"First thing."
"Yes."
"I am going to speak to Jane."
"You are."
"And you are going to speak to Elizabeth."
Darcy's jaw tightened. "I am going to try."
"You are not going to try. You are going to do it. You are going to open your mouth and say the things you actually mean instead of the things that sound correct, and you are going to do it in front of whoever happens to be in the room, because that is the point. The point is doing it when people are watching."
Darcy looked at his friend. Bingley had never spoken to him like this before. Bingley had always deferred to Darcy's judgment, had always trusted that Darcy's reserve concealed wisdom rather than fear. The deference was gone. In its place was something that looked very much like the authority of a man who had spent an evening discovering that his best friend had been complicit in his sister's schemes and who had decided that the price of continued friendship was honesty.
"I will do it," Darcy said.
They rode up the Longbourn lane together the next morning. The sky was cold and bright, the kind of November morning that felt like a held breath, the air sharp and still and waiting for something. The last leaves clung to the oaks along the lane. The hedgerows were bare. The fields on either side were brown and quiet.
Darcy's heart was beating faster than it should have been. He had addressed Parliament. He had faced down angry tenants and dishonest stewards and George Wickham himself. None of those things had made his pulse race the way the sight of the Longbourn gate did.
They dismounted. They tied the horses. They walked to the door.
Jane answered it. She happened to be in the hall, or perhaps she had been watching from the window, because her hair was pinned with more care than usual and her dress was the one that suited her best, the cream muslin with the ribbon at the throat. She saw Bingley and her composure flickered.
Bingley looked at her and said, without preamble, "Miss Bennet. I have been a fool and I am sorry and I wonder if I might speak with you."
Jane's face did the thing it did when she was overwhelmed. Not a dramatic transformation. A slow one. The composure softening, the careful control dissolving, the light coming in by degrees the way dawn broke across a landscape, not all at once but steadily, until the whole face was luminous. She said yes. Her voice cracked on the word. Bingley's face broke into a smile that could have lit the entire hallway.
They went into the parlour together. The door closed behind them.
Darcy stood in the hall. He was alone. The hallway smelled of beeswax and the familiar domestic warmth of the Longbournhouse: bread baking, lavender, the faint undertone of pig. He could hear voices from the sitting room, raised in excited speculation. He could hear Mr. Bennet's study door creak open.
Then, from somewhere in the back of the house, he heard it. The squealing. The scrabbling of hooves on flagstone. The frantic sound of a pig who had heard a voice she knew and could not get through a closed door.
A pause. Footsteps crossing the hall, quick and purposeful. Then the click of a latch, and Mrs. Bennet's voice, quiet and deliberate, a voice Darcy had never heard her use before: "Go on, then."
The kitchen door opened. Not burst — opened, by a hand that had once unlatched it for a very different purpose. Truffles came through it at full speed, her ears flying, her hooves sliding on the flagstones, her whole body aimed at Darcy like a cannon ball fired from a very small cannon.
She hit his boots with a force that staggered him. She was bigger than he remembered. She had grown in the fortnight since the rescue, and she was no longer the terrier-sized piglet who had sat neatly on his boot at Lucas Lodge. She was the size of a well-grown spaniel now, solid and warm and vibrating with an intensity of joy that made the floor shake.
He bent down. He picked her up.
In front of the Longbourn hall, where Mrs. Bennet was standing by the kitchen door with her handkerchief pressed to her bosom and her eyes very bright, and Mr. Bennet was standing in his library doorway with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and his expression unreadable, and Kitty was watching from the stairs with wide eyes, and Lydia was behind Kitty trying to see over her shoulder, Darcy picked up the pig and held her against his chest.
He did not hesitate. He did not look around to see who was watching. He held the pig the way he had held her at the ball andin the lane and at the farm at Haye Park, and he did not care who saw.
Truffles pressed her snout against his chin. Her whole body vibrated against his chest, trembling with the full-body enthusiasm that pigs brought to everything they felt. She made the sound of deep contentment, the low, steady grunt that meant all was right with the world, and she burrowed into his waistcoat as though she intended to live there permanently.
"Hello," he said, quietly. "I missed you too."
From the stairs, a voice. Elizabeth's voice.
"Mr. Darcy."
He looked up. She was at the top of the stairs. She was in a plain morning dress, her hair pinned up hastily with strands falling loose at her temples, her feet in house slippers on the floorboards. She had been dressing when she heard the commotion. She was not prepared for visitors. She was not wearing her bonnet or her gloves or the careful expression she had been directing at him for weeks.
She was looking at the pig in his arms. She was looking at his face. She was looking at the way he held Truffles, openly and without apology, in front of her entire family.
