Page 72 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

I did not know what home was until you walked into my life. I had a great many houses. I had never had a home. Now I know that it is not a house at all. It is wherever you are. And this morning it is going up the North Road in a travelling coach with a hamper lashed on behind, and I am left standing in a very large empty building in Grosvenor Square that happens to have my name on the door.

I will finish this. I swear it to you. I will find her, and I will prove it, and I will put it in front of my aunt Matlock and the whole of London, and then I will get on a horse and ride to Derbyshire without stopping, and come up the drive through the wood, and round the turn at the top of the rise, and I will make the coachman stop, although I shall not have a coachman, since I shall be on a horse, and I shall look across the valley at the house, and you will be in it.

And I shall say: there.

Write to me about the weather. Tell me about the beeches. Tell me whether Mrs Reynolds has decided where to put you in her heart. Tell me whether Anne has seen a hill yet, and whether it has killed her. Tell me every small foolish thing. I want all of them.

And every morning, when you wake up in that room that faces south over the water, and I am not there, I want you to know that at that moment, a hundred and fifty miles away, I am waking up too, and saying good-morrow to an empty pillow, and meaning it for you.

Yours, entirely, now and for all my life,

F.

She read it standing by the gate. She read it twice. The second time she could hardly see the words.

Then, because there was nobody in the yard who knew her, and nobody watching, and the wind was loud enough to cover anything, Elizabeth Darcy put her face in her hands and cried at last: properly, helplessly, as she had not cried since she was a child. She cried for the empty house and the empty pillow, and for Georgiana asleep in the coach, and for all the weeks of papers and whispers and cruelty. And she cried because she had never in her life been loved like this, and had not known that anybody could be, and it was almost more than she could bear.

When she had finished, she folded the letter small, and put it inside her bodice, against her heart, next to the other one: the one from Christmas, which she had taken out of the drawer of her green writing desk at four o'clock that morning so that she would not have to leave it behind, and which said any slight to her is a slight to me.

Then she wiped her face, and straightened her bonnet, and went back across the yard to the coach.

Anne was awake, watching her from the corner with her bright hazel eyes. She did not say anything. But as Elizabeth climbed in and sat down, Anne leaned forward and put one thin hand over hers, and squeezed it, very briefly, and sat back again.

The coach pulled out of the yard. They went north, into the long green country, towards Derbyshire.

Chapter 20: Letters Between

Pemberley. Thursday, 16th April 1812. Very late.

My love,

The weather in Derbyshire is wild and wet and blowing a gale from the west, and the rain came sideways across the valley all afternoon like grey muslin being shaken out of a window. There. I have told you the weather. I have kept my word.

We are safe. All of us. Anne coughed from Leicester to Derby and then stopped quite suddenly at the county boundary, as if the air had been waiting for her, and has not coughed since. Georgiana slept most of the way and woke up in Matlock, and looked out of the window at the hills, and said "oh" in a small voice, and did not say another word until we reached the lodge.

And then we came up through the wood.

You told me I would see nothing but trees. You did not tell me how many trees. Or how old, or how dark, or how the rain drips from them onto the carriage roof like a hundred small drums, so that I thought we were going up into the middle of the earth. It went on and on. I began to think there was no house at all, and that you had invented it to tease me.

Then the road turned at the top of the rise, exactly as you said, very suddenly, and the wood fell away on the left.

I made the coachman stop.

The rain had eased, just for a moment, as though somebody had drawn a curtain back. And there it was, on the other side of the valley, with the hill behind it and the water in front, and the evening sun coming through under the edge of the clouds and lying along the whole front of it. You said grey-gold. You said almost pink. It was neither. It was the colour of the inside of a shell. I have never seen a building that colour. I did not know stone could be that colour.

I put down the window, in the rain, and looked at it. And I heard myself say: there.

Just that. There.

I understand your mother now. I think I shall stop at that turn every time I come home for the rest of my life. Even when it is raining.

Mrs Reynolds met us at the door. She is small and round and very severe, exactly as you said, and she looked at me for a long time without saying a word, exactly as you said. I stood on the step with the rain dripping off my bonnet and let her look. I thought, she is deciding where to put me. I shall not hurry her.

At last she said, "Madam. You have walked in the wet, I think, more than once in your life." And I said, "Three miles once, Mrs Reynolds, to nurse my sister, and I arrived with mud to the knee, and your master laughed at me." And she looked at me for another moment, and then her mouth did something very slight at one corner, and she said, "Did he, madam? Well. That is something." And she took my wet cloak off me with her own hands, and gave it to a maid, and brought me in to the fire.

I do not know yet where she has put me. But I do not think it is anywhere very bad.

My rooms face south over the water. They are blue, not green, and full of glasshouse lilies, and there is a window seat, and a book of your mother's lying on it: Cowper, with her name written inside in a small round hand, and a pressed violet at the page where she stopped. I have not moved it. I sat on the window seat for half an hour with it in my lap before I could bring myself to take off my bonnet.