Page 22 of Courting Elizabeth

DARCY

On the morning of my wedding, I woke before dawn.

I had barely slept. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw Elizabeth walking down the church aisle. Sometimes she smiled. Sometimes her face remained solemn. In a bolder dream, she entered my chamber clad only in her unbound hair and spoke my name like a prayer.

I rose before that last image could destroy what little self-control I had left.

Bingley joined me for breakfast at Netherfield. He seemed more nervous than I was, though all he had to do was sign the register.

“You’re not eating anything,” he observed.

“Neither are you.”

“I’m thinking of asking for Jane’s hand soon.”

“Miss Bennet.”

“Not for much longer, I hope.”

I set down my cup.

“Are you certain of her feelings?”

He looked at me with comic surprise.

“After everything that’s happened, that’s the question you choose to ask me?”

“It’s important.”

“Yes. I’m certain.”

“Has she told you so?”

“Not in those words. But she blushes when I approach, she seeks my company, she remembers everything I tell her, and she wept when I explained why I had left.”

I turned toward the window.

Elizabeth sometimes blushed. She accepted my company. She remembered my words. She had taken my arm when there was no need, had offered me smiles she gave no one else, and had trembled at my touch.

She was not Jane.

She expressed nothing the way Jane did.

“Why?” Bingley asked.

“Nothing.”

“Darcy.”

“I’m getting married in two hours. I’m allowed to be unreasonable.”

He smiled and raised his cup.

“To your swift recovery.”

The church at Longbourn was small. I had always found it insignificant. That morning, it contained the entire world.

Georgiana stood beside me, pale with emotion. She had met Elizabeth two weeks earlier and had grown attached to her with a swiftness that dispelled one of my last concerns. Elizabeth had neither pressed her to speak nor treated her as a fragile child. She had sat near the pianoforte, turned her pages, and asked her opinion with a simplicity that restored some of Georgiana’s confidence.