“For you. I heard you were coming here,” Bingley replied, drawing a sob from his wife.
Fitzwilliam reached the line about Jane’s vapidity, and Mrs Sinclair snorted with mirth.
“Can you ever forgive me?” Bingley pleaded.
Fitzwilliam reached the line about Elizabeth’s virtues, and Mrs Sinclair burst into gleeful laughter. “Oh, that is superb!”
Both Bingleys looked at her with mixed consternation and mortification.
“Can you ever love me?” Jane said more quietly to her husband.
“How could I not love somebody who still loves me after what I have done? I know not why I ever stopped loving you.”
“Because ennui struck and witless rent ye!” Mrs Sinclair announced triumphantly.
Bingley instantly turned red. His wife looked confused to the point of wretchedness.
Shaking his head at his grandmother, Fitzwilliam put an end to the Bingleys’ lamentations by instructing them it was time to leave. Jane’s protests were unceremoniously deflected. If Elizabeth wished to see her, she would no doubt write. Until such time, her welcome was exhausted. Bingley had the sense not to object.
“I am truly sorry, Fitzwilliam,” he mumbled as Jane climbed into their carriage. “I never meant to use Darcy so ill.”
“You will be sorely disappointed if you hope for some great speech of exoneration from me, Bingley. This cannot be fixed with a trifling apology. Leave this place and my cousins be, or I shall finish the job for which Darcy had not the stomach.”
Bingley paled, nodded, and climbed up after his wife. Fitzwilliam instructed the driver to ensure they left the park, then went back inside. He found his grandmother in the Spanish saloon, sipping aglass of gin and chuckling intermittently, much to the bewilderment of Georgiana, who had joined her there.
“Is Elizabeth well?” he enquired of the latter.
“Perfectly so,” she replied.
“A toast then!” he declared. He poured two measures of sherry at the sideboard and handed one to Georgiana. “To Darcy!”
Mrs Sinclair raised her glass. “Aye. Hail the man who wed the second!”
Georgiana frowned.
Fitzwilliam began to regret arming his grandmother with the damned ballad. “And Elizabeth!” he said, raising his glass a second time.
Mrs Sinclair raised hers also. “Aye, for she is the jewel, alluring and?—”
He coughed loudly.
She gave him a look of affected affront but capitulated nonetheless. “And their son,” she said instead.
Fitzwilliam smiled broadly as he earnestly echoed her toast. “And their son.”
Elizabeth lay at Darcy’s side, her head on his chest and his arm firmly about her as they both gazed upon their son, nestled in the crook of his father’s arm. Every feeling of joy and relief was hers to be united with the two people most precious to her in all the world. Darcy’s stillness was expressive of his prodigious emotion. She almost did not wish to obtrude upon it but felt too much to remain silent.
“He looks so much like you. See how he is almost smiling. ’Tis you to a T.”
She felt Darcy’s lips curl into a mirroring expression against her temple.
“What do you think pleases him?” he said quietly.
“I daresay he is laughing at his papa for always imagining such theatrical misadventures for his mama.”
Her head jumped slightly when Darcy gave a brusque little laugh.
“Tease if you will, woman. I am too happy to care.”
