"Continue," Darcy said. He did not move the pig.
The ceremony proceeded. The vows were said with a pig on the groom's boot and the congregation watching and the December light falling through the church windows in pale gold bars. Darcy said his vows in a steady voice, looking at Elizabeth, and for the first time in his life, the words that came out of his mouth in front of a room full of people were exactly the words he meant.
Elizabeth said "I will." Darcy said "I will." The vicar pronounced them man and wife. The congregation applauded. Mrs. Bennet wept as if she had been saving the tears for exactly this. Mr. Bennet smiled behind his spectacles. Bingley,standing beside Darcy as his groomsman, was not watching the ceremony. He was watching Jane.
And Truffles, at Darcy's feet, grunted once with deep satisfaction.
The wedding breakfast was at Longbourn. Mrs. Bennet had been planning it for weeks, and it showed — the table was magnificent, the food was abundant, and the conversation was loud. Mrs. Bennet told Mrs. Phillips about the wedding four times during the meal. Mr. Collins offered a toast that mentioned Lady Catherine twice and lasted seven minutes. Mr. Bennet caught Elizabeth's eye across the table and raised his glass to her, quietly, and she raised hers back, and that was enough.
Truffles sat under the table and ate everything that fell.
Afterward, in the carriage to Pemberley, Elizabeth sat beside her husband with her head on his shoulder. The carriage rocked gently on the road. Outside the windows, the December countryside rolled past: bare fields and dark hedgerows and the occasional cluster of houses, smoke rising from chimneys, sheep on distant hillsides.
Truffles was asleep in Darcy's lap, curled into a warm pink ball, her snout resting on his knee. One of her ears was folded back. Her tail twitched in her sleep, chasing something.
Elizabeth reached over and adjusted the folded ear. The pig sighed.
"I believe she knew before either of us," Elizabeth said.
"She sat on my boot the first day. I should have taken that as a proposal."
Elizabeth laughed. "You would have had to ask my father's permission. And the pig's."
She thought of Georgiana. Of what Darcy had trusted her with, that day on the lane when he proposed. She held his sister's secret now the way he had held it — carefully, completely, andat whatever cost. She understood why he had been silent about Wickham. She had forgiven the silence. She would keep it safe.
Darcy was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "She was right about you, too. She chose to follow you everywhere. She escaped every enclosure to be near you. She sat on my boot at Lucas Lodge because you were across the room and I was the nearest thing to you she could find."
Elizabeth laughed. It was the real laugh, the one that had made him fall in love with her, the one that filled rooms and spilled out of windows. It filled the carriage now, warm and bright, and Truffles stirred in her sleep and grunted and settled back down.
The carriage rolled on. The road led north.
They travelled for three days. They stopped at coaching inns where the landlords looked at the pig and then at Darcy and then at the pig again, and Darcy said, "She will require a blanket by the fire," in a tone that did not invite discussion, and the blanket appeared. Elizabeth carried Truffles through inn yards and up narrow stairs and into rooms that smelled of woodsmoke and tallow, and the pig slept between them each night, and each morning they climbed back into the carriage and the road unwound northward through the winter countryside.
On the third afternoon, the carriage slowed. The wheels crunched on gravel. Elizabeth opened her eyes.
Pemberley.
The house rose before them in the winter light, pale stone against a grey sky, larger and quieter than she had imagined. The grounds stretched out on either side, bare and beautiful, the trees leafless, the lake still and dark. It was not a house that demanded admiration. It was a house that earned it, the way its master did — slowly, and only if you were paying attention.
Darcy looked down at the pig in his lap. Truffles was still asleep, her snout resting on his knee, her ears twitching.
"Welcome to Pemberley, Truffles," he said, quietly.
The pig sighed.
Darcy looked at Elizabeth. She looked at him. The carriage had not yet stopped. The gravel was still crunching beneath the wheels. The house was waiting, and the servants were waiting, and the life they were about to begin was waiting, and none of it mattered as much as this — the two of them in a carriage with a pig between them, the way it had always been, the way it was always going to be.
He leaned across the sleeping pig and kissed her. Gently. The kind of kiss that was not a beginning and not an ending but a continuation — the quiet, certain thing that came after all the loud uncertain things were finished.
Truffles, wedged between them, grunted in her sleep.
They were home.
The End
