Page 56 of A Mismatched Compromise

For a moment, Mrs Bennet simply stared. Then she let out a sound that was not quite a word and not quite a scream, clutched at Jane for support, and turned to stare at Mr Darcy as though seeing him for the first time.

“Mr Darcy!” she cried, “oh, Mr Darcy, ten thousand a year and Pemberley besides, and my Lizzy mistress of it all! I always said she was the cleverest of my girls — did I not say so, Mr Bennet?” she said to her husband, who had come in at the sound of her joy and stood beside her. “See where it has got her! I shall be able to hold up my head in any room in the county, whatever that dreadful Lady Catherine said. My girls, poorly brought up? Her nephew does not think so, clearly!” she said, beaming at Darcy.

“Mama,” Elizabeth began, shaking her head, “I do not think Mr Darcy requires an accounting of his own income, and you know that is not why —”

“Nonsense, nonsense, there is no shame in it, none at all, it is a very great credit to him,” Mrs Bennet said, seizing Mr Darcy’s hand and pressing it warmly, quite as though she had not once told anyone who would listen to her how unpleasant and disagreeable he was. “You will forgive a mother’s joy, sir! It is most welcome news, after all she has been through, to know that my Lizzy is to be happy and comfortable!”

“It will be my life’s work to ensure that she is so, madam,” Darcy said, actually smiling. Mr Bennet reached out to shake his hand, and Jane dabbed at her eyes.

“Now! You shall stay to dinner tonight, Mr Darcy, and every night until the wedding! When is the wedding to be held? Mr Collins was married inside a month, and if a country parson can manage such dispatch, I’m sure an earl’s own nephew can manage as much, is that not correct, Mr Darcy?”

Mr Darcy, thus addressed, seemed to take a moment to try to determine exactly which question he was supposed to answer, and settled on, “I am sure that you are correct, madam.”

Mrs Bennet beamed. “There, you see, Lizzy — what an excellent connection, he has beautiful manners, whatever anyone might tell you about him being proud. Proud! As if any man with ten thousand a year, and my Lizzy besides, has anything to be humble about!” And with that, Mrs Bennet swept out in search of more people with him to share her news, calling for Hill and saying something about lace.

Elizabeth met Mr Darcy’s eye. He looked at once entirely at a loss and entirely, helplessly amused.

“There is always a great deal of excitement at Longbourn,” she remarked. “But we shall have a lifetime of peace at Pemberley to make up for it. Though I make no promises as to how peaceful I intended to be.”

“No,” Mr Darcy said, raising her hand once more to his lips, heedless of Jane and Mr Bennet looking on. “And I should be very disappointed if you were.”

Epilogue

Five years later

Much to the reverend’s bemusement, the church was decorated with rather more flowers than a simple country wedding generally warranted, but Elizabeth had long ago given up on attempting to restrain her mother’s enthusiasm for such occasions. Mary stood in front of the church in a gown of pale blue, looking more radiant than Elizabeth could have imagined her. Her hand was steady in that of Mr Thomas Abernathy, the parson of Kympton, whom she had met the previous summer during her annual visit to Pemberley, and who had fallen in love with her with a speed that would have astonished anyone who had known Mary Bennet only as the sober middle Bennet sister who was fond of quoting improving passages at dances.

As it transpired, a man who had spent a great deal of his education and his leisure time pursuing moral philosophy and writing sermons was intrigued by a woman who could discuss both at length, and considerably more besides. Mary, meeting at last a person who did not merely tolerate her interests, but shared them, had bloomed into something that Elizabeth privately thought of as her sister’s true self.

“She looks very well,” Darcy murmured beside her as Mary and her parson exchanged their vows.

“She looks happy,” Elizabeth added softly. “Which, I confess, I did not always think I would see.”

Their son, seated between them with the squirming restlessness of a three-year-old confined to a pew, chose this moment to loudly inform them (and much of the church) in a carrying whisper that he wished to go and see the horses. Darcy’s hand found his shoulder with quiet firmness and young Richard subsided, though not without a doleful sigh that drew a smothered laugh from his Aunt Jane in the pew behind them.

It hardly seemed possible that five years had passed since the double wedding where she and Darcy and Jane and Mr Bingley had stood at the altar together, on a bright morning that Elizabeth still thought of as one of the finest of her life.

The wedding had come about two months after Darcy’s proposal — slower than her mother wanted, but much quicker than had they waited for the anniversary of the Netherfield Ball, which only Elizabeth and Mr Bennet (and the Earl of Matlock) had considered a good idea.

There had been a heady year of married bliss, and then the next year Richard Fitzwilliam Darcy had arrived. He had grown quickly from an infant who screamed at the sight of his grandmama’s bonnet to a sturdy, dark-haired lad who followed Darcy about the Pemberley grounds, imitating his walk and gestures with determined devotion.

Their son was sometimes a little too much like his father, at least in his propensity to tell the truth even when it might have been better to speak with discretion. At the precocious age of two, he had informed a visiting bishop he did not think much of his sermon, for it was far too long. He had been joined around that time by the twins — Jane and Georgiana, affectionately called Janie and Georgie, named for the two women whose love and devotion to their respective siblings had done more than anything to bring their parents together, though neither would claim any such credit. They, in their turn, had grown from identical and practically indistinguishable infants into two entirely distinct small persons, one placid and watchful in the manner of her aunt Jane, the other possessed of a restless, inquiring energy that her aunt Georgiana herself had claimed, with great satisfaction, as proof that some things were simply inherited.

Jane and her beloved Mr Bingley sat in the pew behind them with their young daughters, having come the five miles from their own estate, which they had purchased in the first year of their marriage, for the occasion. Elizabeth glanced behind her and caught her sister’s eye with the old, wordless understanding that had never failed them. Mr Bingley, she noted, as she watched him smile down at his wife, had not grown one degree less besotted with her in five years of marriage, and made no effort whatsoever to disguise it, a fact that continued to scandalise Caroline Bingley on the rare occasions she was obliged to witness it.

Of Miss Bingley there was, mercifully, no sign today. She had not been invited, but she would not have attended anyway, so no one was in any way offended, and there was rather less tension by her absence than there would have been with her presence. She remained unmarried still, residing with the Hursts since Mr Bingley had, at Jane’s gentle but immovable insistence, at last declined to permit his sister any further hand in the management of his household, following an incident involving a parlour maid, three separate menus for the same dinner party, and an attempt to have Jane’s own preferences overruled in her absence. Louisa Hurst bore her sister’s company placidly, and Jane reported, after their occasional visits, that Miss Bingley’s temper had not improved with disappointment.

Georgiana was seated near the front beside her husband, the very kind and amiable Baron Sotherton. She caught Elizabeth’s eye and smiled. She had come up from London for the wedding, as with many of the guests, who had seized on the wedding as an opportunity for an impromptu reunion, and she would spend a fortnight or two at Pemberley after, as she did several times a year, dividing her time between her husband’s property in town and the quieter pleasures of her childhood home, to which she remained devoted.

Now one-and-twenty years of age, she had grown into precisely the confident, accomplished woman Elizabeth had always suspected lay beneath the shy girl she had met at her first visit to Pemberley, and delighted in nothing so much as being surrounded by her small nieces and nephew, who considered their Aunt Georgiana a figure of nearly unbearable awe on account of her ability to play any tune requested of her after hearing it once.

The ceremony concluded, the register was signed, and the wedding party spilled out into the June sunshine to the usual scattering of seed and good wishes, before the whole party moved to Pemberley for a wedding breakfast that Mrs Reynolds had spent the better part of a fortnight planning.

It was a lovely affair, the table groaning with everything Mrs Reynolds considered proper for the occasion, the drawing room thrown open to the summer air, and the house filled with a scattering of neighbours and friends along with the Bennets and Bingleys and Fitzwilliams. Mr Bennet and the earl held court in the corner with a decanter of very good port, while Kitty, grown into a sensible young woman under the joint influence of Jane’s gentleness and Elizabeth’s occasionally bracing honesty, danced with a respectable young gentleman well-liked in the neighbourhood and seemed to be enjoying herself considerably. Even Lydia, married these five years to an if not reformed, at least considerably more cautious, Mr Wickham, had sent effusive congratulations along with a note complaining that she could not attend on account of her husband’s regiment.

Elizabeth finally found herself with a spare moment, and as though on cue, Darcy appeared at her elbow with two glasses, one of which he handed to her with a bow. “You look,” he said, “very much in want of five minutes of quiet.”

“I am very much in want of my husband,” she said, accepting the glass, “which is not exactly the same thing, though I find they do often converge.”