Page 55

Elizabeth was not at all certain how long she had been sitting in the drawing room, staring at the chair where Lady Catherine de Bourgh had lately sat, before she recovered herself enough to realise that everyone was gone, the whole ghastly mess was over, and Mr Darcy was standing before her, watching her with an expression that she could not quite decipher.

The room, so recently crowded past decency and comfort with outraged aunts and reprobate new husbands and furious mothers and omniscient uncles and irrepressible sisters and all others she could not think of without a shudder, was entirely quiet. It seemed impossible that it should have been filled with so many bodies and so much noise just moments before, and should now be so very still. Elizabeth pressed her hands together in her lap and tried to attend to what he had said.

“You are free.” It was, she reminded herself, precisely what she had wanted all these months, since the morning she had woken after the ball to find herself engaged to the man whom her beloved sister and best friend had fallen in love with. She was free. She would not be married to a man who loved her sister. She would not be whispered about at every assembly from now until she was an old woman. The Earl of Matlock himself — an actual earl — had swept into her mother’s drawing room and put an end to Lady Catherine and her accusations in a few quiet, devastating sentences, and in doing so, he had declared her innocent. An earl’s word, she supposed, must be given more weight than even the combined opinion of every gossip in Meryton.

She ought to be beaming with relief, joyful, refreshed and ready to resume her life as Elizabeth, not as Mr Bingley’s disgraced, unwanted fiancée. Instead, she felt strangely hollow, as though this thing that she had been fighting for all this time had turned out, now that she had obtained it, to be considerably smaller than the echoing, empty hole that it occupied in her chest.

“Yes,” she said, when she trusted her voice. “I am vindicated.” She attempted a smile and knew that she had not entirely succeeded. “I am free.”

Even as she said it, Elizabeth was aware of how very little the word meant to her at present, and how large a portion of her heart it left entirely unaddressed. Free to do what, precisely? Free to grow old watching Jane and Mr Bingley be rapturously happy, delighted for them and wretchedly alone at the same time? Free to know that the one man whose good opinion she had ever truly wished to earn had already offered for her once, in the worst possible terms, so that she had refused him in equally heated measure, and he could not reasonably be expected ever to make such an attempt again.

Mr Darcy did not speak. After a moment she looked up, curious at his silence, and found him watching her with the particular intensity that she had come to recognise as the sign that he was working over some private calculation. He had worn the same look when puzzling through the matter of the letter, the order of persons arriving at the library, over every knot in this whole tangled affair that he had set out to unpick, with his characteristic thoroughness and determination.

“Free,” he said again, as though testing the word and finding it wanting. “Yes. I suppose you are.” He paused for a long moment. “Though I find I am not nearly so satisfied, even on your behalf, as I had expected to be.”

“No?” Elizabeth felt a cautious lifting, a slow loosening of the tightness in her chest. “I own I am a bit underwhelmed myself. I had rather thought that vindication would feel more… triumphant.”

“I had hoped that it would feel rather more…of a conclusion. Like a satisfying end that would be a place one could move on from and feel resolved,” Mr Darcy said. “I find that it…does not feel like that.”

He stepped a little closer, and Elizabeth, watching him, thought that she had never seen him so entirely without his usual composure. His hands, generally so still, opened and closed once at his sides, as though he were gathering strength for something that he anticipated would be difficult.

“There is something I must say to you — well, there are several things I am resolved to say,” he corrected himself. “But I must say this first, or I shall not properly trust in anything that either of us says after.”

He drew a breath and looked straight into her eyes. “You owe me nothing, Elizabeth. Whatever I have done, in going after Wickham, or in attempting to contradict my aunt, or in bringing your family to Pemberley, none of it — none — was undertaken to place you under any obligation to me, and I cannot bear to have you believe otherwise. If anything else I say to you today feels like an implication of a debt come due, I beg you refuse it outright and spare us both, for I have made one catastrophic blunder already, born of a wretched, prideful sort of reasoning that has left me heartily ashamed, and I could not survive compounding it by accepting anything that you give me from a sense of gratitude. So I ask you to hear what follows as it is meant to be heard: not as a settling of accounts between us, but simply as the truth.”

Elizabeth’s heart, which had settled to its ordinary pace after the madness of the afternoon, now set up such a clamour that she felt certain he must hear it from where he stood. She could only nod, not trusting herself to speak or wanting to disturb whatever he had gathered himself to say.

Mr Darcy looked around and pulled one of the vacated chairs near hers and sat down across from her. “I love you,” he said. “I have known that I love you, I believe, since the first moment I resolved I ought not to, which rather demonstrates how little governance I have over the matter,” he said with a slight smile. “I have watched you defend your sister at the cost of your own reputation, best my aunt without raising your voice, and win my sister’s whole heart in the space of a fortnight, and I find that not only have I run out of arguments against loving you, I have quite forgotten why I should have any arguments at all for so silly an endeavour, and I have not the smallest wish to discover any more.” He reached out and took her hand in his. “You are the cleverest, most spirited, most thoroughly alarming woman of my acquaintance, and I have not passed a single tolerable hour in these six months that was not somehow occupied thinking of you. Georgiana would be beside herself with joy to call you sister, to the point where she has told me as much, in terms much more direct than she generally permits herself. Without you, my beloved Pemberley, my refuge, is simply a large house, and a very empty one, that will only be filled with you as its mistress.”

He paused, his throat working, and Elizabeth saw that his composure had nearly deserted him entirely. “I suppose this is a great many words to say that I love you, and I never wish to live a day without you again. Elizabeth, will you do me the entirely undeserved honour of being my wife?”

For a moment, Elizabeth could not answer him at all. She had imagined this moment so many times and in so many painful variations when she thought it quite impossible, that to have it arrive plainly, in his own voice, with his hand warm around hers, left her at once almost unbearably happy and entirely unable to trust that it was real.

“Mr Darcy,” she said finally, and heard the unsteadiness of her voice. “I must confess I have spent a great deal of energy these last months attempting not to love you, especially since we left Pemberley, on the grounds that you did not want my love, and that circumstances made it impossible anyway. You have been the truest friend my family has had this last half-year — perhaps ever. You rode after my sister, saved her from the consequences of her own folly, and ensured that she would be provided for. You stood between me and your aunt’s contempt; you helped ensure that Jane would not live her life bereft of the man she loved. You even helped bring peace and comfort to my mother. Never once did you ask for thanks, and I promise you, I have seen that and do not discount the worth of it for anything. But that is not why I have loved you for longer than I have been willing to own, even to myself. It…it is not why I say yes to you now. I say yes because I love you, Fitzwilliam, and because there is no one on this earth that I would rather spend the whole of my life alarming.”

“Elizabeth…” On his lips, her name sounded like a vow. “You…you will? You are saying yes? You are certain?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, laughing even as her eyes filled with tears. “Yes, I will marry you, and you must never again distress yourself imagining I might be agreeing out of duty, for I promise you it would take a far more determined sense of duty than I possess to feel the way that I feel at present.” She found she was laughing and near to crying at the same time, a most unusual and inconvenient combination. “You wretched, honourable, thoroughly insufferable man. Did you truly imagine I required persuading?”

“Well, after you refused me, I thought that I had ruined everything,” Darcy admitted.

“And I thought you would never look at me in that way again, after I refused your first proposal,” she said. “I thought you might require more encouragement than I gave at that time to ever consider asking again.”

“I required nothing,” Mr Darcy said, “beyond the courage to ask, and the assurance that whatever answer you gave me would be your own wish, not some misplaced feeling of obligation.”

“Then permit me to inform you, once and for all, that you have both my answer and my heart, and neither is given with any but my most enthusiastic permission,” Elizabeth said.

He laughed then, a low, surprised sound she had heard from him only a handful of times in their whole acquaintance, and he lifted her hand to her lips before rising to his feet and lifting her to hers. He looked down at her for a moment, then bent his head and kissed her properly, and Elizabeth discovered that six months of misery, mismatched engagements, social disapproval and family catastrophe were a remarkably small price to have arrived at a moment so entirely blissful.

They spoke for a long while after, sitting together near the window while the sounds of Longbourn resumed beyond the door — Kitty’s voice, then her mother’s, and Mary attempting to restore calm to the household with a hymn rather too mournful for the occasion. They were just speaking of Georgiana, and how soon they might read the banns, and whether it would be in poor taste to have a wedding on the one-year anniversary of the Netherfield Ball (he said it would be, she believed it would be completely fitting and deliciously amusing), when the door opened and Jane’s sweet face peered in.

“You’ve been alone for some time,” she remarked. “Mama is all atwitter, but Papa says that, while he would not trust Mr Wickham with carrying his dinner from the tray to the table, he would trust Mr Darcy with his books, much less his daughter. I think he is joking, but…”

Elizabeth smiled. “I suppose we will have to arrange for a wedding to ensure there is not yet another scandal,” she said. “Fortunately, Mr Darcy has proposed, and I have accepted him, so we are already well set on that plan.”

Jane exclaimed with delight and came into the room to hug her sister and share her joy with Mr Darcy. Mrs Bennet, never one who would fail to take advantage of an open door, bustled in, demanding to know what they were all about, and whether anyone intended to tell her anything at all in her own house.

“Mama,” Elizabeth said, taking her mother’s hands, “Mr Darcy has done me the honour of asking me to marry him, and I have accepted.”