Chapter Forty
Again
Elizabeth was seventy-four when she and Darcy returned to the south meadow.
The hawthorn was dying.
Again.
Darcy touched the bark with satisfaction. "This time I am cutting it down."
Elizabeth leaned on her cane. "Murderer."
"It is dead."
"Mostly."
"It fell on a fence last winter."
"It apologized."
Darcy stared.
Elizabeth smiled.
He was eighty-two.
Older than when he had died the first time.
That amused him more than he admitted.
His hair was white again. His shoulders had begun to stoop. The young man's face she had found in Meryton had become, slowly, the face of her husband once more--not identical, because different griefs and different laughter had carved different lines, but unmistakably his.
They sat on the bench Matthew had placed near the meadow several years earlier.
Pemberley stretched below.
Different children.
Different grandchildren.
Different lives.
Same house.
Same two people.
Elizabeth rested her head against his shoulder. "Do you regret it?"
Darcy did not ask what she meant. "No."
"Not even our first children?"
His hand tightened around hers. "I regret losing them."
"So do I."
"I do not regret Clara, Matthew, or Eleanor."
"No."
They sat in silence.
Elizabeth watched a pair of birds settle on the low stone wall.
"Do you think the first life still happened?"
Darcy considered before answering. "I hope so."
"Somewhere?"
"Perhaps."
"Our children existed."
"Yes."
"They mattered."
"Always."
Elizabeth looked at him. "You have become very philosophical."
"My wife is exhausting."
She smiled.
Darcy's thumb moved across her wrist once, twice, three times.
I am here.
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
"Fitzwilliam."
"Yes?"
"If we die again--"
"No."
She laughed. "You do not know what I was going to say."
"I do."
"Arrogant."
"Experienced."
Elizabeth smiled. "I was going to say, if we die again, I do not want another beginning."
Darcy looked at her. "No?"
She shook her head. "Twice is enough."
His expression softened. "What do you want?"
Elizabeth looked over Pemberley at the house where two versions of their lives somehow existed in memory. At the meadow. The trees. The windows catching late sunlight.
"This."
Darcy lifted her hand and kissed it. "Then this."
They remained until the light faded.
But age did not take them together that evening.
Life, apparently, did not believe repetition necessary.
Darcy lived another three years.
Elizabeth spent those years complaining that he had broken their pattern.
"You died three hours after me last time," she reminded him one winter morning when he was eighty-five and refusing to allow a physician to examine a cough.
Darcy looked over his spectacles. "I was considerably more cooperative then."
"You were dead."
"Precisely."
Elizabeth laughed.
The cough passed.
He lived to see Clara's eldest daughter married. He taught a grandson how to calculate rents and allowed Eleanor's youngest boy to cheat at chess because the child was eight and thought himself subtle.
Elizabeth caught him.
"You saw him move the piece."
Darcy looked innocent. "Did I?"
"Fitzwilliam."
He smiled.
The next spring they sat together in the library while rain tapped against the windows.
Darcy had become tired more easily.
Elizabeth knew.
So did he.
They did not pretend.
"Find me sooner," Darcy said unexpectedly.
Elizabeth looked up.
He smiled faintly. "You said that once."
"I remember."
"Would you say it again?"
She studied him.
Then shook her head. "No."
Darcy's brows rose.
Elizabeth took his hand. "You already did."
His eyes filled.
She stroked his knuckles once, twice, three times.
I am here.
Darcy died two days later in his own bed with Elizabeth beside him.
No sudden darkness took her.
No younger body waited.
Elizabeth remained.
At first she was angry.
Then she laughed at herself for being angry.
"You always did ruin my expectations," she told the empty side of the bed.
She lived another year.
Long enough to see spring.
Long enough to watch the hawthorn finally come down after a storm split the trunk.
Matthew asked whether she wished to save the wood.
Elizabeth smiled. "A small piece. Your father will complain otherwise."
Matthew laughed. "Father wanted it cut down for sixty years."
"Longer."
He gave her a curious look.
Elizabeth merely smiled.
A craftsman made a small box from the soundest part of the wood.
Elizabeth kept Darcy's last letter inside it.
She did not read it often.
She knew every word.
On her final morning she sat by the library window rather than in bed. Clara was with her. So was Eleanor. Matthew had gone to fetch a shawl and returned to find his mother smiling at something outside.
"What is it?" Clara asked.
Elizabeth looked toward the meadow.
For just a moment, through the glass and spring light, she could imagine a tall young man standing beneath an oak in Hertfordshire looking terrified because a woman had mentioned a blue room chimney.
"Nothing," Elizabeth said.
Then she reconsidered.
"Everything."
Clara took her hand.
Elizabeth tapped three times.
I am here.
She closed her eyes.
This time there was no fear.
No demand for another chance.
They had been given two lives.
Twice was enough.
In the months after Darcy's death, Elizabeth found herself speaking to him in rooms where no one else could hear. She did not imagine answers. She knew better than to make grief into magic twice.
Still, she would enter the library and say, "Matthew moved your chair again," or stand before the breakfast table and murmur, "Orange marmalade. You would be pleased."
Once Clara overheard.
Elizabeth expected concern.
Instead her daughter said, "I talk to Papa too."
Elizabeth looked at her.
Clara shrugged. "Mostly when I am angry."
"He would approve."
"I know."
They sat together.
Elizabeth thought of the first life, when she had feared death because it would separate them. The second had taught her something gentler. Separation was real. It hurt. But a lifetime of being known did not vanish merely because one voice fell silent.
Darcy remained in habits, phrases, children, rooms, arguments Elizabeth could still recite, and three small movements of a thumb.
When her own death approached, she did not ask the universe for proof that he waited.
She had already been given more proof than anyone had a right to expect.
Twice chosen was enough.