Darcy looked at her. She held his gaze with the defiance of a woman who knew she had lost and intended to lose with her chin up.
"Truffles will be very happy at Pemberley," he said. His voice carried. He did not lower it. He did not look around to see who was listening. He did not care who was listening. "The grounds are extensive. She will prefer the south lawn. And the library, I expect, though I may need to add a rug."
He said it in front of the room. He said it calmly and clearly and without apology. This was the man the pig had always believed he was: the man who said the true thing in public, even when the room was watching.
Caroline's smile froze. The calculation behind her eyes went cold, the final recognition that this was over, that she had lost not just to Elizabeth but to a pig, and that there was no dignified way to lose to a pig.
"How delightful," she said. Her voice was glass.
She walked away. She did not mention pigs again. Not that evening, not the following week, not ever. The subject was closed, and Caroline, who was nothing if not practical, turned her calculating attention to a Mr. Hartwell of Derbyshire, who had eight thousand a year and no particular attachment to livestock.
The weeks before the wedding passed with the quiet sweetness of a season that knows itself to be brief. Elizabeth walked with Darcy every morning, Truffles trotting betweenthem. They argued about books. They agreed about very little and enjoyed the disagreement enormously. He told her about Pemberley — the south meadow, the gallery light, the tenant cottages he had repaired that summer — and she told him about Longbourn, about the roses the pig had destroyed and the kitchen latches the pig had defeated, and somewhere in the telling they were building a shared life out of the two separate ones, fitting the pieces together the way a carpenter fitted a joint, testing each surface for the place where it held.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh had been invited. She declined with a letter so cold it had practically frosted the envelope. Mr. Collins wrote separately — twelve pages expressing his astonishment, his condolences, and his firm belief that Lady Catherine's displeasure was entirely justified. Elizabeth read it aloud to Darcy while they walked in the garden, and Darcy had laughed, the real laugh, the one that shook his shoulders and crinkled his eyes and sounded like a door opening.
The Collinses came anyway. Charlotte because she loved Elizabeth. Collins because he could not resist attending an event he disapproved of. They were staying with Sir William and Lady Lucas for a month — long enough, Charlotte had calculated, for Lady Catherine's fury at their attendance to cool from volcanic to merely glacial before they returned to Hunsford.
The wedding was in December.
The church at Longbourn was small and cold and decorated with winter greenery: holly and ivy and the dark, glossy leaves of laurel, tied with white ribbon. The pews were full. The Bennets filled the front row: Mrs. Bennet in her best dress, weeping into a handkerchief before the ceremony had begun; Mr. Bennet beside her, his spectacles gleaming; Mary with a book in her lap, reading during the processional; Kitty with a cold; Lydia, chastened and quiet, sitting at the end of the row with her hands in her lap.
The Gardiners had come from London. Collins sat beside Charlotte with the rigid posture of a man serving two masters and satisfying neither. Colonel Fitzwilliam was present, representing the Darcy family with the easy charm that Darcy wished he possessed. Georgiana sat beside her cousin, small and shy, her eyes wide as she took in the crowded church and the noise and the general chaos of a Bennet family event.
Bingley stood beside Darcy at the altar. He was glowing. He was always glowing now. He and Jane were to be married the following month, and the glow had become his permanent condition.
"Nervous?" Bingley whispered.
"No."
"Liar."
"I am not nervous. I am terrified. There is a difference."
"There is no difference. You will be fine. Say the words. Hold the ring. Do not faint."
"I have never fainted in my life."
"There is a first time for everything."
The door opened. The congregation stood.
Elizabeth came down the aisle on her father's arm. Her gown was pale blue, her best, with a white pelisse buttoned over it against the cold. Her hair was pinned with sprigs of ivy and a twist of ribbon. Mr. Bennet walked beside her with his spectacles straight for once and his face composed, though his hand on her arm was not entirely steady. Her eyes were bright and her chin was up and she was smiling, and she was beautiful in the way that mattered, the way that had nothing to do with gowns or hairstyles and everything to do with the set of her jaw and the way she held herself, like a woman who had weathered a winter and come through it and chosen, on the other side, to find it funny.
She was halfway down the aisle when the sound started behind her. A rapid clicking on the stone floor. Small hooves, moving fast.
Truffles. Of course.
She came through the church door — still open from Elizabeth's entrance, not yet pulled shut against the cold — at full trot, ears flying, with the gait of a creature who had never once questioned her right to be anywhere.
Mrs. Bennet gasped. Mr. Bennet smiled. Georgiana pressed her hand to her mouth. Colonel Fitzwilliam said, quietly, "Good Lord."
Truffles trotted past Elizabeth, past Mr. Bennet, straight up the aisle, and sat down on Darcy's left boot.
Elizabeth reached the altar. She looked at the pig on his boot. She looked at his face. His expression did the thing it did only for her: the softening, the opening, the surrender of the mask. He was smiling. She was smiling.
The vicar paused. He looked at the pig. He looked at Darcy. He looked at Elizabeth.
"Should we...?" the vicar began.
