This ceremony would not be officiated by the vicar, as was the norm, but by the Lord Magister himself under special license.
The speech was mercifully short. Lord Magister Theron spoke not of love, or companionship, or shared joys, but of magical binding and common purpose.
Their vows were a study in unwilling consent. His “I will” was a terse acknowledgment of his fate. Hers was a defiant whisper, offered not to him, but to a crack in the stone beneath his feet.
As the final words of the ritual were spoken, a visible, almost violent shimmer passed between them. Elizabeth felt a startlinglyintimateawareness of Mr Darcy’s magical presence, no longer just an external force pressing upon her senses, but something intertwined with her own in a way that made her skin crawl.
It was as if an invisible, unbreakable tether had snapped between them. She saw Mr Darcy stiffen. He, too, felt it, this unwelcome, forcible merging.
The moment Lord Magister Theron pronounced them bound, “until death do they part,” Mrs Bennet burst into noisy tears of joy. “Oh, my dearest Lizzy! My darling girl! Mrs Darcy of Pemberley! It sounds so grand, so wonderfully settled!”
The wedding breakfast at Longbourn was an extended exercise in excruciating social torture. It began with her mother, who held court, regaling anyone who would listenwith increasingly embellished tales of Lizzy’s cleverness and, of course, Mr Darcy’s vast estates and remarkable magical power. But the true source of Elizabeth’s agony was not her mother’s predictable boasting; it was watching it through Mr Darcy’s eyes.
Each new mortification — Lydia and Kitty’s outrageous flirting, Mary’s plodding performance at the pianoforte, Sir William Lucas’s rambling toast — was a fresh torment, made infinitely worse by her awareness of him. Her gaze kept returning to him, where he sat in frigid stoicism. He ate nothing. He barely spoke. The scorn in his eyes was so poorly disguised that it felt like a personal judgement on her, a fresh thorn of humiliation and aversion.
The morning bled into afternoon in a blur of such small tortures, until at long last, the final carriage rumbled away.
When the door closed behind the last guest, Mr Darcy turned to her. They stood, awkwardly and finally alone in the Longbourn drawing room, the remnants of the fallacious festivity littering the tables like the debris of a shipwreck.
This man she scarcely knew was now her husband. The title felt quite preposterous when applied to a man with whom she had exchanged little more than insults.
“Madam,” he began, the address a deliberate indication of the distance he intended to maintain between them, “we should depart for Pemberley. We have considerable work ahead of us if we are to even begin to understand, let alone control, the potential applications of the Concordance.”
His words were so abrupt that she felt the ground give way beneath her. In that moment, the full weight of her new reality descended. She was leaving her home, her family, and all she had ever known for a life with a man who was little more than a powerful, forbidding stranger.
A sudden tide of fear rose up to engulf her as she realised she knewnothingof her new home. Desperate for some smalldetail to cling to, to ground herself with, she grasped for the first question that came to mind.
“Pemberley,” she said, “Pray, tell me something of Pemberley.”
He gave no immediate answer. Instead, though he did not move, he seemed to recede from her, drawing into himself until all that remained was a figure of impenetrable formality. When he finally spoke, his voice was as detached as his posture.
“It is considered a fine estate. The house is of stone, quite large, set in a park of some ten miles circumference. What more, specifically, do you wish to know?”
Her mouth filled with a metallic taste. Of course. After a day spent listening to her mother’s raptures about his income, he heard her question as just another grasping enquiry. He had mistaken her genuine fear for a mercenary curiosity, for a desire to learn about the quantity of rooms or the value of the chimney-pieces!
“That is quite sufficient, I thank you,” she said, a quiet challenge glinting in her eyes as she met his gaze.
Her words drew from him only a minute, deliberate movement as he reached up to give his cravat an unnecessary adjustment. The gesture was a calculated beat in which he composed his reply.
“I regret if my description failed to meet your expectations. However, the imperativeness of our situation allows little time for more descriptive flourishes. The carriage is being prepared for our departure.”
Elizabeth, who had been steeling herself for this pronouncement, felt a fresh surge of rebellion. It was the norm for a newly married couple to depart after the wedding breakfast, and yet…this was scarcely a normal marriage.
“You intend for us to depart now?” she said, “I would like some time to bid farewell to my family and my home.”
Mr Darcy made a small, irritable gesture with his hand, as if to sweep away the emotional atmosphere of their farewell. “I would have hoped the Lord Magister’s words would have impressed upon you the urgency of our mission.”
“They have impressed upon me a great many things, yes,” she answered, with a smile she did not feel.Impressed upon, indeed!They had quite literally impressed upon her a husband.
“Then you understand that every day wasted here in frivolous sentimentality is a day the Blight strengthens its hold.”
“One day for ‘frivolous sentimentality.’ A single day for a daughter, for a sister, to say her goodbyes to a family she may not see again. You will have all the days that follow.”
She aimed for a tone of a gentle jab, but the words emerged hollow and strained.
He stared at her, a long, appraising look, as if she were a particularly recalcitrant, unexpectedly vocal magical artefact he was forced to deal with. The air between them crackled with the uncomfortable thrum of their newly linked magic.
Elizabeth met his gaze defiantly, refusing to be intimidated by his disapproval. She might be bound to him by magical decree, but she would not be cowed into submission.
