Page 58 of Mr Darcy’s Inconvenient Wife

“I remember. I was very rude to you.”

“You were right to stop me. I had been walking up and down the park at Rosings for days, making a speech of it, and it was a dreadful speech. It told you how long I had fought against it. It told you what your family was and what mine would say. If I had got to the end of it, you would have thrown me out of the house, and you would have been quite right.” He stopped. “Will you let me say it properly this time?”

She could not trust her voice. She nodded.

“I love you.” He said it quite plainly, with nothing added. “I have loved you since long before any of this. I loved you in Hertfordshire, when you laughed at me, and I loved you in Kent, when you could not stand the sight of me. When we were married I made up my mind I would never ask you for anything. I told myself it would be enough if one day you did not despise me. That was as much as I let myself hope for. I did not think I had any right to more.”

Elizabeth looked down at her hands. When she looked up again, she could not see him clearly.

“Then you are a great deal too modest, sir. I never thought I should have to say that to you.” Her voice shook, and she let it. “You may hope for a great deal more than that.”

“How much more?”

“Ask me and see.”

He said nothing for so long that she began to be afraid she had been too pert. Then he moved along the sofa to her and took her hand. He held it carefully, as though she had only lent it to him and might want it back.

“Lizzy. Not because of the cellar, or anything your father said to you that afternoon. Not because of Georgiana. Not out of kindness. Will you have me?”

“Yes.”

“All of it? My temper, and my aunt, and my wretched pride?”

“All of it,” she said. “Every bit.”

He bent his head and kissed her fingers. She felt that he was trembling before she felt anything else. When he sat up again he did not let go of her hand, and she did not ask him to.

Upstairs, Georgiana's candle would be burning down. Somewhere in the house a clock began to strike, and neither of them bothered to count.

Epilogue

Elizabeth

Pemberley, the following summer

“Lizzy, you are walking much too fast.”

“I am walking exactly as fast as I always walk.”

“That is what I mean.” Jane was a little out of breath. “I thought Mr Darcy would have forbidden it, in your condition.”

“Mr Darcy forbids nothing. He only tells me at breakfast how far it is to the bridge, and how far it is back, and then he looks at me over his coffee until I promise to turn round there.” Elizabeth tucked her sister’s arm more firmly into her own. “I have promised him the bridge. I did not say which side of it.”

Jane laughed, and did not argue. That was as near as Jane ever came to a scold.

The path ran along the stream under the old limes. It was barely nine o’clock, and already warm. Up on the lower lawn a man was scything, and the smell of cut grass followed them all the way down to the water.

Elizabeth had heard about these woods long before she ever saw them. Mr Wickham had talked of them in Meryton, and of the stream, and the library, and every stone of the house. He had seemed to love it all, right up until the day he said he had been driven out of it. She had listened, and been sorry for him. Her husband had told her about Pemberley too, in the carriage the morning after their wedding, when she could barely bring herself to look at him. He had only said that she was fond of books, and he thought she would like the library.

Neither of them had told her what it would be like to live here. Nobody could have told her she would be happy here.

She was, though. It still caught her by surprise. Twice last week one of the maids had come upon her laughing over a letter, and once she had been heard singing on the back stairs. She could not afterwards have said what the song was.

It had not begun like this. She had been married because a stable boy had mistaken her for another woman. Jane had learned of it from Elizabeth’s own letter, which found her in Edinburgh after Christmas, and had written back by return of post: four close pages that said nothing whatever about the cellar and a great deal about being glad. For weeks after the wedding she and Mr Darcy had been as polite to one another as two strangers sharing a stagecoach. Now he laughed at the dinner table. He read aloud to her in the evenings without being asked. He took her hand in the gallery with a footman standing right there, and did not seem to notice the footman at all. She sometimes wondered whether the man she had quarrelled with at Hunsford had ever really existed, or whether she had drawn him from Mr Wickham’s description and never troubled to check the likeness.

“I have been thinking about Caroline,” said Jane.

“I thought you might be. I hope you have been thinking dreadful things about her, for once.”