August At Last
They left England three days after the wedding and travelled south to Portsmouth.
Mrs Bennet had objected to the speed of their departure, the length of the journey and the unreasonable refusal of foreign countries to resemble Hertfordshire.
Elizabeth endured each complaint with patience because beside her in the carriage were Darcy, two travelling cases and no one else.
At Portsmouth, the sea lay grey beneath the morning sky. Darcy watched the waiting vessel with an expression she could not yet read.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“No.”
Elizabeth raised a brow.
He took her hand. “Yes. But I mean to go.”
It was not a short voyage, and it was not meant to be. Elizabeth had imagined a destination: a place they were going, which they would reach, at which the journey would end. Darcy had imagined something different. He had imagined the journey itself.
She understood it during their first weeks away.
He carried maps and books enough to stock a small library, discussed every possible harbour with the captain and stood at the rail whenever a new coast appeared.
There were places he had wanted to see long before wanting anything had become dangerous.
Europe remained divided by war, and much of what another generation might have travelled through was closed to them, but there were still places they could go.
Now he meant to see them.
He was taking the journey now, late and married and in the wrong order, because the right order had been stolen from him and he meant to reclaim what he could.
“You thought of travelling before,” Elizabeth said one evening, as they stood at the rail watching the grey Atlantic slide past.
“Once.”
“Before your father died?”
“Before I understood how much could change.” Darcy rested his hands upon the rail. “Afterwards, I never let myself plan it. That would have been unbearable.”
“You planned as far as August.”
He looked at her.
“After August,” she said.
“Yes.” His mouth curved faintly. “I did not know, when I began saying that to you, that it would come to mean this as well.”
“And now?”
Darcy looked towards the horizon. “Now I find I want to see everything.”
Their tour followed what routes the war allowed. They went first to Lisbon, then Madeira and Gibraltar. At each port Darcy studied what lay ahead, yet often abandoned his plans to stand beside Elizabeth at the rail and watch a coastline emerge.
Letters pursued them along the way. Jane wrote of Netherfield, Kitty of Longbourn, and Mrs Bennet of every person in Meryton who had asked when Elizabeth meant to return.
The letters from Pemberley came under Edward’s seal. They were less entertaining, but Darcy opened those first.
Finch had been dismissed. The falsified accounts had been uncovered, money recovered where recovery was possible and the tenants who had been overcharged repaid.
Neglected cottages were being repaired. Edward had placed the estate under a new steward, a Lambton man whose long service had been known to the elder Mr Darcy.
Mrs Reynolds, Edward reported, had wept when the corrected accounts were read to her, apologised for weeping and then gone herself to see that the repaid tenants received their money properly, because she did not trust a clerk to do it kindly.
At the end of one letter, Edward abandoned his usual careful language.
Pemberley is itself again. Come home when you are ready. It will be here, and it will be clean, and there is nothing left in it that need trouble either of you. I have seen to that.
Darcy read those lines at the rail off Gibraltar, the great rock rising behind them and the Mediterranean opening ahead. Elizabeth watched his face.
“He blames himself,” she said.
“They all do, a little. Edward, Richard, my uncle.”
“And you?”
Darcy folded the letter. “Less than I did.”
“Good.”
He looked at her. “That sounded remarkably like an order.”
“It was.”
Darcy laughed, and the sound carried out over the water.
They entered the Mediterranean beneath a clear sky. Malta came next, all pale stone and crowded harbours, and from there they sailed for Sicily.
All the while, August approached.
Darcy did not speak of it often. He no longer counted the days aloud, but Elizabeth knew he counted them still.
They reached Sicily in the last week of July, and it was unlike anywhere Elizabeth had ever been.
The heat was enormous and unhurried. The light fell harder and more golden over the orange and lemon groves, while Etna smoked faintly against the sky and the sea possessed a blue for which Elizabeth found no adequate English word.
They took rooms at Palermo before travelling east. Watching Darcy, Elizabeth understood that Sicily had always been where the journey was meant to end. In August, as far from a cold Kent wood as either of them had ever been.
His birthday fell on a Tuesday.
Elizabeth woke before he did, which was rare, and lay watching the morning light fall through the shutters in bars across the ceiling.
She had known for some time what the day meant to him and had said nothing.
A date counted towards in fear for five years could not simply become an ordinary birthday because the calendar had finally reached it.
When Darcy woke, she was ready.
“Good morning,” she said. “You are one-and-twenty.”
He regarded her for a moment.
“I am.”
“How does it feel?”
Darcy considered the question with the seriousness she loved in him.
“Ordinary,” he said at last, and there was wonder in his voice. “I counted towards it for five years as though it were the edge of the world. Now it has come, and I am lying in Sicily beside my wife.”
“That is what it is meant to feel like. A birthday.”
“There were years I did not think I should reach it.”
Elizabeth reached across and put her hand against his face.
“But you did. You are one-and-twenty, Fitzwilliam. You are your own man, and no one’s ward.”
He covered her hand with his.
“Yes.”
“Happy birthday.”
Darcy drew her to him. Outside the shutters, Sicily went about its morning in the golden heat.
The packet from England reached them nine days later, after following them through three ports. It contained the Earl’s final account of the guardianship, Edward’s report upon Pemberley and the papers placing every remaining matter into Darcy’s hands.
The Earl’s own letter was brief.
You are no longer my ward. I hope you will permit me to remain your uncle.
Darcy read it twice before giving it to Elizabeth.
“What will you answer?”
He looked towards Etna, pale beneath the afternoon sky. “That he is my uncle,” he said. “And that we are coming home.”