Epilogue From Aunt Jane
It remains only to recount what followed, for happy endings, though agreeable in their way, are apt to leave the curious reader peering behind the curtain, wondering how the players fared once the applause faded and ordinary life resumed its unremarkable march.
The marriage of Miss Jane Bennet to Viscount Drake took place at Michaelmas, as Mrs. Bennet had so emphatically announced, and proved to be everything that lady could have wished—a triumph of maternal strategy that she would recount to anyone who would listen for the remainder of her natural life, and to several who would not.
The ceremony was conducted at Longbourn church with all proper solemnity, and if Mrs. Bennet’s bonnet was perhaps more elaborate than strict propriety demanded, no one who valued their peace of mind saw fit to mention it.
Jane was, as all had long predicted, a beautiful bride and an even lovelier viscountess, her gentle disposition perfectly attuned to the management of a great house and a husband whose devotion, steady and unflagging, was perhaps precisely the tonic Jane had always required.
The Viscount, for his part, declared himself the happiest of men at every opportunity, to the immense gratification of his mother-in-law and the gentle mortification of his wife.
Mr. Bennet attended the wedding with evident pleasure and only the mildest protest at being torn from his library, his health having rallied sufficiently to allow both the journey to church and the enthusiastic consumption of wedding breakfast in quantities his physician might have deplored, had he been consulted.
He was not, and Mr. Bennet enjoyed himself thoroughly, though he confided to Elizabeth that he trusted she and Jane had now satisfied their mother’s appetite for gentlemen of consequence, and might allow their younger sisters to settle for husbands of less alarming distinction—though he rather doubted Mrs. Bennet’s nerves would permit such indulgence.
The first child of Pemberley arrived the following spring, a girl with her mother’s fine eyes and her father’s determined brow, and Mr. Darcy proved himself the most besotted of fathers before the infant had been in the world a full hour.
She was christened Anne, after the grandmother she would know only through her journals, and Thomas regarded her arrival with the mixed emotions of a young prince confronted with a potential rival to his throne—suspicious at first, then curious, then fiercely protective in a manner that delighted his parents and occasionally alarmed the nursery staff.
A son followed two years later, and then another daughter, and then a second son, until Pemberley’s nursery wing, which had stood largely empty for so many years, echoed once more with the sounds of childhood—laughter and tears and the busy bustle that attended any household blessed with more children than could reasonably be supervised.
Mr. Darcy, who had once believed himself destined for a solitary existence punctuated only by duty and regret, discovered that he possessed an unexpected talent for fatherhood and an even more unexpected tolerance for noise, disorder, and the mysterious stickiness that seemed to accompany small children wherever they went.
Elizabeth watched him with these later children—so different from the careful father he had been with Thomas in those early, uncertain days—and loved him all the more for the way he had learned to trust his own heart after so many years of doubting it.
Thomas remained, in the way of firstborn children, slightly apart from his younger siblings—old enough to remember a time before them, young enough to have absorbed the changes without fully understanding them.
He became a thoughtful boy, inheriting his father’s reserve and his mother’s wit, devoted to his studies, his natural collections, and the elderly basset hound who had been his companion since memory began.
Harley, for his part, bore the indignities of age with the stoic patience of a dog who had consumed many sausages and regretted not a single one.
The question of Thomas’s parentage, once so formidable a specter in the household, faded with the years into comfortable irrelevance, as such questions will when denied the nourishment of gossip.
He was Darcy’s son in every particular that counted: in the determined set of his jaw, the quiet authority with which he addressed the servants, the fierce devotion he showed his siblings, and the gentle patience with their mischief.
If a visitor now and then remarked on the lack of resemblance to the family portraits in the long gallery, no one paid it any mind.
Children, after all, were notorious for diverging from their ancestors; it was scarcely worth comment.
The cabinet of manuscripts remained firmly locked, and if the key was misplaced or lost, no one concerned themselves, as ancient history had a way of moving itself to the hidden chamber beneath Pemberley, the underground grotto of forgotten monks and dusty relics.
Elizabeth kept her secret, as she had always intended to.
Some truths served no purpose but to wound.
Darcy never suspected what Clarice had confided that night, and Elizabeth never offered it, and between them grew the particular understanding of a marriage built on trust and discretion—the recognition that love did not require the sharing of every burden, that sometimes the kindest thing one could do for another was to carry a weight alone.
Clarice remained in Elizabeth’s service for many years, her cool efficiency softening into quiet friendship as the boundaries of station yielded to time and familiarity.
She never again spoke of what she had witnessed in Lady Amelia’s chambers, and Elizabeth never inquired; the silence between them on that subject became, in its fashion, a conversation of its own—a tacit recognition that Elizabeth was different, in all the ways that counted.
And so we come to Mr. George Wickham, whose adventures in India proved rather less triumphant than his adventures in English drawing rooms had led him to expect.
The journey itself was uneventful, save for a brief bout of seasickness that Mr. Wickham found most injurious to his dignity, and a card game with a fellow officer that relieved him of the modest sum Colonel Powell had been persuaded to advance for incidental expenses.
Upon arriving in Bombay, he discovered that the elephants he had so confidently described to his Derbyshire admirers were considerably larger, considerably less tractable, and considerably more indifferent to charm than the young ladies of Hertfordshire and Cheapside.
His commission, secured through Colonel Powell’s connections, placed him in a regiment stationed in a district that was hot, dusty, and remarkably deficient in heiresses.
The letter of credit arranged by his brother proved sufficient for a gentleman’s modest existence but not, alas, for a gentleman’s immodest habits, and Mr. Wickham found himself, for perhaps the first time in his life, obliged to live within his means.
It was a novel experience, and Mr. Wickham found it thoroughly disagreeable.
I wish I could report, for the edification of my readers, that the rigors of military life and the distance from all temptation wrought a thorough reformation in Mr. Wickham’s character—that he became, through suffering and reflection, the man his father had hoped he might be.
Alas, such transformations belong to novels rather more sentimental than this one.
Mr. Wickham remained Mr. Wickham: charming when it suited him, unreliable when it did not, and possessed of a remarkable talent for believing himself ill-used by a world that had, in fact, used him rather better than he deserved.
He did, however, send the Kashmiri shawl.
It arrived at Pemberley eighteen months after his departure, wrapped in paper that smelled of sandalwood and accompanied by a letter so effusive in its expressions of fraternal affection that Georgiana wept over it for a full quarter hour.
The shawl itself was of excellent quality—red and gold, as promised—and if it had been purchased with funds borrowed against his next quarter’s allowance rather than earned through honest industry.
Georgiana was not informed of the circumstance, and Mr. Darcy saw no reason to enlighten her.
Thomas received the wooden elephant his uncle had promised with rather more enthusiasm than the gift perhaps merited.
He named it Colonel, in honor of Colonel Powell, who had escorted Uncle George to India, and insisted on bringing it to dinner for several weeks until Mrs. Reynolds gently suggested that elephants, even wooden ones, were not generally considered appropriate table companions.
The Colonel lost both tusks and half his trunk to Thomas’s enthusiastic affection over the following years, but remained a treasured possession long after its owner had outgrown such childish things—a reminder, perhaps, of the uncle who had been more legend than reality, more story than presence.
For as each child arrived at Pemberley, so too did a gift from India, each more elaborate than the last: a painted music box for little Anne that played a tune no one could quite identify; a set of carved ivory animals for the first son; silks and jewels and curious artifacts that spoke of a world none of them would ever see.
And with each gift came letters—long, rambling letters full of adventures that grew taller with each telling, of tigers narrowly escaped, and maharajahs befriended and fortunes just within reach if only a small advance might be arranged.
The advances were never arranged, but the letters continued nonetheless, and the children of Pemberley grew up believing their Uncle George to be the most dashing figure in all the Empire.
As for Mr. Wickham’s prospects of returning to England, these remained, as the years passed, perpetually imminent and perpetually deferred.
There was always a promotion just around the corner, a fortune just within reach, an opportunity that required only a little more time, a little more patience, a little more of his brother’s money to bring to fruition.
Mr. Darcy, who had learned through painful experience the precise value of his half-brother’s promises, continued the quarterly remittances but declined all requests for additional advances, and Mr. Wickham continued to write letters assuring everyone that his ship was very nearly come in.
It never did, naturally. But Mr. Wickham had made a career of believing in ships that never came in, and he saw no reason to abandon the habit merely because he had attained middle age.
Perhaps I would be remiss, although I note for posterity’s sake, if any, that Mr. Wickham never again found himself obliged to attend a christening in any official capacity—a circumstance he attributed to good fortune, though others might have drawn different conclusions.
Mr. Darcy, meanwhile, had stood at the font so often that little Anne declared him the most christened man in Derbyshire, a title he accepted with appropriate gravity.
The contrast between the brothers in this regard was, perhaps, more instructive than either of them knew.
And so we leave the Darcys as we found them—imperfect, complicated, and rather more happy than any of them had dared to expect when this tale began.
The bargain that brought Elizabeth to Pemberley had been born in desperation, maintained through deception, and very nearly destroyed by secrets that should never have been kept.
That it concluded in love was not, perhaps, the most probable of outcomes.
But then, the likeliest outcomes are so rarely the most satisfying ones, and if there is any justice in fiction—which there manifestly is not in life—then surely two people who had struggled so hard to find each other deserve, at last, to be found.
The Christmas theatricals, which Elizabeth had threatened to institute during her first feverish week at Pemberley, became in time exactly the tradition she had promised.
The first production—a modest affair involving Thomas as a very grave young prince, Georgiana as the romantic heroine, and Hannah pressed into service as a chorus of one sighing maiden.
Darcy, as Elizabeth had foretold, played the brooding hero.
He stood in the corner looking severe while everyone else had the good lines, and delivered his single speech—“The castle is fallen”—with a gravity that reduced Georgiana to helpless laughter and nearly brought the production to an early conclusion.
Elizabeth declared it the finest performance of brooding heroism she had ever witnessed, and Darcy accepted the compliment with the long-suffering dignity of a man who understood he would be required to repeat the exercise annually for the foreseeable future.
Indeed, the productions grew more elaborate as the family grew larger: scripts written by Georgiana at first, then by Elizabeth when Georgiana’s attention turned to courtship and marriage, and finally by little Anne, who displayed an early talent for melodrama and an even earlier talent for casting herself in the most advantageous roles.
Thomas graduated from young prince to noble knight to tragic villain; this last role suited his natural reserve better than heroism had.
The younger children filled out the chorus, played trees and livestock with varying degrees of conviction, and occasionally improved upon the script in ways their authors had not anticipated.
Darcy continued to brood magnificently in corners, and if his single line expanded over the years to two, and then three, and eventually to a speech of moderate length, he delivered each with the same solemn gravity that had characterized his debut performance—though Elizabeth noticed, and treasured, the way his mouth twitched at the corners when his children forgot their lines or Harley’s successor wandered onstage during the climatic scene.
It was not, perhaps, the sort of tradition one expected at Pemberley. Yet Elizabeth had never troubled herself with what was expected, and Darcy had long since ceased to mind.
And so Elizabeth Darcy, who had once believed herself destined for a small life of small disappointments, smiled at the improbable splendor of what she had been granted, settled into her husband’s arms, and was content.
FINIS - THE END