He had been watching her all morning, with an expression that had evolved over the course of the ceremony from his usual amiable warmth into something sharper, something more resolved. Elizabeth had seen the moment during the vows when Bingley's gaze had shifted from Darcy to Jane and stayed there, and she had known, with the certainty of a woman who had watched her own love story play out in the most dramatic fashion possible, what was about to happen.
Mr. Bingley rose from his seat. He crossed the room to where Jane sat. He bent down and said something that Elizabeth could not hear over the noise of the celebration.
But she saw Jane's face.
She saw the polite attention become startled comprehension become radiant, incandescent joy, and she saw her sister sayyesbefore Mr. Bingley had finished speaking, and the laugh that broke out of Elizabeth was so full and so unguarded that half the room turned to look.
She crossed the room to embrace her sister, and Jane held on with a fierceness that was entirely unlike her usual gentle composure, and Elizabeth felt Mr. Darcy’s hand come to rest at the small of her back.
“It seems we shall be brothers as well as friends,” Darcy said to Bingley, and the genuine warmth in his voice was a gift she had not known he was capable of giving in public.
Mrs. Bennet had to be revived with smelling salts. Mr. Bennet retreated to his library with a glass of port and a smile so rare that Mary followed him to the door to make sure he was not unwell.
They leftafter the wedding breakfast, the early afternoon sun was pale behind thin clouds.
Elizabeth embraced each of her sisters, holding Jane the longest. “Be happy,” she whispered.
“I already am,” Jane whispered back.
Her father walked her to the carriage himself. Before he handed her up, he pulled her into an embrace that was awkward and brief and held the weight of twenty years of complicated love.
She felt his lips brush her forehead. Heard him say, “He trembled, Lizzy. During the vows. I was watching. A man who trembles is a man who means it.”
Then she was climbing into the carriage, and Mr. Darcy was settling on the seat opposite her, and the door was closing, and the horses were moving, and Longbourn was falling away behind them.
The carriage turned onto the London road.
The silence that followed was extraordinary.
Not the comfortable silence of two people who have run out of things to say, nor the awkward silence of strangers trapped in close quarters. This was the silence of two people who, after being surrounded by other people for five solid days, suddenly found themselves completely and irrevocably alone.
Elizabeth looked at her husband across the carriage.
Mr. Darcy was sitting very straight, his hands resting on his thighs, his jaw set with the particular rigidity she had come to recognize as the face he wore when he was exercising control over something that did not wish to be controlled.
“Well,” she said. “Here we are. Married.”
“Married.” The word came out slightly strangled.
“I believe this is the point at which I sit demurely and contemplate the solemnity of the occasion.”
“And are you? Contemplating?”
“I am contemplating the fact that we are alone in a carriage for the first time since the cottage, and you are sitting as far away from me as the upholstery will allow, and I find this arrangement deeply unsatisfactory.”
Something shifted in his eyes. “Elizabeth.”
“That is my name. Though I believe you may now use Mrs. Darcy, if you prefer.”
“If I come to your side of this carriage,” he said, and his voice had dropped to the register she remembered from the cottage, the one that made her skin feel too tight for her body, “I am not certain I will be able to stop at sitting.”
“I am certain I do not crave your restraint.”
He was across the carriage before she finished the sentence.
His mouth found hers, and the kiss was nothing like the one at the altar. That had been a whisper. This was a shout. Five days of separation and five days of wanting and the accumulated restraint of an engagement spent under the watchful eyes of her entire family, all of it pouring into the press of his lips and the slide of his tongue and the sound he made against her mouth that was half groan and half relief.
She pulled him closer. Her hands found his cravat and pulled, and the knot that had been tied with such precision that morning came apart in her fingers. She pushed the fabric aside and pressed her mouth to his throat, to the place where his pulse hammered against his skin, and his hips jerked against her and his hand fisted in her hair.
