Epilogue
On the morning Georgiana married Sir Reginald Elliot, Anthony and Lewis Selbourne found Thomas Darcy in the garden at Thornton Hall, armed with a stick and already muddy at the knees.
Thomas was four. His sister stood beside Elizabeth, clutching her mother’s skirts, while Darcy carried their sleeping baby son against his shoulder.
Anthony, now nine, inspected Thomas gravely.
“Is he old enough for a dragon hunt?”
“I am,” Thomas declared.
Elizabeth looked at Darcy.
“Only a small dragon,” he said.
Anthony nodded. “We shall begin near the orchard. Lewis is waiting there with the rope.”
At seven, Lewis objected to most of Anthony’s plans and accompanied him on all of them.
Their daughter, Jane, who was three and disapproved of mud on principle, tightened her hold on Elizabeth’s skirts and announced that she did not wish to hunt dragons. She wished to see the bride.
The baby, Richard, slept on against his father’s shoulder, indifferent to weddings, dragons and the opinions of his sister alike.
His namesake, the elder Richard, had received the news of the christening with four seconds of silence before declaring that the child had better grow into it, because the name had a reputation to uphold and he did not intend to see it wasted on someone dull.
Anne came down the terrace steps with her youngest daughter by the hand.
Elizabeth Selbourne was nearly two, fair-haired and determined, and had already removed one shoe.
Sir Alexander followed with the missing shoe, having long since accepted that four children made dignity an intermittent condition.
Their elder daughter walked beside him, carrying the glove Anne had dropped and watching the direction in which her brothers had disappeared with the resignation of long experience.
Little Elizabeth released her mother and ran towards Jane.
“Lizzy,” Anne called.
Both Elizabeths turned.
Anne sighed. “I foresaw this difficulty when we named her after you.”
“You dismissed it,” Elizabeth reminded her.
“I was grateful. Gratitude is rarely practical.”
The terrace doors opened, and Georgiana stepped into the morning light.
Young Anne walked beside her, while Sir Reginald followed at a respectful distance, speaking to George, who had grown tall enough to resent being called a child and young enough still to need reassurance.
Reginald listened without interruption, then answered so softly that only George heard him.
Georgiana looked back. Reginald met her eyes, and something passed between them which required neither performance nor permission. She smiled, entirely at ease, and waited for him to join her.
Darcy watched them cross the terrace together.
“She is happy,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes,” he answered. “She chose well.”
Lady Catherine was already seated when they came in, in the best chair the Thornton drawing room could offer, which she had identified within moments of arriving and occupied on principle.
She was older now and moved more slowly, and had acquired a stick which she used chiefly to point at things she disapproved of.
She had disapproved of a great many things that morning.
She had not disapproved of the marriage.
“Sit down,” she informed Elizabeth, as though Elizabeth had been loitering rather than crossing a room. “You look tired. You have three children and a husband who takes you to Sicily. You are entitled to look tired, but you need not do it standing up.”
“Yes, your ladyship,” Elizabeth said, and sat. She had learned that Lady Catherine’s commands were very often disguised kindnesses and were best simply obeyed.
“The Elliot man is acceptable,” Lady Catherine went on, which was, from her, extravagant praise.
“He does not talk unless he has something to say, which distinguishes him from almost everyone else I have ever met, and he looks at Georgiana as though he cannot quite believe his fortune, which is the correct way for a man to look at a wife and one I have observed in disappointingly few marriages.”
Her eyes moved to Darcy, standing across the room with the baby still on his shoulder.
“Your husband looks at you the same way. He always has. It is the one sensible thing he did before he was five-and-twenty.”
“He proposed to me before he was one-and-twenty,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes. As I said. The one sensible thing.”
Lady Catherine’s mouth moved very slightly. On anyone else it would have been a smile; on her it was simply the absence of disapproval.
“You have done well, Elizabeth. All of you. I do not say so often, because people who are told they have done well generally stop doing it, but I am an old woman at a wedding and I find I am inclined to be truthful.”
She looked through the terrace doors, where Georgiana stood with Sir Reginald beside her.
“I told her father to send Wickham away. Thirty years I have been telling the men of this family things they did not wish to hear. It is a great deal of work, being right, when no one attends to you.”
“They attend to you now,” Elizabeth said gently.
“Yes. Now that it is too late to matter for the ones we lost, and only in time for the ones we kept.”
Lady Catherine’s hand tightened upon the head of her stick.
“I shot that man in a wood, Elizabeth, and I have never once been sorry that I fired. He turned a pistol towards Anthony. There was nothing else to consider.”
“No,” Elizabeth said.
Lady Catherine looked again towards Georgiana. “She is happy now. Look at her. And there are children everywhere, including one named Richard, God help him.”
Elizabeth smiled.
“I find, on the whole, that I am content,” Lady Catherine said. “I do not say so often either. You may consider it a second extravagance and expect no more today.”
The bride and groom came in from the terrace then, and the room rose, and the wedding breakfast began, loud and warm and overfull, exactly the sort of gathering that Thornton had not seen in all the years of its unhappiness and would now, Elizabeth hoped, see a great many more of.
Georgiana sat at the head of the table, laughing at something Sir Reginald had said too softly for anyone else to hear.
Richard tormented Edward over some matter of law.
The Earl and Countess sat together. Anne and Sir Alexander counted heads and came up, as always, one child short, because little Elizabeth had gone under the table again.
Lady Catherine presided, upright and content and disinclined to admit it.
Through the tall windows, out on the sunlit lawn, three boys with sticks and a length of rope hunted a dragon that would never come, in a garden where nothing waited to harm them.
“What are you thinking?” Darcy asked beside her, the baby finally stirring against his shoulder.
Elizabeth took their son from him and settled the small warm weight against herself.
“That I am happy,” she said.
Outside, Anthony raised his stick and cried that he had found it. Thomas came running, with Lewis close behind carrying the rope, and none of them knew, and none of them ever needed to.