"Tomorrow."
She went inside. He watched from the lane until the light in her window appeared, a golden square against the dark. Then he turned and walked back to Netherfield, and the night closed around him, and the last night of his life as an unmarried man was cold and clear and full of stars.
In her room, Elizabeth sat on the edge of her bed and held the sapphire pendant and thought about tomorrow: the dress (ivory, not cream), the flowers (gardenias, not carnations), the church, the vows, the man who would be waiting for her at the altar with his dark eyes and his almost-smile and his hands that trembled when he touched her.
She thought about what lay beyond the wedding: Pemberley, Georgiana, a life so different from anything she had imagined that it should have been terrifying. It was not. It was the most natural thing in the world: walking toward Fitzwilliam Darcy, closing the distance that had once seemed impassable, choosing him with open eyes and a full heart.
She lay down. Closed her eyes. Slept.
And in the morning, she would wake, and dress, and walk into the church, and begin.
Chapter 14: The Wedding
Darcy had faced down predators, creditors, society matrons, and his own aunt with equanimity that bordered on supernatural. He had managed an estate worth more than most men would see in a lifetime, navigated the treacherous waters of London society, and endured Caroline Bingley's attentions for the better part of a decade without visible distress.
He could not tie his cravat.
"You have done this every morning since you were fifteen," Colonel Fitzwilliam observed from the doorway of the guest chamber at Netherfield, leaning against the frame with the particular enjoyment of a man watching his formidable cousin come undone by a strip of linen. "It is not a skill that typically deserts a man on his wedding day."
"The fabric is uncooperative."
"The fabric is the same fabric you tie every morning. You, however, are shaking like a leaf." The Colonel crossed the room and swatted Darcy's hands away. "Hold still. You are getting married, not mounting a scaffold."
"The distinction feels academic at present."
"Darcy." The Colonel finished the knot with the practiced efficiency of a military man and clapped his cousin on the shoulders. "You are marrying the most extraordinary woman either of us has ever met. She loves you, God knows why. Youlove her, which is the least surprising development in the history of human attachment. And in approximately ninety minutes, you will stand in a church and make it official, and then you will spend the rest of your life being happier than you deserve. This is not an occasion for terror."
"I am not terrified."
"You are green."
"It is the light."
The Colonel grinned and retreated, and Darcy looked at himself in the mirror and tried to see the man Elizabeth loved. He saw a tall, dark, serious-looking person in a dark blue coat and cream waistcoat, impeccably dressed, rigidly composed, and utterly petrified. The man in the mirror did not look like a man about to receive the greatest gift of his life. He looked like a man afraid of dropping it.
The church at Longbourn was small, ancient, and full of people. The entire neighborhood had turned out, because a Bennet daughter marrying Mr. Darcy of Pemberley was the kind of event that warranted cancelling all other plans, including, apparently, a funeral in the next village that had been rescheduled to accommodate the curious.
The pews were decorated with gardenias -- Mrs. Bennet's triumph -- their scent filling the cold stone space with an almost tropical sweetness. Morning light poured through the stained glass, casting patterns of blue and gold and red across the flagstone floor, and the effect was of standing inside a kaleidoscope, the world broken into beautiful fragments and reassembled into something new.
Darcy stood at the altar with the Colonel beside him and waited, and the waiting was the longest sixty seconds of his life.
Then the door opened, and Elizabeth walked in, and every coherent thought he had ever had dissolved.
She was wearing ivory -- not cream, as Mrs. Bennet had insisted with a prescience that now seemed prophetic -- and the gown was simple, almost severe in its elegance, the lines clean, the fabric flowing, nothing fussy or overwrought. Her hair was half-up, half-down, dark curls framing her face and falling past her shoulders, and at her throat, his mother's sapphire caught the colored light from the windows and blazed like a captured star.
She was holding her father's arm. Mr. Bennet was walking with a deliberation that Darcy recognized as the pace of a man who wanted to slow time, who understood that he was delivering his daughter to a future he could not control, and who was making peace with it in the twenty steps between the door and the altar.
Their eyes met. Elizabeth's face did not hold the demure, downcast expression that tradition demanded. She was looking directly at him, her chin level, her eyes bright, and she was smiling -- not the sharp smile or the polite smile or the new, soft smile she had shown him in the garden. This was something else. This was joy, unfiltered and unguarded, the expression of a woman who was walking toward the thing she wanted most in the world and was done pretending otherwise.
Darcy forgot to breathe. The Colonel nudged him. He breathed.
Mr. Bennet reached the altar. He placed Elizabeth's hand in Darcy's, and the contact -- her bare fingers in his, warm and steady and real -- grounded him like nothing else could.
"Take care of her," Mr. Bennet said, low enough for only the three of them to hear. "She is the best thing I ever made."
"I know, sir," Darcy said. "I will."
Mr. Bennet nodded. Stepped back. Took his seat beside Mrs. Bennet, who was already weeping with a thoroughness that suggested she had been practicing.
