Page 47 of You Willfully Misunderstand Me

Yours entirely,

F. Darcy

Elizabeth read this letter alone, by candlelight. She found, when she had finished it, that she was crying, not from grief, though grief had a part in it, for the ugliness of what had been done to them both, and to Anne, who had only wanted, it seemed, someone to love her as thoroughly as she was capableof loving in return. But chiefly she cried from something nearer relief; that the shapeless dread she had carried since arriving on the Isle of Mann and finding herself alone, the sense of some malice not yet fully understood, had resolved at last into a thing with a name and a face, small and mean and finished, rather than the vast unaccountable danger it had felt like in the not-knowing.

She replied to Darcy that night, and did not attempt to disguise her tears in the ink, for she had learned, this past season, that he did not require her composure nearly so much as her honesty.

***

It was nearly six weeks before he came again to Longbourn; they were weeks in which Mrs. Bennet's nerves oscillated between the ecstasy of an engagement and the fresh agony of its prolonged absence, and in which Elizabeth found herself, more than once, walking out alone toward Oakham Mount simply to be somewhere the noise of the house could not follow her.

But he did come, at last, on a bright morning in early autumn, riding into the yard at Longbourn with a dispatch that made his purpose plain before he had even dismounted; for tucked within his coat, produced with a formality that could not entirely disguise how little patience remained beneath it, was a special license, procured at no small trouble and no small expense, that required no banns, no further waiting, no further delay of any kind that either of them could any longer be persuaded to tolerate.

She had heard the commotion in the front yard; hooves upon the gravel, and Hill's voice raised in some flurry ofinstruction, and beneath it all a low murmur of horses being seen to that spoke of a visitor arrived in some haste. Elizabeth set down her needlework and went to the window first, some old instinct from the cottage door still quick in her even now, before she permitted herself to hope for what she found instead; Darcy, dismounted, travel-worn and windblown from the road, already crossing the yard toward the house with a purpose in his stride.

She was out the door before Hill could so much as announce him, joy overtaking every scrap of the composure she generally prided herself upon keeping.

"Mr. Darcy!" She explained joyously, and came to a halt before him, a little breathless, searching his face for some sign of what six weeks and a hundred miles had cost him. "You did not write to say you were coming!"

He smiled, looking down at her blushing face, "I did not know it myself until I had already left Kent. I found I had run out of patience for writing ahead, and preferred to simply arrive." A ghost of that dry humor moved over his face, though something graver sat beneath it still. "Forgive me. I ought to ask first how you do, and how your family does, before I say anything further."

"You may dispense with the proper order, sir. I have grown rather fond of you managing things out of it."

His smile widened, as his face visibility eased, and he took her hands. "I find," he said, "that I have had quite enough of Kent, and rather more than enough of being parted from you by matters that had nothing whatsoever to do with us, and everything to do with men who ought never to have been permitted to touch either of our lives at all."

"Then I take it, sir," she drew in a breath, feeling a flutter of excitement she made no great effort to disguise,"that we are not to have a long engagement after all."

Darcy lifted his eyebrows slightly, in that teasing way she had come to know and love, so unlike the grave, guarded man who had once so awkwardly proposed to her at Hunsford that she could hardly credit them the same person. "I have brought a license expressly to prevent it. I find myself entirely out of patience for waiting upon banns, and upon anything at all that stands between this morning and the moment I may call you my wife." He looked at her, and whatever careful reserve he had once worn like armor against the world was, in that moment, entirely and visibly absent. "Will you marry me tomorrow, Elizabeth? I have waited a great deal longer than I intended to ask you so plainly, and I find I have no wish to wait one day more than this business has already stolen from us."

Elizabeth, standing in the autumn sunlight with a license in his hand and six weeks of letters pressed close in memory, found she had no wish to make him wait either, "Tomorrow," she agreed. "I begin to think, Mr. Darcy, that we have both had quite enough of waiting to last the whole of our lives together."

For a moment he did not answer at all. Whatever he had meant to say seemed to have deserted him entirely, and he stood there in the yard, license still in hand, looking at her with an expression she thought she should remember all her life, not triumph, not even relief exactly, but something quieter and far more undone than either.

"Tomorrow," was all he managed at last, though inwardly he thought onlyat last, at last, after everything, she is not lost to me.And then, finding no better answer than the one his whole bearing had already given, he only smiled, therare, unguarded smile she had come to treasure above any of his more practiced civilities, and drew her hand to his lips, and said nothing further at all, for there was, at last, nothing further that wanted saying.

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, anda 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.