CHAPTER 22
The word came up from Castletown on a bright, hard morning some three weeks after the fever had broken, the harbor works were finished, the Liverpool Packet had cleared the point without incident, and regular passage to Liverpool would resume imminently.
Elizabeth heard it from Mr. Kewley himself, delivered with particular satisfaction, and she carried the intelligence up to Darcy, who was by now permitted to sit in a chair by the window, though not yet to walk further than the garden gate.
"Well," he said, when she had told him. "So, it is decided for us, after all."
"So it would seem." She said, taking her usual seat, the mending she no longer had any real need to pretend at lying forgotten in her lap. "I confess I had rather hoped the harbor might require another fortnight's repair."
"As had I. Though I own that is poor return for the harbormaster's evident hard work, to wish it undone on our account."
She smiled, but it did not reach the trouble sitting beneath it, and she saw in his face that he had made an attempt at lightness.
"Elizabeth." He said her name now with an ease that had become, these past weeks, entirely natural to them both, though it would want a great deal of explaining to anyone in Hertfordshire who might overhear it. "You are thinking of something, and I know you have not said it. What is on your mind?”
She looked at him, with a serious look, and admitted, "I am thinking that I have spent the last few weeks on this island becoming a version of myself that I do not know how to carry back onto the Packet."
He was silent for a moment, turning the words over with the same careful attention he gave to everything that mattered to him, "Explain it to me," he said. "I find I would rather understand this trouble better.”
She set the mending aside entirely, and let out a loud exhale.
"I suppose here I have been no one's daughter, no one's sister, no one's relation to be married off before Mr. Bennet's estate falls to Mr. Collins, my father's cousin.
I have not once had to consider what Lady Lucas would say of my walking three miles alone, nor what my mother would make of my sitting an hour with a gentleman and no more chaperone than Mrs. Kewley's coming and going with the tea things.
I have been only myself, Mr. Darcy, entirely, and unaccountable to anyone's opinion but my own.
And yours, of course, which I confess I have come to value rather more than I ever expected to value any man's.
" She looked at him directly. "I do not know how that woman returns to Longbourn and becomes, once more, merely Miss Elizabeth Bennet, second daughter.
I have had too much the taste of independence, sir, to return comfortably. "
He was silent a moment, turning her words over with the same careful attention he gave to everything that mattered to him.
"Then you shall not return being discomforted for long," he said.
"Not by Mr. Collins, nor by anyone else.
I have spent a great many years learning to protect what is mine, Elizabeth; this includes Georgiana, Pemberley, my other estates, and the name my father left me, and I find I am rather better at it than I am at most things society esteems in me.
I do not intend to discover, upon landing at Liverpool, that I have forgotten how. "
"That is a very fine assurance, sir, but an aunt's disapproval is not so easily met as a poacher on Pemberley land."
"No, by all means, it is easier." Something dry moved at the corner of his mouth.
"A poacher I must have removed from the property.
But, my aunt I need only fail to invite to the wedding, and my cousin, I might add, who was the very means by which you found yourself entangled in this sordid affair to begin with, may consider herself fortunate to receive an invitation at all. "
Elizabeth laughed despite herself, "You say the wedding as though it were already a settled thing, and a date fixed in some church register I have not yet seen."
"It is settled, so far as I am concerned.
I have only been waiting upon a fit occasion to ask it properly, as I promised you I would, and upon your ceasing to change the subject each time I attempt it.
" He held her gaze, steady despite the grey exhaustion still sitting in his face.
"You need not fear becoming merely Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn again, Elizabeth, because you are not returning to Longbourn as Miss Bennet.
You are returning as the woman I mean to marry, and I find that changes rather more about what the world may say to you than you have perhaps allowed yourself to consider.
Lady Lucas may say what she likes of a woman walking three miles alone.
She will have considerably less to say of the future Mrs. Darcy doing the same. "
"You mean to hide me behind your name." Her brow lifted. "How very convenient that the solution to my independence should be my absorption into yours."
"I had not thought of it as absorption." He considered her a moment, something unmistakably fond gathering at the corner of his mouth.
"I had rather hoped you might think of it as annexation.
You would keep your own opinions, your own tongue, which I have found entirely too sharp to survive any process so gentle as absorption; I merely propose to make it considerably more difficult for anyone in England to make you suffer for either. "
"Annexation. You make me sound very like a disputed province."
"A disputed province I have wanted a very long time," he said, "and mean to hold rather more jealously than the Crown has ever managed with Scotland."
"That is a poor comparison for a man attempting to be persuasive, sir. Remember, Scotland has rebelled against England with some regularity."
This made him laugh, a low, unguarded sound she had heard from him perhaps three times in as many months, and treasured each time a little more than the last. "Yes," Darcy agreed. "I am aware."
But the laughter subsided by degrees. He felt the teasing had run its course, as all good teasing must, and that what waited behind it would not be so easily deflected by wit.
He set aside the book he had not, in truth, been reading these twenty minutes past, and gathered himself, in the manner of a man bracing for the one attempt at happiness he did not think he could survive failing a second time.
"Elizabeth." He said her name the way he had come to say it these past weeks, not as address, but as a kind of anchor, a thing to hold to before venturing further.
"I told you once, in a sickroom, half out of my senses with fever, that I should ask you properly when I was well enough to deserve an answer given in earnest. I find I am tired of waiting upon my own recovery to do it. "
"You are hardly at your most impressive, sir, still confined to the fireside and forbidden the garden gate after dark."
"No," he agreed. "I am not impressive at present.
I have very little to offer you in this moment beyond a chair by a borrowed fire, and a constitution that has failed me twice already this season, and a family who will receive you, some of them, with rather less grace than you deserve.
" He held her gaze, steady despite it all.
"I find I do not care to wait for a more impressive occasion to say what I have known for some time now to be true.
I do not want a future in which you are merely accounted for, Elizabeth—settled, provided, disposed of, as you have so rightly feared.
I want you as you are. Sharp-tongued, and unaccountable, and entirely disinclined to let me have the last word in any argument worth having.
I find I have grown rather fond of losing to you. "
"You have not lost to me nearly so often as you imply."
"I have lost to you constantly since October, and only latterly begun to enjoy it." The faintest smile touched his mouth, there and gone. "Elizabeth Bennet, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?"
The fire cracked softly in the grate. Outside, the wind had settled into the low, steady murmur it kept on quiet nights, and somewhere below she could hear Mrs. Kewley moving about the kitchen, entirely unaware that the whole shape of a life was being decided one room above her head.
Elizabeth found that she had known her answer for weeks, had known it, perhaps, since a window latch and a mile run in the dark, or longer still, since a fever and a candle and words she had believed no one awake to hear.
But she let the moment hold a beat longer regardless, because she thought he had earned, after everything, the small mercy of being kept in suspense by a woman who had once refused him with rather less cause.
"I begin to think, Mr. Darcy," she said at last, "that you have asked me a question to which you already knew the answer, some three weeks past, in a room with rather worse lighting than this one."
"I had hoped. I did not know. There is, I have found, a considerable difference."
"Then let me remove the difference entirely.
" Her voice softened, all the teasing gone out of it, replaced by something plainer and far more true.
"Yes, I will marry you, not despite everything that has passed between us, but very much because of it, for I do not think I should have known my own heart half so well without every quarrel and every reproof that led me to it. "
Something moved through his face then that she had seen only twice before, once by candlelight in a fever, and once in a farmyard with blood on his shirt and her name on his lips, the look of a man who has spent a great while bracing against a blow.
He reached for her hand, and she gave it, "Then I find," he said, low, "that I have got precisely what I came to this island fearing I should lose, and precisely what I never once permitted myself to hope I might gain by it."
She laughed despite herself, and it loosened something in her chest that had sat tight since Mr. Kewley's news that morning.
"Then we sail Thursday," she said, "both of us frightened, and both of us resolved not to show it, which I begin to think may be the truest description of courage either of us is likely to manage."
"There are worse foundations for a marriage," Darcy said, "than two people equally determined not to let the world make cowards of them."
Elizabeth did not correct him. She found, turning back to her mending with hands that were not quite steady, that she did not wish to.
***
The morning of their departure came grey and mild, the kind of soft Isle weather that seemed, to Elizabeth, almost deliberately unwilling to make the leaving easy by contrast. Mrs. Kewley wept without shame at the cottage gate and pressed upon Elizabeth a small parcel of dried lavender from the linen press, "for the ship, and for after, so you'll not forget us entirely.
" Mr. Kewley shook Darcy's hand a long moment, and said only, "You'll have a care of her," in a tone that made it not quite a request.
The harbor at Castletown was busier than Elizabeth had yet seen it with carts and crates and the shouting of men glad to be at work again after weeks of enforced idleness, gulls wheeling overhead in the freshening wind, the Liverpool Pack riding at anchor with her sails still furled but her rigging alive with purposeful movement.
It ought to have felt like triumph, this return of the ordinary world's machinery.
Elizabeth found it felt instead like the closing of a door.
Darcy stood beside her at the rail some while after they had gone aboard, watching the island recede into grey distance behind them, and said nothing for a long time. She did not press him to it.
"I find," he said at last, "that I do not know how to thank a place for very nearly killing me and then giving me back the whole of my life in exchange."
"I do not think it requires thanks," Elizabeth said. "I think it only requires that we not waste what God gave us."
He turned from the rail to look at her, and whatever he had meant to say next seemed to leave him entirely, replaced by something simpler, "No," he agreed. "We shall not waste it my love."
Behind them, the Isle of Man dwindled to a grey smudge upon a greyer sea, and before them lay Liverpool, and Hertfordshire, and Pemberley, and Lady Catherine, and Mrs. Bennet, and every small, familiar machinery of a world.
But the ship carried them forward regardless, as ships do, indifferent to the courage of their passengers, and there was nothing left to do now but discover, together, whether what they had found on that narrow, wind-scoured island could survive the crossing.