He reached into his coat and produced a folded document. Heavy paper, an official seal, the Archbishop's signature visible beneath the fold.
“My uncle sends his regards,” he said. “He also said, and I quote, that it was about time I stopped being a damned fool and married someone with wit enough to manage me.”
“I find I agree with your uncle.”
“I thought you might.”
She reached for the license. Their fingers touched over the paper, and the contact, after five days without it, sent a jolt through her that was wholly disproportionate to the innocence of the gesture.
"Thursday," he said. His voice was rough. His eyes had not left her face. "I have spoken with the vicar. Your father has given his consent. That gives you three days to prepare, and your mother three days to make the arrangements she will insist upon, and me three days to endure the wait without losing my mind entirely."
"Three days," she said. "You calculated this very precisely."
"I calculated the minimum amount of time your mother would require to plan a wedding breakfast without disowning us both, and then I subtracted a day."
She laughed. He was still holding the other end of the license. Neither of them had let go.
“I should tell you,” she said, “that I have spent the past five days sleeping with your coat. The one you lent me at the cottage. I find this extremely undignified, and I blame you entirely.”
The sound he made was not quite a laugh. It was lower than that, rougher, and it did things to her stomach that had no business happening in her mother's garden in full view of the parlor windows.
“I should tell you,” he said, “that I have spent the past five days in a state of distraction so complete that my uncle's secretary asked if I was ill, and I could not explain that I was merely suffering from an excess of wanting my future wife.”
“An excess of wanting.” She raised an eyebrow. “Is that the Darcy family term for it?”
“It is now.”
Mrs. Bennet's face appeared at the parlor window. Elizabeth released the license. Darcy stepped back to a distance that might charitably be called proper.
The distance did not help. She could still feel the heat of him from two feet away, and she knew, with absolute certainty, that tomorrow could not come soon enough.
The morningof the wedding dawned clear and cold, the sky a pale winter blue that seemed to promise good fortune.
Elizabeth stood before the mirror in her bedroom while Jane arranged the ribbons of her bonnet with careful fingers. She was wearing her best dress, a pale blue muslin that Jane had spent the past three evenings improving with new lace at the collar and sleeves. It was not a grand gown. It was not what the future mistress of Pemberley ought to wear. But it was hers, and it was pretty, and when she looked at her reflection, she saw a woman who was ready.
Mrs. Bennet had wept over the lack of a proper trousseau four separate times this week and would doubtless weep again before the vows were spoken.
“You are beautiful,” Jane said softly.
Elizabeth met her sister's eyes in the glass. “I am terrified.”
“You are not.”
“I am not,” Elizabeth agreed. “But it seemed the sort of thing one ought to say on one's wedding morning. I thought I would try it on and see if it fit.”
Jane laughed, and the sound loosened something in Elizabeth's chest she had not realized was tight. “And does it?”
“Not remotely.” Elizabeth turned from the mirror and took her sister's hands. “I am not terrified. Nor resigned. Nor dutiful. I am so unreasonably happy that I suspect there must besomething wrong with me, because this is not how sensible women feel on the morning they sign away their legal existence.”
“Perhaps sensible women have been doing it wrong,” Jane said, and the quiet certainty in her voice was better than any benediction.
The wedding breakfastpassed in a haze of congratulations and toasts, of Mrs. Bennet's raptures and Mr. Collins's grudging felicitations, and neighbors pressing forward with their good wishes.
Elizabeth sat beside her husband.Her husband.The word kept catching her off guard, landing in her thoughts with a small shock of pleasure each time she remembered it was real.
They laced their fingers under the table. He moved his thumb in slow circles against her palm, using the same gesture he had employed the day they were found, and its steadiness anchored her through the noise, the well-wishing, and her mother's increasingly theatrical displays of maternal joy.
She caught Mr. Bingley watching Jane across the crowded room.
