“You have thrived here, but I still could have?—”
“You had to stay here, Elizabeth,” he said firmly. “Where Georgiana lives, women are deprived of opportunities for intellectual and economic achievement. She has what she does because our father and I gave her the money and the legal rights to do it. I loved you, so why would I want that narrow life for you or my daughter?”
“Some women could be happy then,” Elizabeth insisted.
“Not you,” he retorted. “Mrs Reynolds chose it, and it is the only home Georgiana has ever known. She is in an extraordinary and unique situation. Even if Georgiana embraced the twenty-first century like I did, I still don’t think she’d leave her time.”
“Shecouldreturn here,” Elizabeth said faintly. “Georgiana could resume her original identity and live here if she wanted.”
“But she won’t.”
“Because of Pemberley? And Mr Willers?”
“Partly,” he agreed. “Georgiana also has no curiosity about this world, as far as I can tell.”
“You could know if you talked with her.”
He felt the implication, but grew quiet as he saw the stone circle on the other side of the clearing.
Nine Ladies was an early Bronze Age stone circle believed to depict nine ladies turned to stone as a penalty for dancing on Sunday. The short stones were set on the inner edge of a slight bank in a ring less than forty feet around. Like others around Derbyshire, there was little evidence to explain why it was built and how it was used. All his family knew was that after an antiquarian excavated the site in the 1780s, the portal opened.
“There are more people around than I remember,” said Elizabeth, looking at the other groups passing.
“The weather is fine, and now both Haddon Hall and Pemberley House are open again. There are more tourists in this part of Derbyshire, but also more locals in the community because we employ them.”
Elizabeth stepped toward the stones, and when he thought she might step through the ring toward the centre, he gently clasped his thumb and fingers around her wrist. She looked back at him, but he kept his gaze on the circle, locking his arm at his side but keeping a loose hold on his wife.
The place was unnerving.
She must have understood him, because she relaxed and stayed by him, and only then did he drop his hold. “Never go in there,” he whispered.
“I won’t,” she promised. In a gentler voice she added, “It’s not an equinox, and we’re hours from sunset, anyway.” They watched a hiker’s dog dart into the circle before its owner called it out. “I wouldn’t have gone anywhere.”
“I won’t take that risk. Not with you, not with our daughter. It doesn’t matter the time of year or the hour.” Elizabeth agreed and slipped her hand through his and led him away.
He immediately exhaled a heavy breath. They continued in their loop around Stanton Moor, away from Nine Ladies, his shoulders sore from tension and worry.
“I cannot understand it, Elizabeth,” he said when they were farther away. “Nothing of what I understand about faith or science explains what causes that gateway to open. It is eerie, and although it has been predictable, I could never trust it. I never want to look at it, let alone go inside it.”
“You swore to yourself you would never step foot in it again once you arrived here at the end of 2012, didn’t you? Whether or not you found me, you weren’t going back.”
“Yes.” He exhaled again, more at ease now that they were farther from the stone circle. “My commitment to this time was absolute, and that inexplicable power within those nine stones frightens me. I won’t risk anything sending me back.”
“I wouldn’t have suggested we walk here if I had known how much you hate it.”
“I don’t hate it,” he corrected. “It gave me my sister and my wife.”
“It also gave you the extraordinary chance to have your sister in your life again for a little while.” He sighed, and she looked up at him with eyes that studied him. “Or is that the problem, my dear? If you can’t be part of her life always, then why be a part of her life for now?”
“Partly,” he said. “I put in place an elaborate scheme to allow a young woman with an older brother still living to inherit and control Pemberley, and to do so even after she marries. If I got here and learnt Georgiana had lived a full life, if the Pemberley estates thrived, I wouldn’t have ruined that future for her or threatened the present estate’s success by going back if I hadn’t found you.”
“You didn’t want her to lose that lifetime of happiness, even if it meant you lost everything and were here alone?” She wore a loving smile on her lips. “You’re the best man in the world. But you must have known you would find me, even if you didn’t have the documents you wanted.”
“I never told you I loved you before I left. You had no reason to believe I was working on returning to you. You might have married. You might have died. You might never have forgiven me for leaving you with so many things unsaid.”
Elizabeth stopped walking and touched his arm to halt him. “Fitzwilliam, I never hated you for going back. Georgiana needed you, and so did Pemberley. And I wasn’t exactly dating after you left,” she said shyly. “No one was going to compare to you.”
He felt a surge of pride and hid his satisfied smile as they resumed crossing the moor. “I was committed to living here no matter what. I knew I could do it, so that meant a complete divorce from the life I had for my first twenty-eight years. No going back, no letters, no visiting.”
