She chose the green. It was the most practical of the three—the fabric sturdy enough to survive the wind, the cut simple enough that she could manage the fastenings herself without a maid. She changed quickly, her fingers clumsy with haste and cold and the residual trembling of a body that had not eaten properly in days and had spent the night on a gallery floor.
The gown fitted her. Not perfectly—she was thinner than she had been when her aunt last knew her measurements—but well enough. The ribbon cinched above her waist. The muslin fell clean and straight to her boots—still the old boots, salt-caked and scarred. Some things could not be transformed overnight. Elizabeth Bennet in a new gown and old boots was as honest a portrait of her present situation as any mirror could have offered.
She smoothed the fabric over her hips and admired the sweep of the gentle material, the way it flowed with her movements rather than guarding them from the elements. She ran her fingers through her hair and pinned it as best she could with the pins she had left. She folded her aunt’s note and placed it in the bodice of the gown, against her skin, where it would stay.
Then she went outside.
The headland was full. Not crowded—Blackscar was not a large village—but full in the way that mattered, which was that every face she had come to know since September was there in the morning light, turned toward the tower with expressions that ranged from satisfaction to open curiosity to the quiet gladness of people who had been watching a dark coast and had woken to find it lit.
Darcy had his back to the tower door, his ruined coat catching the wind, his face still grey but his bearing upright. Around him in a loose semicircle stood Mrs Hargreaves, Hugh Calder, Tom, Nell with her basket, Robson, Peter, the parson—Mr Ellers, who was also a sometime fisherman and who kept a boat in the harbour beside Calder’s and who looked at Darcy now with the mild suspicion of a man who had known the keeper for five years and was attempting to reconcile that man with the gentleman who had apparently replaced him overnight.
Mrs Hargreaves saw Elizabeth first. Her gaze moved from Elizabeth’s face to the gown—the green muslin, the ribbon, the clean lines of fabric that had never been withinsight of salt water before this morning—and something flickered across her expression that was not surprise but confirmation, the settling of a thing she had suspected for some time into a shape she could finally see whole.
“Well,” she said. “That is an improvement.”
Nell pressed the basket into Elizabeth’s hands—bread, cheese, two boiled eggs, a jar of something dark that smelled of honey. “You have not been eating.”
“I will eat now,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “Thank you, Nell.”
Darcy had turned slightly to take her in. The green gown in the March light, the salt boots, the hair pinned hastily and already losing to the wind—she saw herself reflected in his expression—not the admiration of a man assessing a woman in a new dress but something deeper, something that had to do with the fact that she was still here, still standing, still on this headland where she had fought for six months and lost and been found. The gown was only the outermost layer of a transformation that had begun in the dark when he knocked on the door and said her name.
He crossed to her and took her hand—simply, openly, without the concealment they had maintained for months—and the taking of it, in front of Mrs Hargreaves and Calder and the parson and every soul in the village, was a declaration that required no words.
“What do you think,” he said, quietly enough that only she and the nearest ears could hear, “of being married from Blackscar?”
Her hand tightened in his as the wind pulled at the green muslin. “I think,” she said, “that there is nowhere else I would have it.”
He turned to Mr Ellers, who was standing three feet away with his arms folded and his chin tucked and the expression of a man who had been putting certain observations together since the light reappeared the previous evening.
“Mr Ellers. I wonder if I might call upon you later today to arrange for the banns to be read. For our marriage.”
Ellers looked at Darcy, then at Elizabeth. He looked at their joined hands and Darcy’s coat, which had cost more than every garment in the village combined and which looked, after a night on a gallery floor and a week on the Great North Road, as though it had been through a shipwreck. His gaze travelled upward to the tower, then back down to the two of them standing in the doorway of it, and his mouth thinned.
“You arrived last night,” Ellers said. It was not a question. “After dark. Your driver and your man took rooms in the village, but you did not. And the two of you have been in that tower together since then.”
“Mr Ellers.” Mrs Hargreaves’s voice cut across the headland like a blade through fog. “Miss Bennet is an independent woman holding an office of stewardship on this headland. That man is in her employ. She has conducted herself with more propriety in six months on this cliff than half the county manages in a lifetime, and if you mean to stand there casting aspersions on a morning when the light is burning for the first time in a fortnight, I suggest you reconsider your priorities.”
Ellers’s mouth thinned further. He looked unconvinced.
“Besides,” Tom Calder said, from somewhere behind Robson, “Wickie knows better than to ‘importune’ the steward. Heard ‘im say it once myself. She’d have sent him down the stair headfirst. We’d have found him in the morning at the bottom of the track.”
A murmur of laughter moved through the assembled villagers—the easy, knowing laughter of people who had watched Elizabeth Bennet manage this headland through a winter that would have broken most men they knew, and who did not require a parson’s approval to understand what they were looking at.
Ellers exhaled heavily. “I suppose I can find room in the register.”
“Thank you. I shall be down to the village in any case. I need to arrange for my carriage and settle the account for my men’s lodging.” He glanced at Robson. “And the cart will not be needed, I think. Miss Bennet is not going south until the new keeper comes to assume the post.”
Robson’s face broke into something that was not quite a grin, but that lived in the same country. “Right, then,” he said. “I’ll leave it in the yard.”
Hugh Calder was looking at Darcy from boots to collar, taking in the tailored coat, the waistcoat, the cravat that had once been tied with care and was now a crumpled ruin, the whole improbable spectacle of a gentleman of immodest wealth standing on a Northumberland headland at eight in the morning with salt in his hair and a woman’s hand in his.
“So,” Calder said. “What, did you inherit a fortune while you were in London, Wickie?”
Darcy glanced back at Elizabeth, and the look that passed between them carried six months of keeping and twelve dark nights and a covenant that had outlived every instrument designed to contain it.
“Some things were there all along,” Darcy said. “I just needed help finding them.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
