“Have you gone often to your father’s grave?” Darcy’s voice was soft and kind.
“In one sense I have. He is buried in the churchyard where we attended. I passed by Papa’s remains at least weekly the whole time I was still at Longbourn. Just…”
“You honoured him in your heart.”
Elizabeth nodded. “When I think about the grave, I see him cold and dead. The way he looked before they closed the lid.”
Darcy squeezed her hand, and she took comfort from that.
“Yes,” Elizabeth smiled back at him. “I should introduce you to him.”
“That is what a dutiful daughter would do,” Darcy replied with complete seriousness. “I must ask for his blessing.”
“Oh, I miss him! — you would have liked him very much. And he would have liked you.”
“You have said as much,” Darcy replied.
It was not a long distance from the middle of Meryton to the chapel near Longbourn where Papa was buried. But it took them a rather long time to travel the whole distance as Emily was engaged in a game of hopping. It was a fine day, warm enough to be one of the first days of summer, with a pleasant breeze, and the sun shining down.
A good sort of day.
Elizabeth cradled Darcy’s arm in her own as they strolled along, only occasionally shouting for Emily to get out of the road so that a farmer’s cart might pass.
A familiar countryside, and she would leave it behind, not forever, since they were sure to visit, likely once or twice a year when they came to London for the season. But she would neverlivehere again. She had not for months in any case.
There was a deep poignant feeling in her chest, and around her eyes. “Look,” Elizabeth exclaimed, “That is the tree Lydia broke her arm falling out of when she was nine.”
Darcy grimaced. “Emily is too adventurous, she’ll break an arm when she is eight.”
Elizabeth laughed.
The old well. The water was particularly cool and sweet in the midst of summer. That old wilderness that she’d run around and around a thousand times as a child, making up stories to herself, playing games with the village children, swinging a stick about as though it were a sword. Mr. Potter’s cottage, which had been newly built only five years past.
A collection of swallows nests that had been reoccupied each summer for as long as Elizabeth could remember.
They came to the churchyard from behind. At the gate they paused for a long time as Emily assessed the integrity of the old fence. It was only when she proved the weather beaten wood wanting and made clear that she would very much like to wholly disassemble the structure so that it might be replaced, that Darcy picked her up, soothed away her tears at the interruption of her destructive task, and carried Emily into the little graveyard.
There were others Elizabeth had loved who lay here with Papa.
Her grandmother. The housekeeper before Mrs. Hill. A variety of cottagers and tenants. A dear friend from an estatehalf Longbourn’s size who had died from an ear infection when Elizabeth was thirteen.
Flowers in bloom all around, and Elizabeth brushed her hands over them, while Emily ran about and sniffed each set.
Elizabeth found the gravestone. It was still fresh, built of solid granite, and with etchings that had not been worn down by only one changing of the seasons. The little area was kept clean and well maintained. Mama must have arranged that. Though her parents’ marriage had been in many ways flawed, and wholly different from what Elizabeth hoped for herself with Mr. Darcy, it still had been of long duration, and there had been affection between the parties.
Angels flew over the top of Papa’s name, and each of the bottom corners of the gravestone was an hourglass. In the middle the family crest.
The name: Thomas Bennet.
The two dates.
In remembrance of Thomas Bennet
A man of letters and refined taste
His love for his dear wife
And for his five cherished daughters
