Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
The following autumn, Elizabeth Darcy found the Cowper on the third shelf of the Pemberley library.
Not the grand shelves — those held the serious things, the folios, the sets, the leather-backed rows that had been accumulating for a century.
The third shelf was a working shelf, the kind a reader maintains rather than a collector: books with broken spines and dog-eared pages and the occasional piece of paper used as a marker.
Her father's fourth volume was there, spine-up.
The Rambler. Several volumes whose titles she did not recognise but whose wear suggested they had been read rather than shelved.
Not corrected. Not absorbed. Not placed in some polite corner where it was technically present but understood to belong to a different category. Simply there, spine out, as though it had always been one of his.
She stood looking at it for a moment in the particular way she stood when she was working something out.
"The third shelf," said Darcy, from the doorway.
She turned. He was leaning against the frame with the comfortable ease of a man in his own library, which she was still, six months in, finding new versions of.
She had discovered that Darcy at Pemberley was less defended than Darcy at Netherfield, less careful, more likely to appear in a doorway in his shirtsleeves and say something dry about the estate steward or the autumn weather.
"You put it with the working books," she said.
"It is a working book."
"It has my notes in it."
"That is," he said, coming into the room, "why it is a working book."
She looked back at the shelf. The Cowper sat between a battered Milton and something in French she would investigate later. It looked, she thought, at home.
"I had imagined," she said, "that you might keep it separately. As a — I do not know. A relic of the correspondence."
"The correspondence is ongoing," said Darcy. He came to stand beside her, looking at the shelf with the same attention he gave everything. "I see no reason to archive it."
Elizabeth turned the Cowper out of the shelf. She opened it to the garden poem — the page she had opened a hundred times, with the last line of the poem and, below it, in his careful upright pencil: I had not considered it so. I should have.
She looked at it for a moment. She looked at the blank space at the bottom of the margin, which had been blank since Netherfield, through the ball, through the Thursday call, through Lady Catherine's visit, through the library at Longbourn and the Pemberley library and the six months of a marriage that had been, she thought, rather what she had expected and considerably better.
She took the pencil from the shelf — his pencil, which had migrated there from his writing-table and lived among the working books as though it belonged — and wrote, at the bottom of the margin, below his eight words:
The garden was enough, until it became the beginning.
She looked at it. Then she handed him the book.
He read it. She watched him read it — the look that preceded and survived the smile, the look she had first seen on a landing at Netherfield and which she had been accumulating ever since.
"Better than mine," he said.
"Your eight words," she said, "were precisely right for October. Mine are right for now."
"The margins are filling up."
"We have the rest of Cowper," said Elizabeth. "And the Milton, and whatever that is in French, and a considerable library. We will manage."
He set the book back on the third shelf, spine out, between the battered Milton and the French volume, where it had been and would continue to be.
He looked at it for a moment. She stood beside him, in the Pemberley library in autumn, with the light coming through the tall windows and the garden somewhere below, going gold and cold and still.
"The garden," he said.
"The beginning," she said.
He took her hand in the deliberate way he had, the way that meant he knew what he was doing, and they stood for a moment in the library that was, she had discovered, one of the best rooms she had ever been in — not because of its size or its shelves or the century of books around them, but because it was his and now hers and the two of them in it were, she thought, exactly what the room had been waiting for.
What came after — the seasons at Pemberley and the visits to Longbourn and the long argument about the Milton that would last three winters and resolve into something neither of them had expected — belonged, as all the best things did, to the unrecorded hours.
The End
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