Page 90 of Twice Chosen

I am here.

Mrs. Reynolds greeted them at the door.

She did not know Elizabeth.

That hurt in a way Elizabeth had not expected.

She smiled anyway.

She walked through rooms she had managed for half a century as a guest. She knew which corridor was cold in winter, which stair creaked, which window in the west sitting room stuck after rain. She could not say any of it.

At the blue room she stopped.

Darcy, behind the Gardiners, whispered, "Chimney."

Elizabeth laughed.

Mrs. Gardiner looked between them. "What?"

"Nothing," they said together.

Mrs. Gardiner's brows rose.

That evening Elizabeth stood on the terrace with Darcy while the Gardiners rested.

"I thought this would feel like coming home," she admitted.

"Does it not?"

"Yes. And no. Mrs. Reynolds looked through me as though I were anyone."

Darcy's face softened. "To her, you are."

"I know."

"Does that make you regret coming?"

Elizabeth looked across the darkening grounds. "No. It reminds me this life cannot simply be laid over the other like tracing paper."

Darcy took her hand. "Good."

She glanced at him. "Good?"

"Because I want this Pemberley to learn you too."

Elizabeth's eyes filled.

"That was very well said," she whispered.

Darcy smiled. "Marriage improved me."

She laughed and leaned against his shoulder.

Their London courtship brought them into contact with more minor acquaintances than either had remembered clearly. Elizabeth discovered that in her first life she had reduced many people to amusing impressions because Darcy had been the center of her attention. Now, older in mind if not body, she noticed more.

Mrs. Gardiner's neighbor, Mrs. Wilton, had an invalid husband and still managed to send soup to three poorer families every week. Mr. Gardiner's clerk, young Mr. Evans, spoke too quickly when nervous because he was supporting two sisters after his father's death. A dowager at one assembly whom Elizabeth remembered only for an enormous feather had lost a son the previous month.

Elizabeth began understanding how often youth had mistaken incomplete knowledge for accurate judgment.