CHAPTER 25
The next morning came clear and mild, with the particular golden light that autumn sometimes offers in place of summer's more careless warmth, and Longbourn's small church stood fresh with the last of summer's flowers, gathered that dawn and woven still damp with dew along the aisles between its worn wooden pews.
Elizabeth had expected, given the haste of the license and the general chaos her mother was capable of producing from even the most ordinary occasions, that the day might arrive in some disorder.
Instead she found, dressing that morning with Jane's careful hands doing up the last of her buttons, a stillness in herself she had not anticipated, not the nervous stillness of a woman bracing for an unknown future, but something steadier, the quiet of a decision long since made and only now, at last, being permitted its proper form.
"You are not nervous?" Jane asked inquisitively, as she helped Elizabeth with her hair.
"I find I have already survived rather worse than a wedding, this past season," Elizabeth said, as she reflected on her time on the Isle of Man, which included a window latch, and a mile run to reach help. “I do not think a church aisle is too terrible after that.”
"No," Jane agreed, smiling. "I do not suppose it does."
***
Darcy had felt some quiet dissatisfaction that Georgiana could not be present, nor Richard's own family beside him, an absence he bore privately.
But he would not have waited another day for it, whatever was lost in the waiting.
He had promised Elizabeth she should not return to her old life as merely Miss Bennet, second daughter, and a man who had already waited far too long to say what he meant did not intend to let even his own family's absence delay, by so much as a morning, the keeping of that promise.
He had told his cousin, before ever leaving Kent, of his intention to procure a special license the moment his business there was settled, and Richard, who knew Darcy well enough to read the whole of his meaning in so brief a disclosure, had said only, "Then I collect I had better keep myself free of other engagements this autumn," with the particular dry knowingness of a man who had watched his cousin's guarded heart finally come undone, and did not intend to miss the consequence of it.
Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam was as good as his word.
Richard arrived in Meryton that same night, dust of the road still upon him, to be informed by Darcy, at the Meryton Inn, over a hastily arranged supper that the wedding was to take place the very next morning, a piece of intelligence that startled him not at all, though it did occasion a long look at his cousin, and the observation that "you have contrived, Darcy, to become considerably less predictable than the man I have known these ten years, and I find I approve the change entirely. "
Darcy rose early the next morning, and dressed with care, wanting to be at the church before any other soul arrived to fill it.
If he were honest, some part of him had still not quite trusted his own good fortune, and he felt the need to stand in that quiet nave alone a while first, and satisfy himself the day was real before he permitted the rest of the world to claim its share of it.
The morning eventually wore on, and preparations began at Longbourn in earnest. A cart arrived not long after dawn bearing armfuls of late-season blooms from the Lucas Lodge gardens, the last of the asters and Michaelmas daisies, whatever roses the season had not yet claimed, bound up with trailing greenery and sprigs of rosemary that Mrs. Bennet insisted upon for luck, though she could not, when pressed by Mary, produce any very satisfactory account of whose luck, precisely, rosemary was meant to secure.
Kitty and Jane set about winding the greenery along the church's worn pew-ends themselves, Jane's quiet steadiness a welcome counter to Kitty's habit of tying each bow twice as elaborate as the last until Jane gently undid half her work and redid it more simply. Mrs. Bennet moved between them the whole while in a state of happy management bordering on the militant, pronouncing one arrangement too sparse and the next too proud, until Mr. Bennet, arrived and took the ribbon from his wife’s hands with a firmness born of long practice and said only, "Come and sit a moment, Mrs. Bennet. The flowers will do very well without further improvement.”
By the time the sun had climbed fully over the hedgerows, the little church stood transformed, not grand, for Longbourn's means and Darcy's own preference for quiet ran to the same modest scale, but full of color and green and the soft, honest scent of a garden's last generous offering before winter, laid along every pew as though the whole of the county's late summer had been gathered up and set aside expressly for this one morning.
Not long after, Darcy waited for his Elizabeth at the front of the small church with Colonel Fitzwilliam beside him, dust of the previous night's ride scarcely brushed from his coat, greeting Elizabeth beforehand with a warmth that held no trace of the awkwardness she might once have feared, given all that had passed.
Mr. Bennet gave Elizabeth away with a dryness of manner that fooled no one who knew him well enough to see past it, and Elizabeth, taking his arm for the last steps of the aisle, caught the particular brightness in his eyes that he would have denied, had anyone been unwise enough to remark upon it.
"Well, Lizzy," he murmured, low, for her alone, "I find I am giving away my cleverest daughter to the one man in England clever enough to deserve her. I do not know that I entirely forgive him for it, but I find I cannot fault his taste."
"Thank you, Papa."
"Do not thank me. Thank whatever God saw fit to wreck a harbor at precisely the moment it did. I have long suspected His Providence of a sense of humor, and I find this has settled the matter entirely."
Darcy, when she reached him, looked at her with an expression only of plain, unhurried joy; seeing him thus made Elizabeth feel entirely, unaccountably satisfied.
They stood opposite each other as the vicar opened his book, and Elizabeth, meeting her betrothed's eyes across the small space that still, technically, separated Miss Bennet from Mrs. Darcy, found she had never in her life felt so entirely, uncomplicatedly certain of anything as she felt in that moment, waiting only for the words that would make it official.
Darcy was thankful that the ceremony itself was brief, as such things generally are, and Elizabeth found she remembered afterward only fragments of it clearly; the vicar's voice, steady, and the particular warmth of Darcy's hand closing over hers when the ring was given; Mrs. Bennet's audible sniffling from the second pew, indistinguishable, by that point, from joy or nerves or simple relief that the whole uncertain business had at last resolved itself so satisfactorily.
She remembered the moment she was asked whether she would have this man, and the ease, the sheer, uncomplicated ease, with which the answer came, without a shadow of the doubt or reproof that had once stood so thickly between them.
"I will," she said, and meant it entirely.
Darcy's own vow, when it came, was delivered in a voice that held, beneath its steadiness, a man who had once believed himself entitled to love without the trouble of earning it, promising now, before witnesses, to spend the whole of his life earning it regardless.
***
The wedding breakfast that followed was smaller than Mrs. Bennet's ambitions and larger than Darcy's natural inclination, which Elizabeth privately considered an excellent compromise between the two.
The Lucases were in attendance, Sir William offering Darcy a series of ceremonious bows that Darcy bore with considerably more patience than he would once have mustered; the Philipses came as well, Mrs. Philips already gathering material enough to supply Meryton's gossip for a fortnight, though this time, at least, the material required no invention.
A scattering of other notable families rounded out the company, drawn as much by curiosity as by goodwill, though Elizabeth found she minded the curiosity rather less than she once might have, secure now in a happiness that had no further need of anyone's good opinion to sustain it.
The explanation offered, at the wedding breakfast, for so hasty and quiet an affair was simple enough, and had the considerable advantage of being entirely true, if not entire in itself, that Mr. Darcy, detained unexpectedly by business in Kent, had already missed the wedding date he had originally hoped for, and was not disposed to countenance any further delay upon his return.
It satisfied Mrs. Philips well enough, and satisfied Lady Lucas better still, and neither lady troubled herself to inquire what the business in Kent had actually comprised, which suited Elizabeth and Darcy both very well indeed.
It was not, strictly, the whole of the truth, but neither was it any great distortion of it, for Darcy himself privately held that the wedding had already been delayed a full six weeks beyond what he considered its rightful date.
He would, given the choosing of it, have married Elizabeth the very day her father gave his consent in the library at Longbourn, license or no license, banns or no banns, and considered every day since merely a debt owed him by circumstance, and paid now, at last, in full.