Epilogue
The First Assembly
Many years after Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy were gone, their granddaughter Margaret found an old journal in Pemberley's library.
It had been pushed behind a row of estate ledgers on a shelf no one had reason to disturb.
The cover was worn, the leather faded, and the first several pages contained nothing remarkable: household observations, books Elizabeth meant to read, notes about tenant families, a reminder concerning winter apples, and several complaints about Fitzwilliam refusing to wear a coat.
Margaret smiled.
Family tradition insisted her grandmother had spent most of a century trying to keep her grandfather warm against his will.
She turned another page.
The handwriting changed.
The ink was older.
I saw him tonight.
He was standing beside Charles as he did the first time, except he looked directly at me.
I smiled.
He went pale.
I thought grief had made me mad.
Margaret frowned.
She turned the page.
Below Elizabeth's handwriting was another hand she recognized from old letters.
Fitzwilliam Darcy.
She knew how I take my coffee.
Beneath it Elizabeth had written:
You did not take it that way yet.
Then Darcy:
An unfair test.
Elizabeth:
It worked.
Margaret stared.
The entries did not explain themselves.
She read on.
There were references to apricot preserves, a blue room chimney, a hawthorn, three strokes of a thumb, and a series of rules that made no sense without context.
One entry read:
Rule Five is impossible because my husband has no talent for pretending he does not know me.
Darcy had written beneath it:
My wife has no talent for pretending anything.
Elizabeth had answered:
You married me anyway.
Then:
Twice, apparently.
Margaret sat back.
That word appeared more than once.
Twice.
She knew her grandparents had married only once.
Everyone knew the story.
The wealthy Mr. Darcy came to Hertfordshire with Mr. Bingley, unexpectedly behaved like a reasonably civil man despite his fearsome appearance, and became attached to Elizabeth Bennet almost at once.
Family tradition claimed their courtship had been unusual.
Very unusual.
Jane Bingley had once told her eldest granddaughter that Mr. Darcy and Lizzy behaved from the beginning as though they shared private jokes no one else understood.
Charles Bingley had insisted Darcy knew which chair Elizabeth would choose before she entered a room.
Mrs. Gardiner had famously remarked after a London concert that the pair behaved like people who had already been married for years.
At the time everyone laughed.
Margaret no longer did.
She continued reading.
One page had been written much later in Elizabeth's life.
There are things one may spend a lifetime regretting if one imagines regret is the same as love.
It is not.
Love asks something harder.
Notice them while they are still here.
Below, in Darcy's hand:
She has been correcting me for more than fifty years.
Elizabeth had added:
Twice.
Margaret's fingers rested upon the page.
She thought of family stories that had never quite made sense.
Why Elizabeth had discouraged everyone from teasing Mary before Mary learned to laugh at herself.
Why Darcy had taken George Wickham's arrival in Meryton seriously before any scandal occurred.
Why Georgiana Darcy always said her brother became a different man during the autumn he first went to Netherfield.
Why Charles Bingley swore Darcy had once told him not to allow him to insult a woman Bingley had never heard of.
Why Lydia Howard claimed Lizzy had behaved like a frightened mother toward her during the Brighton summer despite being only five years older.
Why Charlotte Avery credited Elizabeth with opening a door she could not have known Charlotte needed.
Coincidences.
Family exaggeration.
Memory reshaped by affection.
Surely.
Margaret read until the light faded.
At the bottom of one page she found three small marks drawn side by side.
|||
Beneath them Elizabeth had written:
I am here.
Margaret knew that gesture.
Everyone in the family did.
Darcy descendants tapped three times against the hand of someone they loved when words were insufficient.
Parents used it with frightened children.
Husbands and wives used it across dinner tables.
Brothers and sisters used it beside sickbeds.
Clara had tapped Margaret's hand three times when she married.
Matthew Darcy had done the same beside his mother's coffin.
No one knew precisely when the gesture began.
Some said during Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth's courtship.
Others claimed during the birth of their first child.
One elderly aunt insisted Mr. Darcy had done it the first night he danced with Elizabeth Bennet at a country assembly in Hertfordshire.
That seemed unlikely.
They had scarcely known one another.
And yet another family story claimed Elizabeth had smiled at Fitzwilliam Darcy before he ever spoke to her.
Not the polite smile of a stranger.
A smile of recognition.
As though she had been waiting for him.
And Mr. Darcy--proud, reserved, formidable Mr. Darcy--had looked at her as though he had just been given back something he thought lost forever.
Margaret closed the journal.
She did not tell anyone what she had found that evening.
Not immediately.
Instead she carried it to the south meadow the following morning.
The hawthorn was gone. Only a low stump remained, softened by moss and years. Margaret knew the little wooden box in the library had been made from it, though no one understood why her grandmother had insisted upon saving a piece of a half-dead tree.
She sat on the bench.
Pemberley spread below her.
The family had changed again since Elizabeth's death. Children grew. Marriages came and went. People disappointed one another and apologized. Some mistakes were corrected. Others remained.
Margaret opened the journal to the final page.
Elizabeth's last entry was brief.
We believed, when it happened, that a second life must have been given so that we might correct the first.
We were wrong.
No life can be corrected into perfection because people are not sums. They do not produce the same answer simply because one changes the figures.
Jane needed confidence, not management.
Charles needed room to choose.
Georgiana needed to know shame was not hers.
Charlotte needed a door.
Lydia needed time.
Kitty needed to be seen.
Mary needed us to stop laughing long enough to listen.
Papa needed to understand that observation is not responsibility.
Mama needed more kindness than I gave her when I was young.
Fitzwilliam needed me.
He has written in the margin that this last statement is conceited.
He is wrong.
I needed him too.
Darcy had indeed added a note in the margin.
Extremely conceited.
Beneath it Elizabeth had written:
Still here?
His final answer:
Always.
Margaret closed the book.
For a long time she sat beneath the open sky, listening to the wind through the grass.
Perhaps the story was impossible.
Perhaps her grandmother, in old age, had written an elaborate private fiction with her husband.
Perhaps two people who loved one another for decades had invented a secret mythology simply because marriage had given them enough jokes to fill a book.
Margaret found she did not particularly care which explanation was sensible.
The lesson remained.
Years later, when her own husband lay frightened before a difficult surgery, Margaret held his hand.
He attempted to reassure her because frightened men sometimes believed comfort was easier to give than receive.
She said nothing.
Her thumb moved once.
Twice.
Three times.
His eyes opened.
Margaret smiled.
I am here.
That was all.
It had always been all.
For Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, it had been enough to cross pride, prejudice, grief, death, and whatever impossible distance lay between one lifetime and another.
They had been young together.
Old together.
Lost.
Found.
And given the strangest blessing imaginable--not the power to fix everyone they loved, nor the certainty of reproducing happiness exactly as it had once existed, but the chance to understand what love required before time taught the lesson too late.
When Fitzwilliam Darcy crossed a crowded assembly room toward a young woman who should have been a stranger, Elizabeth smiled at him.
He had found her sooner.
She had been waiting.
Margaret eventually showed the journal to her mother. Clara read it in silence over two evenings. When she finished, she did not call the story impossible. She simply sat with both hands around a cup of tea that had long since gone cold.
"Did you know?" Margaret asked.
Clara shook her head. "Not this. But I knew there were people they mourned whom no one else remembered."
Margaret stared.
Clara smiled faintly. "Your grandmother cried on certain dates. Your grandfather disappeared into the hills on others. When I asked, they said only that love did not become unreal because other people could not see it."
"Do you believe them?"
Clara looked toward the window. Pemberley's lawns stretched beyond the glass, green beneath a soft spring rain.
"I believe they loved each other in a way that made one lifetime seem insufficient. Whether the rest is miracle, memory, or a story they told themselves does not matter very much to me."
Margaret considered that.
Clara reached across the table and touched her daughter's hand. Her thumb moved once, twice, three times.
Margaret smiled.
"That," Clara said, "I believe."
The journal returned to the library, not hidden but not displayed. It remained a family secret of the gentlest sort, discovered by those curious enough to read and understood differently by each generation.
Some called it romance. Some called it impossible. One grandson, an annoyingly practical young man, insisted his grandparents had merely possessed unusually vivid imaginations.
Clara laughed when she heard.
"Perhaps," she said. "But if you ever marry, I hope you are fortunate enough to imagine your wife so well."
He had no answer.
Years continued. Pemberley changed hands. Portraits darkened. Rooms were redecorated. The blue room chimney was repaired more than once. The stump of the old hawthorn finally disappeared beneath grass.
But three small taps endured.
So did the story of a young woman at a Meryton assembly who smiled at a stranger as though she knew precisely how he would look when he was old.
And of the proud young man who crossed the room toward her, baffled and hopeful, because somewhere inside him was the memory of a promise made beside a snowy window.
Find me sooner.
He did.
THE END