The silence descended again, almost a relief after the stilted interaction of the inn.
The next three days of their relentless journey north towards Derbyshire unfolded in a depressingly monotonous fashion. Each evening, they stopped at a different coaching inn, each establishment progressively grander as they moved further north, a subtle, unspoken reflection of their increasing proximity to Darcy’s vast sphere of influence and the heart of his power.
Yet, despite the changing scenery and the escalating splendour of their accommodations, the dynamic between them remained unchanged. Each evening, Elizabeth lay in her solitary, often overly grand and intimidatingly empty, bed, feeling a complex, churning mixture of relief and a deeplyunsettling sense of something else, something she steadfastly refused to examine too closely.
Their meals continued as awkward ordeals. Each evening, an inn servant would lay out their supper in a private parlour that felt both too large and too small. The silence was a third guest at every meal.
Elizabeth, driven by a genuine dislike of the overwhelming quiet and an impish urge to disturb his peace, would occasionally attempt to breach it. It became a kind of game, a test to see if she could find a topic that would elicit more than a single syllable from her taciturn companion.
Each attempt was met with a new and more frustrating form of dismissal. When she remarked on the beauty of a village, he would offer a vague agreement. When she ventured a literary reference, he would acknowledge it with a curtness that was almost an insult, though she could not shake the feeling that he watched her with a sharp, yet grudging, attention even as he rebuffed her. It was as if he found her observations worthy of a rigorous examination, but not of a conversation. His replies were not those of a man indifferent, but of one determined to remain so.
After that, she gave up. The requests for salt or the passing of a bread basket became the sole, necessary punctuations to their shared misery. He would ask, “May I offer you some wine?” and she would reply, “No, thank you,” and that would be the extent of their discourse for the next hour. She took to studying the patterns in the worn tablecloths, the wood grain of the table, the cracks in the bowls, anything to avoid meeting his eyes, which she often felt upon her when he thought she was not looking.
In the carriage, Elizabeth tried to lose herself in the volumes of poetry and light novels Jane had pressed into her hands at their tearful parting, but the words often blurred before her eyes. She found herself, more often than she cared to admit, covertlywatching Darcy, primarily from the angle of the proud lines of his profile as he stared out his own window.
As the landscape began to change dramatically once more, the gentle hills and cultivated fields giving way to steeper, more rugged terrain, Elizabeth realised, with apprehension, that they were approaching Derbyshire, the wild heart of England, and, inevitably, Pemberley.
With each passing mile, with each turn of the carriage wheels, the apprehension within her grew. The relative truce of the road, with its minimal interaction and its suppressed hostilities, was about to end. Soon they would arrive at his ancestral seat, the nexus of his power, the place where his lineage had been rooted for centuries.
And then, the almost unimaginable work of learning to wield their magics as one harmonious force was about to begin.
CHAPTER FIVE
The final leg of their journey was marked by an increasing sense of wildness in the landscape. The hills of Derbyshire rose around them, cragged and fierce. The air grew sharper, carrying the scent of snow from the higher peaks.
Darcy, somehow defying the impossible, grew even more taciturn as they neared his home. Elizabeth wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling, returning to his ancestral seat under such circumstances.
At last, after a long, winding ascent through a dense forest where the trees grew so close they blotted out much of the weak afternoon sun, the carriage passed between two massive, lichen-covered stone gateposts.
There was no grand, visible warding here, but Elizabeth felt an immediate pressure, a sense of deeply layered protective enchantments, far more powerful than anything she had ever encountered. These were not the showy, superficial wards of lesser estates; this was magic woven into the fabric of the land, into the stones, the trees, the flowing water, with a power that felt as old as the hills themselves.
The drive to the house wound through a vast park. Elizabeth had expected manicured lawns and artfully arranged groves. Instead, the parkland looked neglected and sick. There was a wild, almost mournful beauty to it, but it was the beauty of abandonment, of a place struggling against a creeping decay.
And then Pemberley itself came into view. It was not the glittering jewel of wealth that Elizabeth had vaguely imagined from her mother’s rhapsodies. Built of dark stone that seemed to absorb the meagre light, it was undeniably grand, immensely imposing, yet it possessed a sombre air. Many of the windows were shuttered. No smoke curled from the numerous chimneys. The house felt asleep, or perhaps, more accurately, under a blanket of sorrow.
The front doors, massive timbers bound with black iron, were opened not by a liveried footman, but by a single butler. He bowed low, his movements stiff with age.
“Welcome home, Mr Darcy,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
Darcy nodded at him. “Brooks. This is Mrs Darcy.”
“Welcome to Pemberley, Mrs Darcy. We are pleased with your arrival.”
“Thank you, Brooks.”
Darcy said, “Is Mrs Reynolds within?”
“Yes, sir. She awaits you in the main hall.”
The interior of Pemberley was even more disheartening than its exterior. The vast entrance hall, though clearly once magnificent with its vaulted ceiling and marble floor, was shrouded in gloom. Dust motes danced in the few beams of light that penetrated the grimy windows. From what Elizabeth could glimpse in the rooms beyond, most of the furniture was draped in ghostly white dust sheets. The air was cold, damp, and mixed with the scent of disuse, old stone, and that metallic tang of decay Elizabeth had come to associate with the Blight’s touch.
A matronly woman, her back straight despite her years, her grey hair neatly coiffed beneath a cap, came forward to meet them. Her face was lined, not just with age, but with a deep worry, yet her eyes, when they met Elizabeth’s, held an almost maternal warmth that Elizabeth found instantly comforting.
“Mr Darcy, welcome home, sir,” the woman said. There was a familiar, almost proprietary affection in her tone when she addressed him that softened the formality. “It is a sore relief to these old eyes to see you returned safely to Pemberley’s walls.”
“It is good to see you, Mrs Reynolds,” Darcy said, his voice losing some of its edge when he spoke to her. It was clear he held her in high, and probably unique, esteem.
He turned then, and his tone formalised once more as he made the introduction. “This is Mrs Darcy.”
