Elizabeth's face went through something. Not the careful, controlled expressions she had been wearing for weeks. Something unguarded and complicated and real, passingthrough surprise and recognition and relief and joy, each one visible, each one honest, and settling finally into an expression he had never seen on her before. An expression that was warm and open and undefended, as though she had set down a weight she had been carrying for a long time and discovered that the ground beneath it was solid.
"You understand," she said, and her voice was not entirely steady, "that she will sleep outside your bedroom door."
"She already did, at Netherfield. I believe my valet has recovered from the shock."
She laughed. It was the real laugh, the one he had heard across rooms and through walls and in his memory during the weeks when she would not look at him. The laugh that crinkled her eyes and shook her shoulders and carried across the morning like a bell. And then her eyes filled, and she pressed her face against the pig's neck to hide it, but she was smiling, and she said, with her face buried in Truffles' warm neck:
"Yes."
The word was muffled by pig. He heard it anyway.
The pig, sensing the shift in the air the way pigs always did, lifted her head. She looked at Darcy. She looked at Elizabeth. She looked at Darcy again. And she made a sound of absolute contentment, a deep, satisfied grunt that vibrated through her whole body and into both of theirs.
Darcy leaned forward over the pig between them and pressed his lips to Elizabeth's forehead. She was cold from the morning air. She smelled of lavender and soap and the familiar warm scent of the Longbourn house. She leaned into the kiss, and her hand came up to rest on his arm, and then she lifted her face, and he kissed her mouth. Gently. Briefly. Her lips were cold and then warm, and she tasted of the tea she had drunk at breakfast, and the whole of the kiss lasted perhaps three seconds, andit was not enough, and it was everything. His hand trembled against her sleeve.
The pig was warm between them, and the morning was cold and bright and perfect.
EPILOGUE
The news spread through Hertfordshire with the speed and force of a natural disaster.
Mr. Bingley and Miss Bennet were engaged. Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth were engaged. Mrs. Bennet's nerves were cured. Mrs. Bennet's nerves had never been better. Mrs. Bennet's nerves had been replaced by an entirely new condition, which was ecstasy, and it was louder than the nerves had ever been.
"Ten thousand a year!" she said, to Mrs. Phillips, to Mrs. Long, to the butcher, to the vicar, to the curate, to the baker's wife, to a startled farmer in the lane, to anyone who stood still long enough to be informed. "And Pemberley! Lizzy at Pemberley! Who would have thought! And Jane at Netherfield! Two daughters married! In one autumn!"
She said "ten thousand a year" with the reverent tone other women reserved for prayer. She said "Pemberley" the way a geographer would say "Atlantis." She told Mrs. Phillips. She told Mrs. Phillips again. She told Mrs. Phillips a third time, at which point Mrs. Phillips observed that she had, in fact, been informed, but Mrs. Bennet was not listening, because Mrs. Bennet was already moving on to the butcher.
Only once did the rapture falter. Truffles trotted through the parlour on the second morning, heading for the kitchen, and Mrs. Bennet went quiet mid-sentence. She watched the pig cross the room. She did not say anything about the carpet or the impropriety or the incompatibility of livestock and drawing rooms. She bent down, slowly, and set a piece of toast on the floor in the pig's path. Truffles ate it without stopping. Mrs. Bennet straightened, and her eyes were bright, and she resumed her account of Pemberley's grounds without acknowledging the interruption. Elizabeth, watching from the doorway, said nothing. There was nothing to say. The toast said it.
Mr. Bennet bore the raptures with the stoic patience of long practice. He sat behind his newspaper in the mornings and behind his spectacles in the afternoons and occasionally surfaced to observe that his wife's volume was sufficient to frighten the livestock, a remark that Mrs. Bennet did not hear because she was telling Kitty about Pemberley's drawing rooms.
He called Elizabeth to his library on the second day.
He sat behind his desk and looked at her over his spectacles, and for a long moment, he said nothing at all. The library was quiet. The fire was low. The familiar smell of old leather and pipe tobacco and the good mustiness of books that had been read many times filled the room.
"I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy," he said. His voice was steady, but his eyes were not. "Though I confess the pig's opinion weighed heavily in my decision."
"Papa."
"She has shown impeccable taste from the beginning. I have trusted her judgment in all matters since the day she charged Mr. Collins into a hedge." He paused. "I intend to consult her on all future matters of family importance. Mary's suitors, if any emerge, will be required to pass the pig test."
"Mary does not have suitors."
"No. But if she did, they would have to meet the pig. It is a more dependable judge of character than anything I have managed."
Elizabeth laughed. Her eyes stung.
His expression shifted. The humour drained from it slowly, the way colour drains from a sky after sunset, leaving something flat and careful beneath.
"I know about the kitchen door, Lizzy."
She went still. "Papa —"
"Hill did not tell me. She did not need to. I have been married to your mother for twenty-three years. I know the particular quality of her silence when she has done something she cannot undo." He turned his spectacles over in his hands, examining them as though the lenses held something he had missed. "I have spoken to her. It was the worst conversation of our marriage, and we have had a great many bad conversations."
Elizabeth did not ask what he had said. She did not need to. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the careful way he placed the spectacles back on his nose, in the steadiness of his voice that cost him more than he would ever admit.
"She is not a wicked woman," Mr. Bennet said. "She is a frightened one. The fear makes her foolish, and the foolishness makes her dangerous, and I have spent twenty-three years finding that amusing instead of addressing it." He paused. "I have stopped finding it amusing."
