Page 35

“The potage ala reine is much discussed, and upon securing a box of pomegranate from your town purveyor, I believe we shall manage to have it made.”

“At breakfast?”

“We mean to be ridiculous, Mr Darcy.”

“And the cake?”

“Enormous! Cook says it will soak up half a cask of brandy. And it will be covered in white icing, a wonder in Hertfordshire, from the fuss being made. Mama is distressing herself as to how to do the same for Jane.”

“You had better tell her to use Netherfield’s cook so your sister feels no slight. Might I give them shares in your uncle’s business as a wedding gift?”

“My word, but you are open-handed, sir. What next? Will you buy Mama her own carriage?”

“If you would let me.”

“Absolutely not! She is becoming intolerable even now. I shall admit to you that I look forward to seeing the downs and in that clean, astringent air, forgoing this extravagance. I feel slightly tarnished.”

“A repairing lease is in order, then,” I said, forgetting we were not alone and pushing a little curl off her cheek. “We shall go on a tour of austerity and dine on crusts of bread soaked in ale.”

She laughed. “Have you sent horses everywhere?”

“Strings and strings of them.”

“And are the innkeepers airing our sheets and polishing the glass?”

I looked at her with the great tenderness that I felt for her, and said in perfect imitation of my former self, “Good lord, Elizabeth. I certainly hope so.”

She smiled so very softly at me, I wished we were indeed private. “Are you not a little anxious, Mr Darcy?”

“About marrying you on Friday? No, fiend, I am not anxious at all. Having used up all my nerves in securing your consent, I am unperturbed at the prospect of signing over my worldly goods to you.”

“How dull,” she said, tipping her head to the side and looking at me.

“Dull! How can you say so? I am for once unruffled.”

“But I enjoy ruffling you.”

I could not quite restrain the lusty note in my chuckle when I said, “Believe me, Elizabeth, you will ruffle me very well come Friday night.”

I secured my bride on a day that started wet but cleared delightfully.

For the most part, I stood mutely to one side, for after saying I do and I will, I was of little use to anybody.

My wife—the thrill of calling her this has not yet subsided—stood as though in a light from above, and as always, she drew people to her, moths to the flame.

With my sister standing at her side, Elizabeth greeted her neighbours warmly, teased her friends with a lightness of touch that made her everyone’s favourite, and cajoled her sisters with master strokes of jokes, admonishments, and demonstrations of tenderness.

She ended by receiving her father with a look ripe with both affection and irony.

“Well, Papa, I am no longer crossed in love. You will need to find a new favourite among your daughters. I suggest Kitty, for even you will own that she could be more than she is.”

“But I am busy with your library,” he said with a twinkle.

“Make Kitty help you, sir, and while she is setting books on the shelves, tell her about Ivanhoe .”

Mr Bennet kissed her cheek and said, “I am glad you are going away, Lizzy, for I have a strong suspicion your new position as Mrs Darcy will give you notions of managing me.”

Mrs Bennet then pushed herself forward and threw herself on her newly crowned dearest daughter . Over the lady’s shoulder, Elizabeth’s eyes ruefully met mine, and I came forward.

“I have never attended a better wedding breakfast, Mrs Bennet,” I said truthfully. “You have outdone yourself. Might I,” I said, after brushing her hand with my lips, “beg leave to steal your daughter?”

As the notice of my shocking wedding circulated London, Elizabeth and I walked for miles along chalk-coloured paths amidst tufts of rye grass.

Closer to the coast, she could rarely take her eyes from the waves.

Whether they appeared as folds of blue velvet serenely breathing or fractured white tops pounding the shingle, she marvelled at their power.

And in taking Elizabeth to see things I had observed many times, I saw everything anew.

For once, I felt gratitude where I had only felt entitlement, and our simple movements—breakfast, walking, a carriage ride to another inn, passionate afternoons, a cosy supper in a fire-lit room, reading, midnight conversations—all these ordinary things, done with Elizabeth, rejuvenated my soul.

I had longed for this union, and yet I had no notion that Elizabeth’s delight would ignite such joy within me.

By degrees I began to allow myself to speak unguardedly, to unshackle the tightly controlled inner man.

Lying in a linen shift with one shoulder bared and her hair spilling in waves over my chest, my young wife listened to me with compassion, with commiseration, and upon occasion, with a chuckle as I unburdened myself of my ponderous history.

Not only had I secured her love, I had earned her friendship, and this was the most humbling gift she could have given me.

Upon returning to Netherfield, Richard came down the steps, and standing aside so Elizabeth could be scooped up by Georgiana, Mary, and Jane, he looked me up and down.

“I do not recognise you, Darcy,” he said. “What has happened to your face?”

“I have laughed more in two weeks than I have in twenty years,” I said. “I believe my jaw is realigned.”

“You inspire me, Darcy.”

“To marry?”

“Certainly to marry for affection,” he said lightly.

We saw Jane married two days later, and on our last night before leaving for Pemberley, we had a family supper at Netherfield.

In the parlour, Mrs Bennet beckoned me and said, “Mr Darcy, do you not think that my daughters Kitty and Lydia would take in London?”

My wife stiffened, but for once I knew what to do. I sat down next to her mother and said, at my most obliging, “Mrs Bennet—Mother Bennet—may I call you that? I would, of course, oblige you by presenting them when they are made presentable.”

“Made presentable?” Her eyes darted to her daughters and raked over them as they sat whispering in the corner as though searching for some flaw in their hair or their dresses.

“I have not discussed the recommended course with Elizabeth, you understand, and her opinion of what is to be done about them must stand over anything I might think of.”

She bristled. “What is to be done about them?”

“They are perfectly behaved for the country, Mother Bennet, but in town they would be deemed?—”

“Fast,” Elizabeth cut in sharply.

I patted Mrs Bennet’s hand reassuringly and said, “If you would like, I can send to you a lady of my acquaintance, a Lady Charlotte Wainright. She was married to an admiral and is fourth daughter of the Duke of Leinster. She is considered an authority on what constitutes town manners and would put in a word about vouchers at Almack’s if she thought that Kitty and Lydia would take.

Well, you and Elizabeth should consider the matter and decide what is best. Meanwhile, I have been meaning to ask if you would like my workers to make any trifling repairs at Longbourn before I send them back to London.

I believe they are nearly finished at Netherfield. ”

That evening we retired early. I slipped into Elizabeth’s room, as I did every night, for the pleasure of watching her brush her hair.

“Mother Bennet?” she asked archly.

“Of what do you wish to accuse me, Elizabeth?”

“I think it churlish of you to make me love you for your brusqueness only to now come the charmer.”

I came up behind her and took up her brush. With endless fascination I stroked through the silken strands on her head, losing myself in the rhythm and the feel of this nightly ritual.

“And who is this Lady Charlotte?” she asked, looking up at me in the mirror with a tiny frown and pulling me out of my distraction.

“She is exactly who you imagine her to be, love.”

“Horrible, in fact.”

“Yes.”

“And you think she might do my sisters some good?”

“I do not rightly know, but she regularly refers young ladies to the rigours of a Swiss school where they are taken away from everyone and everything they know and indoctrinated with a good deal of fashionable nonsense.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the classic accomplishments. Caroline Bingley is a product of that brand of education. Do not shudder, fiend. She went in with her basic nature, which was sniping and grasping, and she came out with it intact but lacquered over. I doubt very much they could dampen Lydia’s high spirits, but perhaps they might be directed into more suitable channels. Kitty might polish well, however.”

My wife heaved a great sigh, so I put down the brush and began to tenderly kiss her ear. “We do not have to decide anything today,” I whispered, before proceeding to turn her thoughts in another direction altogether.

In the morning we left Hertfordshire. I thought my Elizabeth might be sad, but she was in fact only reflective and by degrees over that three-day journey, we became truly bound to one another.

The proximity, together with the discomfort, confinement, and unending boredom of such a journey, rubbed us together in more ways than the physical.

Soon enough, we were ground down where we met as a couple, polished to perfectly fit one with the other, and infinitely comfortable.

Richard came with us as far as Bedford, before peeling off to visit some friends in Cambridge and then circling back to the Brigade of Guards in Surrey. He kept Georgiana and Mary occupied in my sister’s carriage.

The three of them ran shy of us, disinclined to join us in our coach save for a few short legs. When I hinted my bewilderment at this standoffishness, Richard laughed and said, “Darcy, you neither of you have eyes for anyone else. In time, I hope, you will have room to spare for the rest of us.”

“I do not mean to be?—”

“Of course you do not, but you are. Now, I have a packet of letters for you, which we agreed I would hold until now.”

At Bedford, Richard handed over my post which, aside from letters from my steward and man of business, I had purposely refused to read. With a jaundiced eye, I looked at the alarming pile wrapped in string.

“Take heart, Cousin,” Richard said cheerfully, “for they cannot all be damning, and you have only to reflect on your current happiness to know that much of this is meaningless.”

Upon rejoining Elizabeth in the coach after our stop in Bedford, she said, “You had better tell me what has put that grave look upon your face, Willum.”

My mother called me Willum, and when I shared this small intimacy from my boyhood, Elizabeth decided she would call me that as well. The sound of my mother’s pet name never failed to soften me, and so I heaved a great sigh and put the stack of letters between us.

“You have finally decided you must face the world’s opinion, then? Would you like me to read them to you?”

“On no account. The things that might be said of you?—”

“I can bear with a great deal of amusement, I assure you. Besides, what else is there for us to do? I begin to think Pemberley is a place in some mystical future and that we shall be forever on the road to meet her. Now, let us tackle Black Annis first, shall we? After what we hear from her , what anyone else cares to say will hardly signify.”

In consequence of my wife’s inclination to be joyful, a distasteful duty produced instead a great deal of laughter.

We took turns reading in various voices mimicking our correspondents, whether it was my tremulous vibrato of the countess’ shock and dismay, or Elizabeth’s gruff barks of outrage from the earl.

My friends couched tepid congratulations in the language of commiseration, and when I said, “My love, they one and all believe I have gotten some country squire’s daughter with child,” she looked her delight.

“Do they?” she cried.

“Of a certainty. These letters are written as condolences for consequences which must earn their sympathy.”

“How do you know, Mr Darcy?”

“You know very well how I know, fiend. I have had to write one or two of those grievous congratulations myself. Let us see what my banker says.”

My professional acquaintances sent best wishes composed strictly for the sake of form, none knowing whether they would somehow benefit or suffer from my unaccountable wedding.

We also read all the society notices.

Mr D of Derbyshire has confounded all his brethren by publishing notice of his wedding to a Miss B of Hertfordshire two days ago.

Lord and Lady M have taken the knocker from their door for reasons thought to be related to the surprise wedding of their nephew.

But by far, Lady Catherine’s letter was the most absorbing, for she managed five full pages of such a deranged rant that anyone reading it must either go mad or be well entertained.

One entire page was spent on my legal recourse to dissolve an illegal marriage, and another page dwelt in graphic detail on the stains of scandal for which my temptress must pay with an eternity in hell.

After we had torn these letters into tiny bits and strewn them over twenty miles of muddy road, I took Elizabeth in my arms and held her close while we dozed.

When I awoke, I said, “Elizabeth, do you know, I have never been happier?”

“Even after all those dreadful letters?” she asked on a yawn.

“Particularly after all those dreadful letters. Whoever comes to Pemberley now, whoever writes to me or wishes to know me, will do so from simpler motives. I had not realised what tension I suffered from having to discern what everyone wanted of me.”

“Do you know what I want from you?” she asked, but before I could come to a salacious conclusion, she said, “I want a very, very long walk.”

In consequence, the next day when we came to the perimeter of Pemberley’s park, I knocked on the roof of the coach and sent the whole cavalcade forward.

Taking my wife’s hand, we walked three miles to the rise overlooking my house, and stopping to stare, she said in a voice of wonder, “Is this home, Willum?”

Suddenly Pemberley was no longer a legacy to me. It was just a house! I wished to laugh aloud at my lifelong obsession with what was only, in essence, a place to eat and sleep, but instead I said, “Where you are is home to me, Elizabeth. Will you stay here with me?”

My love does not like me sinking into maudlin sentiment. She wrinkled her nose and sighed reprovingly. “It is very grand.”

“Would you rather have a cottage, my love? We can have Lady Catherine’s advisors begin to dissolve our contract. I shall put you on the edge of the estate in a stodgy little place where you can bear my love children, and I shall send you a guinea every so often.”

“Will I get a ham at Christmas?”

“Lord! What next?” I huffed. “Am I to buy silver buckles for your shoes?”

“Certainly after every boy child,” she said with a sniff.

And so we went down the rise to the house where the servants had flung open the doors to welcome us home.