth had been at the rail of the harbour wall since first light, unable to keep still, unwilling to be anywhere the vessel might come into view and find her not watching for it.
"You will wear a groove in these stones," Darcy said, coming to stand beside her with two cups of something hot he had procured from somewhere and pressed into her hands without being asked, "walking back and forth as you have been doing this half hour."
"I do not care in the least for the stones." She did not look away from the harbour mouth. "It has been above a year, William. I find a year is rather a long time to practise patience, and I do not think I have grown any better at it for the practising."
He said nothing to that, only stood beside her with his own eyes fixed on the same grey horizon, one hand resting briefly and without either of them remarking on it against the small warm weight of their son, not yet a six-month old, asleep against his father's shoulder and thoroughly unimpressed by the whole business of ships and harbours and long-awaited reunions.
It was General Blythe, arriving with Prudence on his arm a few minutes later, who spotted the first sail properly and called out that there she was, unmistakable now, coming in steady with the tide.
Prudence's hand found Elizabeth's without either of them quite deciding whose doing it was, and the two of them stood gripping each other's fingers through the whole long slow business of a ship coming into harbour, which felt, Elizabeth thought, considerably longer than any ship had any right to take when the people aboard it were people one had missed so entirely.
She saw Jane before she properly saw anyone else, a familiar fair head at the rail, and then, beside her, unmistakably Fitzwilliam, and it was several minutes yet, the ropes thrown and caught, the gangway settled, before either sister could do more than wave and laugh and wave again, both of them undignified with it, neither of them caring.
It was General Blythe who noticed first, or perhaps only said it first, watching Jane come carefully down the gangway with one hand resting against the entirely unmistakable, entirely advanced curve of her own middle, eight months along if she was a day, moving with the careful deliberateness of a woman who had grown accustomed to being watched over rather more closely than she generally cared for.
"Well," he said, to nobody in particular, in a voice that had gone rather thick, "well, I did wonder what that last letter was hinting at, and being too well bred to ask outright, though I confess I had not pictured quite so advanced a state of things by the time the ship finally made harbour."
"The ship was delayed a fortnight at Gibraltar," Jane said, reaching the bottom of the gangway with Richard's hand steady at her back the whole way down, "and I have spent every day of the delay informing my husband that his child shows every sign of arriving before we do, and my husband has spent every day of the delay pretending this does not alarm him in the least, which I do not for one moment believe. "
"I am the very picture of composure," Fitwilliam said, with the strained dignity of a man who was, in fact, nothing of the kind.
Jane was immediately and thoroughly enveloped, Elizabeth first, then Prudence, both of them talking over each other with questions neither waited to have answered, and Elizabeth, drawing back at last to look properly at her sister, found Jane's free hand had gone, quite without her seeming to notice, to touch the small sleeping head against Darcy's shoulder.
"He is beautiful," Jane said, wonderingly, "You description since your last letter. He has grown a great deal."
"They do that," Elizabeth said, "with what I consider quite unreasonable speed," and she watched her sister's face as she said it, the particular soft helplessness that came over anyone confronted with a sleeping child, and thought that in a very few months there would be two such small heads between them, and found the thought made her unaccountably, entirely happy.
It was some minutes before anyone properly noticed Fitzwilliam standing a little apart, waiting his own turn with the particular patient good humour of a man long practised in being patient, his coat sitting differently than it once had, a colonel's insignia where a lieutenant colonels had been the last time any of them had seen him.
"You have been promoted again," Elizabeth said, releasing her sister at last and turning to him properly. "I begin to think you cannot go a single campaign without the army finding some new reason to raise you higher."
"I begin to think so myself," Richard said, "though I will confess the promotion feels considerably less significant to me at present than the news my wife has apparently been carrying about for these eight months and did not think fit to properly warn me the scale of, in any letter I actually received. "
"I did warn you," Jane said, with the serene composure of a woman entirely unrepentant.
"I mentioned it quite plainly in the letter that went astray somewhere between Lisbon and wherever your regiment had got to by the time it arrived.
I cannot be held responsible for the incompetence of the packet service, nor for a husband who insists on being surprised by arithmetic he was given every opportunity to work out for himself. "
"No," Richard agreed, "though I find I am rather glad, on reflection, to have had the full shape of it in person instead," and he put his arm around her, careful of the gangway's uneven footing, careful of her in a way that had nothing to do with the footing at all, and looked at the small, gathered crowd of the people who had come to meet them with an expression Elizabeth had not often seen on him, something unguarded and entirely without its usual dry armour.
"I did not think, the day I proposed to you on that quay," he said to Jane, quietly, though not so quietly that the rest of them did not hear it, "that I should ever come back to this harbour a colonel, with a wife eight months gone with our first child, and a nephew already waiting to make his acquaintance besides.
I find I had rather modest expectations for my own happiness, that day.
I am glad to say they have been thoroughly exceeded. "
"As have mine," said Jane, and kissed him, without the smallest regard for who might be watching, and Elizabeth, beside her husband, felt his hand find hers, their son stirring faintly against his shoulder at the small movement, and thought that whatever winding roads had carried each of them here, a compromise refused, a war endured, a whole family scattered and gathered and scattered again across the better part of four years, they had arrived, all of them, together, at precisely this: a grey morning, a harbour full of returning ships, two small new lives already begun or nearly so, and every person she loved most in the world standing within arm's reach of her at once.