She stood on her toes and laced her hands behind his neck. “Just see if I let you out of my sight. I should like to be kissed by my husband at the bank of the lake at half past nine in the morning, in the sight of any gardener who happens to be looking, on the strength of having walked the south lawn on a leg that does not, this morning, hurt.”
He took her chin in his hand, and then he kissed her.
Epilogue
Northmere—The Seventh Summer
Hetoldthecoachmanto slow at the bend before the avenue.
The bend was the bend at which the mere first came into view through the trees, and he had told the coachman every July of the seven Julys, and the coachman had been the same coachman for four of them, and required no instruction this morning, and slowed.
Elizabeth was at the window beside him. She had her face to the open air. The dust of the road had been on her bonnet some forty miles, and her hair at the temple was damp where the temple met the rim, and the brown of her cheek was the brown of a woman who had been at her own gardens at Pemberley four mornings out of any seven through the prior six weeks. She did not turn from the window.
“There,” she said. “Through the alders.”
He did not look at the alders. He looked at her looking at the alders.
He had been looking at her looking at things this way for the better part of six of the prior seven years, and the practice had not in any month worn itself out. The line of her jaw at the open window. The small motion at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile and had been put there by something the alders had given her. She did not need to point to the mere any longer. The mere was where the alders ended, and Elizabeth had known the geography of Northmere’s avenue without any reminder from him since the third July at the latest.
The carriage came round the bend. The avenue opened. The mere lay below in the long blue of a summer noon, and at the bank the children were already at the water — four of them, in the various conditions of wet that children at a bank assume within ten minutes of their parents’ permission. Hadley had sent them down. Hadley always did.
Elizabeth turned from the window. She turned to him, and her face was bright with it.
“Hadley is a wickedness.”
“Hadley is a particular saint of the Derbyshire diocese. They will be wet to the waist by the time we reach the door.”
“They are wet to the waist. Look at them, Fitzwilliam!”
“I am looking at you.”
She did look at him then. Her face was at the small distance from his that she had used in their own carriage at Pemberley these six years and four months, and her eyes were the eyes that had given him an answer in the water seven Julys ago and had not, in any month or week or day since, given him cause to consider the answer as anything other than answered.
He kissed her. The kiss was the kiss they used for the last quarter mile of any journey back to Northmere — brief, careful of the bonnet, and entirely free of consideration that they were the master and mistress of two estates and the parents of three children and were within sight of the front door of the smaller of the two estates. It did the work it was put to, and she was smiling against his mouth before he had finished.
The carriage drew up.
Jane was at the door, in a plain summer dress, her cheeks browned from the meadow, her hands folded in front of her, determined against anything resembling tears and not, by the look of her hands, going to succeed. Behind her in the doorway was the colonel with the smallest of the Fitzwilliam children on his arm. The colonel had been carrying the smallest of his children whenever any of his children was small for the better part of four years, and the smallest at any given July had always supposed himself the only one ever to have been carried, and the colonel had not corrected the supposition.
“You are late,” Richard said.
“We are on time, by the only reckoning the household keeps. Hadley sent the children down at sunrise, I am told.”
“Hadley is a wickedness, on which Mrs Darcy and I are agreed.”
“He shall hear it from me also.”
Elizabeth was down before Darcy could give her his hand at the step. Jane was already at her, and Elizabeth went into her arms without breaking stride, and Jane was crying into the shoulder of Elizabeth’s travelling dress within a count of three, and laughing through it within a count of five, and apologising for the crying within a count of seven, and Elizabeth was not letting her go for any of the three. They embraced as women embracewho have been apart no time at all, which was their way at the door of Northmere in any July, and which had not in seven years lost its small unfailing rightness in the eye of any of those who watched it.
He went up the steps to his cousin. “How is she?”
“Plumper. Browner. She has had her hand in Mrs Pemberton’s borders all spring, and Mrs Pemberton has been permitting it because Mrs Pemberton’s wrists are not what they were. I should rather you had her at Pemberley this autumn, by the way. She has been thinner than I should have wished, two of the prior six weeks.”
“She has told me.”
“She has told you the half of it. Anne wrote, by the way, on the Tuesday. The post-bag will have come up with it. She is at the garden with the new man at Rosings and is, in her own particular way, well. She sends what she sends, which I had as well not paraphrase. Take Elizabeth to the bank now. Jane will give them tea when they are ready. We shall keep the children. Go on.”
The colonel was, in such matters as fell to him in the household, not in the habit of being obeyed twice. Darcy took Elizabeth from her sister by the hand. Jane gave her over without remark and squeezed Elizabeth’s other hand before she let go, and Elizabeth squeezed back, and the squeeze was the thing Jane had been wanting since the carriage came up the avenue.
