Page 40 of Miss Bennet is Gone

She turned it in the light. “But not by me, I think, and not today, in a sickroom. You are the one who held her in your arms when she was small and homesick. You should be the one to send her up the aisle wearing it. Let it be your gift as much as mine. God knows we have both earned a share in that girl’s happiness.”

And Mrs. Gardiner, who had thought herself wept out, took the brooch in both hands and was undone all over again and could only nod, and close her fingers over it, and put it away in her own keeping against a morning now very near.

Elizabeth woke in the middle of the afternoon to a square of pale sun on the counterpane and the ordinary blessed sounds of a house at work below her.

She lay a while simply taking the inventory of safety the way she had used to take the inventory of the other room, but every item now a comfort and not a threat.

A door she could open, a window with no bar, a fire someone had built without being made to, the smell of bread instead of the smell of the grey blanket.

She got up, and found she could. Dressed, slowly, in her own clothes and came to the top of the stairs and stood listening, not for locks, she noted, with a small private satisfaction, but for voices, for the dear ordinary racket of people she loved.

Georgiana was at the foot of the stairs, and had been for some while. So when Elizabath called her name and came down to her, she got out none of what she had spent the morning preparing.

What she managed, when Elizabeth reached the bottom step, was the one word she had been unable to finish at a dinner-table in Grosvenor Street a lifetime ago, and she said the whole of it this time, steadily, out loud, in front of everybody.

"Lizzy."

And Elizabeth, who had been given back a great many things in the past four-and-twenty hours, found that this one undid her, and put her arms round Darcy's sister and held on to her in the hall.

After, the whole family made a great fuss of caring for her and she let them, and she ate a proper meal at a proper table with her family round it, and it did her more good than any draught the doctor could have left.

Darcy was at her side, and did not crowd her, and could not quite stop looking at her.

She caught him at it, twice, and the second time reached over and put her hand on his without a word, in front of everyone, which in that house on that day passed without the smallest remark, the family having moved some hours ago past any pretense that these two needed watching for proprieties.

When the worst of the fuss had eased, she said what she had woken meaning to say. “I should like to write to my father,” she said. “Today. Or, Aunt, I should like you to write it, in your steady hand, for mine is not steady yet and he must not have it in a shaking hand or he will know.”

She looked round the table. “He is not to have the truth in a letter; that is a thing to do in the same room together and no other way, and I will not have it broken to him two days’ ride with no one by him but my mother. So the letter is to say only that I am mended, that the long illness is past, and that Mr. Darcy and I mean to be married very soon and very quietly at Pemberley, as soon as I am strong enough to travel and that he is to come to us there, all of them, for it.”

Elizabeth paused and thought of another thing she wished done.

“Uncle, there was a young woman at Madame’s, you will know I am sure. Her name is Sarah. She is the one who carried that bottle in to me and said the words she had been told to say. She has a mother who was dying then and may be so yet."

“I remember her, Lizzy. She was a timid creature but tried to help me and Darcy at the modiste that evening,” her uncle said.

Elizabeth went on, “She was chosen, you understand. Not happened upon. She was chosen because she was poor enough and frightened enough and had too much already on her to look twice at a kindness. I have thought about her a great deal in that room, more than I expected to. She is at this moment going about her work believing she handed a bride her ruin, and nobody has troubled to tell her how it came out."

She looked round the table. "So she is to be told. Today, if it can be managed. Sarah is to be told that I am found, and that I am well, and that not one person in this family holds a thing against her. And whatever her mother wants is to be had, and it is not to be called payment, because there is nothing whatever to pay her for. She gave a bride a glass. That is the sum of what she did."

Mr. Gardiner said that he would go himself, that afternoon.

“Then Let my mother have her wedding to crow about,” she continued. “Let it be at Pemberley, where I can be married among trees instead of stared at down a London aisle, and where the whole sorry season can be put behind us at the door.”

She turned her hand over under Darcy’s. “I find I have stopped wanting a grand town wedding entirely. I have had enough of being talked about by people I shall never meet. I should like to marry you quietly, in our own home, with only the people who love us to see it, and I should like it to be soon.”

“It can be as soon as you can sit a carriage to Derbyshire,” Darcy said, “and not one hour after, if I have any say in the matter, which I begin to hope I do.”

“You have a great deal of say,” Elizabeth said. “You have rather more say, as of last night, than any other person living. Only do not imagine it will always be so. I mean to recover my health entirely, Mr. Darcy, and argue with you about everything, all the way to Derbyshire and the whole of our lives after, and you are not to look so pleased at the prospect, it is unnerving in a man.”

He laughed, the first easy laugh anyone at that table had heard out of him in a long while and the sound of it went round the room like warmth from a fire.

Mrs. Gardiner had to look hard at her plate, and Jane reached for Mr. Bingley’s hand under the cloth, and the long dread that had lived in that house got up, quietly, and went out, and did not come back.

23

They went north to Pemberley by easy stages a fortnight later, when Elizabeth was strong enough to sit a carriage a half-day at a time and impatient enough to insist she was strong enough for more, which Darcy, who had appointed himself the unbending guardian of her recovery, would not hear of.

She was mended, the doctor had been right. She ate, and slept the night through more often than not, and the nightmares that had jerked her awake in the first days came seldom now and woke her less violently when they came.