Page 21 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

The wedding was close now. The appointed morning waited beyond it, patient as a debt.

CHAPTER 8

ELIZABETH

The Sunday after the special licence arrived smelled of rain.

Elizabeth stood in the Longbourn pew after the final hymn while the name no one had spoken aloud from the pulpit pressed against her silence. No banns. No three Sundays in which a parish might object, gossip, wonder, delay. A special licence dressed silence as privilege and made haste respectable with the right seal and fortune. The word spinster would still appear in the register, that small legal joke implying a woman who had not been chosen, when she had in fact been chosen too thoroughly by a man who treated selection as conquest.

Charlotte sat in the third pew, black bombazine absorbing the spring light. Colonel Fitzwilliam sat beside her. Elizabeth did not look directly, but she saw Charlotte's hands folded in her lap with that terrible stillness. Whatever Fitzwilliam had demanded since their last meeting remained hidden behind her friend's shuttered face.

Darcy sat in the Netherfield pew across the aisle. He did not look at her during the service. He did not need to. His presence was sufficient, a weight in the nave that drew everything toward it, making the air between their pews feel compressed and taut. He sat upright, his prayer book open, his face composed into the expression of a man fulfilling a social obligation, and Elizabeth could feel his attention on her as one feels the sun on the back of the neck: constant, warm, impossible to ignore.

Mrs. Bennet wept. Joy, naturally. She wept as she did everything: loudly, wetly, with complete disregard for the comfort of those seated nearby. Kitty passed her a handkerchief. Lydia rolled her eyes. Mary studied her hymnal with the concentrated disapproval of a woman who considered emotional display a theological failing.

Mr. Bennet sat at the end of the pew and did not weep and did not smile and did not look at his second daughter. The careful blankness of his expression was its own kind of eloquence, the face of a man who has signed a document he considers fraudulent and must now watch it take effect.

After the service, the congregation spilled onto the church path in the usual slow churn of bonnets and handshakes. Elizabeth found herself surrounded, Mrs. Long pressing her hand and declaring herself delighted, Sir William bowing so deeply his waistcoat buttons strained, Maria Lucas whispering congratulations with the breathless intensity of a girl who has read too many novels and believes all engagements to be romantic.

Elizabeth smiled. She thanked. She deflected. She played the happy bride with the precision of a woman who has rehearsed every gesture and measured the cost of every failure. The effort was exhausting. The deception was necessary. The charade would continue for the rest of her life.

Darcy appeared at her elbow as the crowd thinned. He had the uncanny ability to appear beside her without warning, a quality she associated with huntsmen and servants, both of whom moved through the world on silent feet because their purposes required it.

"It is done," he said, his voice pitched below the hearing of the departing congregation. "The licence is secured. Four days, and then the ceremony."

"Four days. One might almost say a sentence."

"One might say many things about our situation. I have noticed you prefer metaphors of imprisonment."

"I have noticed you prefer the language of business transactions. We each describe the cage in the idiom we know best."

His mouth twitched. She had learnt to recognise that suppressed amusement and refused to ask why she wanted more of it.

"Walk with me," he said.

They followed the churchyard path between the graves. April had been generous; daffodils pushed through the grass between the headstones, and the yew tree by the gate was thick with new growth. The rain had held off, but its metallic sweetness filled the air, and the western sky was the colour of slate.

"I have spoken with your father," Darcy said when they were beyond earshot. "He has agreed to the settlement terms. The ceremony will take place here. Small. Family and a few close intimates only."

"And Charlotte?"

"Mrs. Collins will attend. Colonel Fitzwilliam will escort her."

Elizabeth looked at the graves beneath her feet. Women who had married and borne children and died in this parish, their entire lives conducted within a radius Elizabeth could walk in an afternoon. She would not die here. She would be taken to Pemberley, to London, to wherever Darcy's life required her presence, and her grave would be marked with a name she had not been born with.

"I have a request," she said.

The word request produced a visible sharpening of his attention, the slight straightening of posture, the focused gaze, because Elizabeth did not make requests. She complied. She resisted. She submitted. She did not ask.

"Speak."

"Oakham Mount. I should like to walk there tomorrow afternoon. With you."

Suspicion gave way to curiosity, then to hope before he mastered it. He wanted to be chosen. She had suspected this since Hunsford: beneath the commands lived a man who craved willingness rather than obedience, and that craving was the crack in his armour she might one day use. Here she was choosing a walk, not him, within circumstances she had never chosen.

"You wish to walk with me," he repeated. "Voluntarily."

"I wish to walk to a place I have loved since childhood, and I wish to do so before it belongs to me in a different way. Whether you accompany me is your choice."