Page 76 of The Longbourn Bloodline

Elizabeth’s hand strayed to her pocket, where Darcy’s letter lay folded—his three questions, his confession—and she knew, with a certainty that surprised her, that she would go with him.

“I do not believe I have agreed to anything yet, Mr. Darcy.” She could not help the wit or the grin, the combination that tempered her most vulnerable moments. “If you had supposed I had nodded, I wish to inform you that I was merely stopping Molly from plodding into an icy patch.”

“Noted,” Darcy said, but he, too, was grinning, because he now knew her tease meant affection, and that knowledge had blunted Elizabeth’s most effective weapon. Perhaps she required a different tactic.

The boundary stream came into view as they crested the northern ridge—a ribbon of silver threading between the fields, its banks still white with frost. And there, sprawled across its width like a fallen giant, was the elm.

It was larger than Elizabeth had expected from the reports. The root plate had torn from the frozen earth, leaving a ragged crater on the Netherfield side, and the crown had tangled in the branches of the trees on the Longbourn bank where it would dam up the water behind it. The trunk lay across the water like a bridge, its bark dark and wet, its branches reaching toward the sky as though still hoping to grow.

Darcy dismounted and came to assist Elizabeth. His hands found her waist, steadying her as she slipped from the saddle, and they stood so near that she could see the pulse at his throat, the faint tension in his jaw, the searching in his eyes.

“You have been crying,” he said.

“I am not grieving.” She heard the words come out sharper than she intended, and she softened her voice. “I am saying goodbye to my home. The only place on earth I am rooted.”

The horses stood behind them, patient and still. Hercules lowered his head to nose at the frozen ground. Molly pressed close to his flank, and their breath rose together in the cold air, two matched plumes that mingled and dissolved.

Darcy had not released her waist. His hands rested there, light and warm through the wool of her pelisse, and Elizabeth looked up at him—at the face she had once considered merely proud, then grudgingly handsome, then privately devastating, and now simply his. The face she wished to see across the breakfast table and beside the library fire and in the doorway of every room she would ever enter for the rest of her life.

“Tell me about Pemberley,” she said.

Darcy’s gaze stayed on her, the deep orbs of his eyes like pools she could easily get lost in. “There is a library,” he said, “with windows facing east. In the morning the light comes across the water—there is a stream, wider than this one, running through the grounds—and it fills the room with a kind of brightness you can feel against your skin, even in winter. My mother used to sit in the window seat and read while I played on the floor beside her. The cushion is faded where the light has touched it. I have never allowed it to be moved.”

Elizabeth felt the image settle behind her breastbone—the stream, the light, the faded cushion, the boy on the floor beside his mother’s chair.

“There is a kitchen garden,” he continued, “behind the south wing, where my mother grew her roses. Mrs. Reynolds maintains them still, though she says they were never the same after my mother died. The beds are laid out in the old formal style, and in June they bloom all at once—white and pink and a deep red my mother called Pemberley crimson, though I suspect the name was her own invention.” His voice had changed. The careful formality had dropped away from it, and what remained was lower and more private, the voice of a man speaking not to impress but to share. “The stream runs close enough to hear from the garden. My mother said it was the reason my father proposed there, so the stream would cover the sound of her answer in case she refused him.”

Elizabeth made a sound—not quite a laugh, but its warmer cousin.

“She did not refuse him,” Darcy said, unnecessarily.

“I gathered.”

“And then there is the lake, a peaceful, serene lake—seen from every south-facing window. My mother built a pavilion on the shore where she liked to sit and read, take a basket and pass an afternoon with the swans. The sunsets from that pavilion—I think of her painting the sky with her watercolors. I used to bring Georgiana when she had nightmares, and we would count the stars.”

Elizabeth’s hand went out to Darcy, touching his chest, resting against his heart. “Pemberley means the world to you. And now, you are going to make me cry, not because of the place or the lake or the library—but because your people lived and loved there. Your parents, grandparents, even back to George, a boy lent to Longbourn, and the meaning of it is too immense.”

She was ready. It was what every woman did when her heart belonged to a man worthy to love, cherish, and honor. And so, she placed her hand in his, and nodded.

“Come home with me, Elizabeth,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you. I will go with you to Pemberley and make it mine, and I will come home to Longbourn when my heart requires it, and I will love you for the rest of my life.”

Darcy’s breath caught, a small, sharp sound, and then his hands cupped her face, and his mouth found hers. Elizabeth’s own breath faltered, a gentle hitch in her chest, and then the January air vanished, replaced by the mingling of cold and warmth—the frost on his lips, the heat beneath. With the last lucid corner of her mind, she thought this must be what the stream sounded like when it ran clear: steady, bright, and inevitable.

Behind them, Hercules lifted his head from the grass and nickered softly. Molly flicked an ear in acknowledgment.

Elizabeth, standing at the threshold of her old life with Darcy’s arms around her, looked back at Longbourn in the distance—small and beloved, its chimneys smoking, its windows catching the pale January light—and felt a bittersweet gratitude for the home she would always carry within her, and for the man who would be taking her home with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

MRS. BENNET’S TRIUMPH

The delightful prospect of two daughters engaged to men of consequence had Mrs. Bennet bustling to do what all triumphant mothers must: announce her victory to the neighborhood with a formal dinner. Never before had a double engagement dinner swept as fast as a wintry gale as the one over Longbourn in the bleak of January, inviting or rather, demanding, the attendance of every neighbor in its path.

In less than a se’nnight, Mrs. Bennet had commandeered every available surface for fabric samples from Uncle Gardiner’s London warehouse, filled the morning room with fashion plates from La Belle Assemblée, and terrorized Cook into producing a menu that would, she declared, “put Lady Lucas’s Easter dinner to shame, though of course I would never say so aloud.”

Elizabeth, ever resourceful, evaded the more flamboyant preparations by riding out with Darcy, losing herself in the library with Georgiana, and rummaging through the attic for stillroom receipts and other arcane remedies. Jane, meanwhile, was besieged by congratulatory letters and the endless parade of well-wishers and gossips who had haunted their doorstep since childhood. Aunt Philips, naturally, entrenched herself beside Mamma, badgering Mrs. Gardiner—who had arrived post-Twelfth Night, already forewarned of matrimonial developments—to pronounce on every fabric, accessory, and decorative flourish currently sanctioned by London taste.