He had been about to agree before she mentioned the moor. He had an aversion to Nine Ladies and its unnatural power. “Not since I walked out of the stone circle thirteen years ago. How many times have you been back?”
“Only twice to leave messages. To tell Georgiana we got married, and then to tell them when Sandra was born. I took to heart your belief that interfering could be dangerous, even though it ended up doing some good.”
They had suspected from her diaries that Georgiana was melancholy—or “depressed” as Elizabeth called it—after he left because she never knew if he had been successful. Elizabeth hadsent a pithy message through Nine Ladies to assure Georgiana that he had found Elizabeth and was happy. That small gesture had been Elizabeth’s idea, and while he deplored involving himself in the past, there was no denying her diaries after that had a more cheerful tone.
Walking might make talking easier, and if Elizabeth wanted to go, then so be it. “Can you get your keys?” she asked as he rose.
“You want to drive? It is only four miles.” There were carparks around Stanton Moor, but they had made the walk from Bakewell years before.
Elizabeth rose too, stretching her hips as she did. “But I’m old now, Fitzwilliam,” she said with a playful whine. “I can hike the moor, or I can walktothe moor. I’m too old now to do both.”
He gave her a sceptical look but found his keys. Elizabeth was thirty-nine. In his century, she would be approaching having grandchildren, but here and now she was still an active and youthful woman.
“You are still young, you know,” he said as they went to the car.
“It’s the grey coverage hair dye,” she quipped. “The real reason is I’m sore and tired from last night, and I want to save my energy for when we come back. There are more rooms I haven’t had you in yet.”
Sometimes, Elizabeth’s charming modernness still took him by pleasant surprise. “Well. I cannot argue with that.”
The circular walkaround the moor was only about a mile, or however many kilometres it was according to the conversion calculator on Darcy’s phone. He still struggled with thinking inmetres and not feet, much to his daughter’s amusement and his friends’ consternation.
“Does being in untouched places like this make you forget when you are?” Elizabeth asked as they walked past the Cork Stone and went north.
He looked around toward the woodland, over the open moorland views, and shook his head. “No, because I don’t want to forget when I am. This is home.”
She gave him a fond smile, and even though she knew he preferred to be here, he would do better at showing her it was true. “I never wanted you to sacrifice being able to vote and enter into contracts,” he went on, “or to get ultrasounds and cancer treatment, just to live in my time where you would be thought inherently less because of your gender. I love you just as you are, and you would have had to hide everything that makes you special to me just to live your daily life in the nineteenth century.”
“I may not have to feel guilty for that, but I do feel grateful.”
“Never say that,” he said, more sharply than he intended. Thankfulness in this case felt too close to obligation, a debt to be repaid. “I don’t want your gratitude for doing what was the only sensible choice for us.”
“Nevertheless, you find it a strange world sometimes.” She tilted her head at someone animatedly narrating their walk on a livestream.
Darcy lifted his eyes. “You can talk to anyone on earth in an instant, but more communication has not led to more connection. Still, the scientific advances here amaze me.”
When he first realised the extent of the social and technological changes of the past two hundred years, he had been astounded, if a little fearful. But by the time he had committed himself to life in the twenty-first century, he was eager to embrace every opportunity that the time offered.
Looking at Elizabeth, he said suddenly, “Did you not know back then, when you brought me here to save me, how much I wanted to live here, in this time? Of course it was because of you, but life here fascinated me too.”
She gave a wry smile. “Electricity and indoor plumbing that great?”
“You know the answer to that. You spent three months without them. After I returned to save Georgiana, I kept putting my hand to a wall after entering a room looking for light switches that didn’t exist.”
“Really?” she breathed. “I didn’t know that.”
“When you first brought me here, I did not wish to know more than I needed to keep my secret safe until the equinox and I could return home. But soon…” He remembered the sense of discovery amid the shock. “Soon I was captivated. At first it was a fascination with alarm, but soon it was with wonder and curiosity.”
“So, the technology and scientific advances bewitched you as much as I did?”
He smiled at her. “You alone were enough, as I told you. This century is hardly perfect, but it is still a safer and more equitable world than the one I knew. I left to be with you, but I also thought I could thrive here.”
“Don’t you miss being Mr Darcy?”
It was a question she teasingly asked him often, but it felt more serious this time, with more fear behind it. Still, he answered as he always did. “I am still Mr Darcy.”
“It’s significantly different, though.” She was silent for a while. “I know you wanted to be here, but I could have tried harder to understand your time enough to go back. I wasn’t brave enough.”
The social mores were in some ways unrecognisable, but things like human decency and the importance of communitywere the same. “I neverhadto live in a world where the male is elevated above the female, enjoying every economic and political privilege to her detriment. In any way success is defined for a man, I could have had it then or now.”
