Afterwards
The bells had ceased before Darcy returned to Thornton.
There had been no account of Wickham’s virtues at the graveside.
The rector had spoken the appointed words, the earth had fallen upon the coffin, and the small company had walked back to the house without attempting to make the man better in death than he had been in life.
Georgiana waited in the drawing room with the children. Little George stood beside her, solemn in black, one hand resting upon the chair that had belonged to his father. It belonged to him now.
The drawing room held more of the family than Darcy had seen gathered in one place since Georgiana’s wedding.
The Earl stood by the fire with the Countess.
The Viscount and Viscountess Stanhope had come, and Lady Rowena had seated herself close to Georgiana.
Lady Henrietta remained across the room.
Lady Catherine occupied the chair nearest the window, upright and composed.
Anne and Sir Alexander sat where they could watch both Georgiana and her children.
Richard had come down from the north for the day and would return tomorrow.
Edward had come from Pemberley and would go back the same way.
None of them had come for Wickham. Darcy understood it with perfect clarity as he looked about the room.
There had been no eulogy at the graveside, and there was none here.
No one spoke of the man in the ground. They had travelled from London and Matlock and the north and Rosings, cancelled engagements and interrupted business, and they had done all of it for the young woman by the window, with her son’s hand resting upon his father’s chair.
They had failed her for nine years. A girl of nineteen married to a steward’s son during her father’s long illness; a boy of eleven told he was too young to understand what he saw; and afterwards, a careful and comfortable distance maintained from a marriage no one wished to examine.
They had come now. It was very late. But they had come.
By late afternoon, the last of the estate families had gone. Darcy found his travelling coat laid across a chair in the hall. Richard stood beside it.
“Your carriage is ready.”
“I had not said I was leaving today.”
“No one believed you needed to.”
Georgiana came from the drawing room. “You have stayed through the funeral.”
“I can remain until morning.”
“You can,” she agreed. “But you will spend the night walking about Thornton and pretending not to count the hours.”
Lady Catherine appeared behind her. “Go, Darcy. Miss Bennet has already waited longer than good sense requires.”
Richard handed him his coat. “Try not to propose before reaching Longbourn. It would be inconvenient for the witnesses.”
Darcy put on the coat.
Georgiana came to him before the footman opened the door. “You will write when you arrive.”
“Yes.”
“And you will not turn aside for Pemberley.”
He glanced towards Edward.
“Pemberley is in capable hands,” Edward said.
Richard opened the door. “There. Every possible excuse removed.”
Darcy bent and kissed Georgiana’s cheek. “Send for me if you need me.”
“I promised I would.”
“You will be well.” It was not quite a question.
“I will be well. I have the children, the family, and a great deal of work to do at Thornton. For the first time in nine years, I need answer to no one for how I spend my days.” She took his hand briefly.
“That is not grief, Fitzwilliam, whatever it may look like. Go and be happy, and let me discover what it is to be my own.”
Outside, the carriage waited upon the drive. Darcy climbed in before anyone could offer further advice, and Thornton disappeared behind the trees.
Elizabeth was waiting in Hertfordshire. The road south was long, and Darcy did not urge the horses as often as he had expected to. There was time now. That was the strange thing, the truth he kept turning over as the miles fell away behind him. There was time.
For five years, every road had led towards some danger he could not name aloud, every arrival had carried the question of who might be watching, and every silence had been something to maintain. He had learned to move through the world as cautiously as through a house he suspected of being on fire.
Wickham was in the ground at Thornton. His guardianship had ended, and the Earl’s would last only until August. Edward was setting Pemberley’s accounts in order. Richard would find Pritchard, Finch would answer, and whoever had carried word to Wickham would be found.
None of it was Darcy’s alone to carry any longer. The Earl had said so. Georgiana had said so. The whole family had said so by travelling to a funeral no one wished to attend and standing beside the woman they had failed.
He would be one-and-twenty in August. Yet the choice before him required no waiting.
He chose Hertfordshire. Somewhere south of Hatfield, with the light turning gold across the fields, Darcy found that he was smiling.
He travelled until darkness forced him to stop, slept badly at an inn, and was on the road again before breakfast. By the second afternoon, the country beyond the carriage window had begun to look familiar.
It was nearly evening when they passed through Meryton. Darcy lowered the window as the carriage turned towards Longbourn, though the air had grown cold.
At the gates, he ordered the coachman to stop and walked the remaining distance.
The house had not altered. The same gravel, the same door, the same air of a place holding more people than it had quite been built for.
Darcy walked up the drive in the evening light and found that his hands were steady.
He was received with an amount of ceremony that would have mortified Elizabeth had she been in the room. She was not in the room.
Mrs Bennet met him in such delighted agitation that Darcy understood within the first minute how much she had guessed.
“Mr Darcy. You are very welcome. Very welcome indeed. Lizzy is, she is walking, I believe, she walks a great deal, she is always walking. Kitty, where has your sister gone? You will take some refreshment. You have come such a distance…”
“Thank you,” Darcy said. “I find I should be glad of a walk myself, after the carriage. Which way did Miss Bennet go?”
Mrs Bennet’s mouth opened, closed, and rearranged itself into something dangerously close to triumph.
“Towards Oakham Mount. The path past the copse. You cannot miss it.” Unable to help herself, she added, “She often walks a very long while. One need not hurry back on her account.”
“I will bear that in mind,” Darcy said gravely, and went to find her.
He found her beyond the copse, where the path began to climb. Elizabeth had stopped beside the stile and was looking across the fields. At the sound of his steps, she turned.
For a moment neither of them moved. Then she came towards him.
“You came.”
“I said that I would.”
Her gaze travelled over his black coat and returned to his face. “The funeral?”
“Yesterday.”
“And your sister?”
“She remains at Thornton with the children. She told me it was time I came here.”
Elizabeth lowered her eyes briefly. “Then I am grateful to her.”
“So am I. Though I would have come without being told.”
Elizabeth’s mouth curved. “I know. That is why I could wait.”
She said it simply, and Darcy thought of everything she had waited through: the ballroom, the winter of contradictory rumours, London, the returned book and three words in a note, Kent and a pistol against her ribs. She had known he would come.
“Elizabeth.”
“Yes.”
He had rehearsed nothing on the road south. He had spent too long arranging every word for what it might reveal to someone listening. For once, he wanted to say a true thing plainly.
“I have said a great many things to you that meant their opposite,” he said.
“In November I told a room that you were of no consequence to me, because it was the only way I could keep you safe. I sent you a book instead of coming to you. I wrote three words in a note because I could not write the rest. I have spent the whole of our acquaintance telling you the truth in the one form that would not endanger you, and trusting you to understand it, and you always did.”
He stopped.
“I am done with that now. There is no one listening. There is nothing to hide behind. So I find I must simply say it.”
Elizabeth had gone very still.
“I love you,” Darcy said. “I have loved you since Hertfordshire, and through everything that made it impossible to say so, and now that nothing makes it impossible, I would like to say it as often and as plainly as you will allow. Marry me. Not after August. Not when it is safe. Now, and for the rest of it.”
For one terrible moment, she said nothing.
Then Elizabeth stepped closer and laid one hand against his chest.
“Yes,” she said. “Now, and for the rest of it.”
Darcy caught her hand beneath his. “You are certain?”
Her brows rose. “After all that, you intend to question my judgment?”
“No.”
“Good.”
She smiled then, and he bent to kiss her. When at last they parted, Elizabeth rested her forehead against his.
“You took a very long road to ask me.”
“I know.”
“You may spend the rest of your life making amends.”
“I intend to.”
“Beginning,” Elizabeth said, “with telling my mother, who will have watched us the entire way up the hill and will already be composing the announcement.”
Darcy glanced back down the slope towards Longbourn, where a curtain in an upper window had, unmistakably, just moved.
“She recommended I not hurry back,” he said. “On your account.”
“Of course she did.” Elizabeth took his arm.
“She has been trying to marry me to something respectable since I was fifteen. She will not survive the news that she has succeeded beyond her most extravagant hopes. You are aware you are now the single most interesting thing that has ever happened to her.”
“I had begun to suspect.”
“You will be spoken of at every dinner in the county for a twelvemonth. Your income will be quoted with increasing inaccuracy. My aunt Philips will claim a considerable share of the credit.”
“And you?”
They had begun to walk, unhurried, down the path towards the house and the twitching curtain and the whole loud, ordinary future waiting behind it.
“I find,” Elizabeth said, “that I do not mind any of it. I have spent a winter learning what it is to be truly afraid. A lifetime of my mother’s enthusiasm seems a very small price, by comparison, for this.”
“For this,” Darcy agreed.
They walked down together into the noise.