Chapter Thirty-One
Pemberley Again
Marriage was strange.
Not because Elizabeth and Darcy were strangers.
Because they were not.
On their first morning at Pemberley, Elizabeth woke in Darcy's bed and automatically shifted toward his side before she remembered that the room, the bed, and even the body beside her were all decades younger than memory suggested.
Darcy was already awake.
Watching her.
Elizabeth opened one eye. "That is unsettling."
"What is?"
"You. Staring."
"I am not staring."
"You have been staring since 1791."
Darcy's mouth twitched. "You are repeating yourself."
"Age."
"You are twenty-one."
"I have been twenty-one before. I did not care for it."
Darcy laughed.
Elizabeth sat up and discovered, with disproportionate pleasure, that her back did not object. She stretched both arms above her head.
Darcy watched with amusement. "What are you doing?"
"Existing without pain."
"You complained very little."
"I was dignified."
"You complained every morning when it rained."
"Privately."
"To me."
"Precisely. That does not count."
Later that day Elizabeth sat on the floor of the blue sitting room to examine a stack of estate maps Mrs. Reynolds had brought for her. When the housekeeper left, Elizabeth stood without touching the chair beside her.
She looked delighted.
Darcy, who had been reading near the fire, lowered his book. "Again?"
"You do not understand."
"I spent the last ten years of my life watching you reject assistance out of spite. I understand perfectly."
Elizabeth sat on the floor again simply so she could stand a second time.
Darcy laughed until she threw a folded map at him.
There were other adjustments less amusing.
Mrs. Reynolds did not know Elizabeth's preferences.
The breakfast staff placed orange marmalade beside her plate.
A maid entered the dressing room without knocking in the particular rhythm Elizabeth remembered.
The footmen addressed her as Mrs. Darcy with the careful respect offered a new mistress rather than the easy confidence of servants who had known her forty years.
Pemberley had to learn her again.
Elizabeth found this unexpectedly painful.
One afternoon Mrs. Reynolds came to her with a question concerning the winter linen. Elizabeth answered immediately, then stopped because the answer belonged to an inventory made thirty years in the future.
"I think," she corrected, "we should inspect what is presently stored before deciding."
Mrs. Reynolds smiled. "Very sensible, ma'am."
Elizabeth nearly laughed.
Darcy found her later in the long gallery staring at a portrait of his mother.
"Mrs. Reynolds thinks I am sensible."
He came beside her. "A serious misunderstanding."
Elizabeth elbowed him.
Darcy smiled. "She likes you."
"She liked me before."
"She will again."
Elizabeth looked at the portraits. "I know. I only had not expected to miss being known by the house."
Darcy understood. He slipped his hand into hers.
"Pemberley is not the walls," he said.
Elizabeth glanced at him. "That sounds suspiciously sentimental."
"Do not tell anyone."
"Your reputation would be ruined."
His thumb moved three times over her fingers.
I am here.
The grief found them most sharply in the nursery.
Elizabeth did not mean to go there. She followed a corridor one morning without thinking and found herself standing before a room that had not yet been prepared for children.
Empty.
In memory Anne's bed had once stood beneath the window.
Thomas had hidden a broken cricket bat behind the wardrobe.
Henry had carved his initials beneath a sill at age nine and blamed a visiting cousin.
Margaret had refused to sleep without a ridiculous stuffed rabbit long after she was old enough to know better.
None of them existed here.
Darcy found Elizabeth standing in the center of the room.
He stopped at the threshold.
"Anne had the window bed," Elizabeth whispered.
"I know."
"Thomas hated the yellow wallpaper."
"He said it made the room look ill."
A tear slid down Elizabeth's cheek.
Darcy crossed the room.
"If we have children--"
"They will be themselves," he said.
Elizabeth turned into him.
They never promised the same four would return. That would have been comforting and false.
They held each other instead.
It was the first great price of choosing differently.
They learned to carry it.
The first year of marriage also taught Darcy and Elizabeth that knowing each other's old habits could become a kind of laziness. Darcy sometimes assumed Elizabeth's reaction before she had one. Elizabeth occasionally answered questions he had not asked because she remembered what he used to think.
Their first serious quarrel began over a tenant family.
Darcy wished to postpone repairs to a cottage until spring because the stonework required dry weather. Elizabeth remembered that in their first life a child in that cottage became ill during winter and immediately insisted the family be moved.
Darcy refused.
"You know what happens," she said after the steward left.
"I know what happened."
"That is the same thing."
"No. It is not. The family living there now is different. The child you remember has not been born."
Elizabeth went still.
Darcy regretted the bluntness immediately, but not the point.
"We agreed," he continued more gently, "not to treat memory as prophecy."
"And if someone becomes ill?"
"Then we act. We can inspect the cottage now, provide extra coal, and arrange temporary rooms if the walls worsen. But we cannot uproot people because of ghosts."
Elizabeth's eyes filled.
"That was cruel."
Darcy closed his eyes. "Yes."
He did not defend himself.
They went to bed angry.
That too was familiar.
The next morning Darcy apologized for the word ghosts. Elizabeth apologized for attempting to govern a family from a remembered future.
They inspected the cottage together.
The winter passed without illness.
Afterward Elizabeth said, "I disliked that quarrel."
Darcy took her hand. "Good. We need not repeat it."
"You always say that."
"Because you repeat arguments."
She smiled despite herself.
Even fifty years of marriage did not remove the work of choosing one another daily.