Page 1 of Miss Bennet is Gone

1

Elizabeth Bennet was days from her wedding, and she had discovered in herself a happiness so great she did not entirely believe it, but a walk before the fashionable hour on the arm of the man who had occasioned it was as near as she had come to bliss.

"You are very quiet," Darcy said.

"I am committing my contentment to memory. It is a novel sensation, and I should like to be able to describe it accurately later."

"For what purpose?"

"For the next occasion on which you provoke me. I intend to recite it back to you and say, 'observe, sir, that I was once perfectly happy in your company, and consider how far you have since fallen.'"

"You are assembling evidence against me eight days before you have promised to spend your life with me."

"I am a thorough woman. You knew that when you asked."

"I did," he said. "I confess it was among the reasons I loved you."

She turned her head to look at him. "Was it indeed? You wished to marry a woman who would remember every one of your failings?"

"I wished to marry a woman who would notice them at all. I had met a great many who would not have troubled themselves." He said it lightly, his eyes ahead on the gravel, and she had learned that he reserved his plainest truths for these moments. "I had not expected to mind the difference as much as I find I do."

"That," she said, "is dangerously near a pretty speech. I shall have to note the date. You make so few of them that each one ought to be commemorated."

"Then I shall ration them more strictly."

"You will do no such thing. You will be as extravagant as I require, or I shall tell Lady Matlock that you have been miserly with your bride, and she will have a great deal to say to you about it."

He laughed, the low breath of one surprised out of him. Elizabeth counted it a victory, and a considerable one.

She had been collecting those victories every time she surprised Fitzwilliam Darcy into laughter against his better judgment, and she did not mean to stop until the collection was indecent. Six months engaged had taught her his delight.

A barouche came round the bend at the measured pace of a carriage whose owner wished to be seen taking the air. Mrs. Alderton sat very upright within it.

When Elizabeth had first appeared in town as Darcy's intended, a country nobody who had somehow carried off the catch of the Ton, Mrs. Alderton had looked her over once and thereafter declined to see her at all.

This morning, she inclined her head. It was a small motion, precise and deliberate, not warmth, but acknowledgment, which in certain circles was the harder of the two to give or to get.

Elizabeth returned it with exactly as much as she had been given. She did not slow her step. She did not look after the carriage once it had passed.

Beside her, Darcy had seen the whole of it and said that she had forgiven Mrs. Alderton and was vexed with herself for the mercy. It was precisely the look and precisely the reason, and she declined to confirm either.

"You are very sure of yourself this morning," she said.

"I am very sure of you. It is a different thing, and a better one."

She turned that over and could not improve upon it, which was rarer than she cared to admit. "Then I shall have to grow less legible," she said. "A wife ought to keep a little of herself in reserve, if only to leave her husband something still to discover."

"Keep as much of yourself in reserve as you please." He looked down at her, tipping her chin up, and said the plain thing while staring into her eyes. "I have the whole of my life to reach the end of you. I find I am in no particular hurry."

"Two pages, then. No more." And because the morning was bright and the man was hers, she laughed.

His face changed, as it always did at the sound, as though her laughter were something he had accomplished and might fairly take credit for.

Eleven days, she thought. Elizabeth leaned a little more into his arm which she could trust to hold.

The dinner at Matlock House was small, which was its own kind of welcome. Lady Matlock did not assemble large parties for people she meant to keep. She kept them by degrees, at her own table, where she could watch how they did.

It was not, however, without its small examinations. Mrs. Henderson, a friend of the Countess for many years, seated across the table from Elizabeth, had the serene persistence of a woman who believed a question asked sweetly enough could give no offense however often it was repeated.