“Oh, I doubt I shall ever think of Louisa that way. She will have no motherly role to play with me. I only hope they shall be happy together.”
“I do not see why they should not be. They both prefer country to town, and books to people. Perhaps it is no grand romance, but I expect they each will work to please the other and end contented, at the very least.” He blanched suddenly. Slowly, he shifted the baby and held him out, and Elizabeth saw that both Bennet’s swaddling and her husband’s sleeve were thoroughly soaked.
She threw her head back and laughed.
* * *
October 1815
Elizabeth sank into a soft chair and gazed around Bramley Hall’s warm, comfortable parlour. “You have done wonders with this house,” she said to Jane.
All five Bennet sisters were gathered for the first time since she and Jane had wed. They were assembled now at the Derbyshire estate the Bingleys had taken eight months prior. The interior had been positively dreadful the last time Elizabeth had seen it, so dreadful that the Bingleys had lived five and twenty miles away at Pemberley for the first three months of their ownership, while the plaster was repaired and new furnishings bought.
“It was a great deal of work, but it is finally finished. And just in time,” Jane replied, laying a hand over her belly. There was a great furore as the younger sisters rushed to congratulate the eldest.
Having offered her own wishes, Elizabeth withdrew slightly to watch her sisters so happily occupied with talk of the coming child. Mary was all genuine smiles, though Elizabeth knew her to be disappointed by her own childless state, while the more newly-married Kitty had an absent, dreamy look about her and Lydia made outrageous, laughing claims about all the mischief she intended to support her sisters’ children in during the coming years.
Lydia had adapted well to her altered vision, though the process had been long and arduous. She had regained much of her former liveliness and Jane, much of her serene good cheer. Both were greatly improved in appearance, their scars faded to almost nothing, the distinctive pitting of smallpox softened by time. The milky white cast of Lydia’s damaged eye could not be hidden, however, and she had early resigned herself to the role of spinster.
Mary soon mentioned that she had news of her own. “Uncle Carter has asked us to make our home at Morton Grange, and begin to oversee it while he is still there to help us along. Nathaniel has already begun the process of separating from the militia, and we expect to be in our new home by Christmas.”
Elizabeth and Jane expressed their pleasure in having Mary and Mr Carter so amiably settled; the news did not seem to be a surprise to their younger sisters, who had travelled to Derbyshire with Mary. Kitty had wed Sir William Lucas’s heir, Matthew, the previous year, and relieved Lady Lucas’s nerves by immediately taking over the running of Lucas Lodge. Lydia was still at Longbourn, though Elizabeth suspected she would be installed at Morton Grange not long after Mary.
“What news from Meryton?”
Lydia smiled mischievously. “I know nothing for a certainty, but Louisa has been rather unwell in the mornings of late. I believe Papa’s issues with drainage are not as severe as he has painted them; they could have come here, if Louisa were able to travel.”
“Well, I hope she may give us another brother!” Elizabeth cried. “If only to spite Mr Collins. He had the temerity to write to my husband after our brother Tommy was born and supplanted him as heir to Longbourn, asking him to restrain my father from ‘continuing to subvert the will of God in the matter of the entail’, and that both he and Lady Catherine would be ‘most seriously displeased’ should Mrs Bennet produce a ‘spare’. He even had the utter gall to write that he still considered himself the heir presumptive, as so many children do not reach their majority.”
While Mary and Lydia were quick to voice their outrage, Kitty only raised her eyebrows. “I wonder if he wrote to Darcy before or after he wrote much the same to Papa, and received a most scathing reply.”
“He did not! Oh, of course he did. Insufferable man!” cried Elizabeth.
“Are Darcy and Lady Catherine still at odds?” Jane asked.
“Matters have settled into a detente of sorts. Once a year, in January, she writes to inform him that she is still offended by his breach of the supposed betrothal with her daughter, and that as a consequence, he will not be welcome at Rosings for the visit he was used to make each spring. And every year, in February, he replies that he had formed no intention of going in any case. And that is the sum of congress between Pemberley and Rosings,” she concluded with a laugh.
* * *
July 1818
“What word from Hampshire? Is Mary well?” Darcy asked as his wife folded the letter from her sister and set it aside. She turned a shining face to him, and his heart still caught at the sight, six years and three children after she became Mrs Darcy. With the summer sun reaching through the window to bring out glimmers of copper and gold in her dark curls, he thought she looked not a day older than when she had first taken his name.
“Very well indeed. Despite the long wait, her expectancy is proceeding as easily as any of ours, for which she is thankful—as am I. But she had other news, the best possible news—Lydia is engaged!”
He smiled in return, his pleasure real. His brotherly relationship with the youngest Bennet daughter had been slow to form, no doubt because they were so different in essentials, but he truly liked her now. She had faced her altered life with a courage and cheer he could not but admire, and he flattered himself to think she had, in time, come to appreciate his own steadiness and his care for Elizabeth and all her family.
“Did Mr Harman finally convince her that he did not merely wish for a closer tie to his patron?”
“It seems so. Silly girl—it has been plain for two years at least that he was simply mad for her.” Elizabeth shook her head with a fond expression. “As confident as she seems, I do not think she ever believed a man would be able to look past her appearance.”
Darcy nodded. Even he, who was not at all attuned to the romantic inclinations of others, had seen that Mr Carter’s parson was desperately smitten with the last Miss Bennet.
“How strange,” Elizabeth added with a grin, “to think that Mary should have wed a soldier, while Lydia will be a clergyman’s wife!”
He chuckled. “I am glad she allowed him to persuade her. Should I give Mr Harman the Branxton living, do you think? It is smaller than the one he has, but he might install a curate and enjoy some additional income.”
She rose from her chair and demonstrated with a lingering kiss her approval of that notion.
