“Patience is the price.” Elizabeth looked up at the sky, causing the boy to glance upward too. “I suppose we may nap until he comes out.”
Seeing nothing but clouds, Thomas returned his finger to his mouth and turned his gaze back to the snail, staring at it until the creature re-emerged cautiously, its eye stalks swiveling.
“He out!” The boy’s face broke open with a delight so sudden and so unguarded that Darcy felt a knot untie in his chest.
“Georgiana,” Elizabeth said smoothly, “might you demonstrate for Thomas how to stroke the shell with the greatest gentleness? Simply with one finger. I believe he will not mind if you are sufficiently careful.”
Georgiana dropped to her knees on the path without a thought for her dress and guided Thomas’s finger along the curve of the shell. The snail did not retract, and Thomas looked from the shell to Georgiana to Elizabeth with the dazed gratitude of a boy who has existed entirely alone in his misery and has suddenly, without understanding precisely how, found himself surrounded by a company of friends.
This was precisely the quality Thomas’s mother had possessed—the ability to create such connections effortlessly. She would have climbed a tree to examine a beetle or waded in a stream to catch a minnow, all to delight her young son.
And again, Darcy commended himself for having chosen correctly. A girl who would tramp through Hertfordshire mud for her sister would surely climb a tree for a stranded kitten or crawl beneath a hedgerow in pursuit of a lost dog. Yet Elizabeth was the safer choice.
Elizabeth was not Lady Amelia, who had driven her phaeton with reckless abandon, gambled eagerly at cards, and met the world’s terms with nothing more than a dismissive laugh. Elizabeth’s literary pretensions remained confined to her correspondence and journals—considerably tamer than Lady Amelia’s lurid novels and the freedom she had enjoyed with her blue-stockinged literary circle.
And here, Darcy halted this train of thought as he observed his wife sitting contentedly in the dirt, her patience as stubborn and steadfast as any characteristic for which a Darcy might be known.
“Mr. Darcy.” Elizabeth looked up at him, the sun on her face, and a strand of hair had escaped its pins. “You are standing at a distance that suggests either disapproval or uncertainty, and as I cannot imagine the master of Pemberley is uncertain of anything in his own garden, I must conclude you disapprove of snails.”
“I possess no opinion on snails whatsoever.”
“Then you have even less excuse for hovering at such a distance. Do come closer and examine both the boy and the snail, for neither will bite you.”
And so the master of Pemberley crouched beside his wife at a stone wall, a willing audience to a common snail, while Georgiana beamed at him as if the act of bending over his wife were worthy of a chapter or two in a Gothic romance. Thomas had progressed to gently lifting the snail by the shell, unsticking it from the wall, and then attaching it to a branch where he held it in front of his nose, completely absorbed, his grief, for the moment, entirely forgotten.
So the four knelt in the dirt by the kitchen garden wall, beneath the April sun, forming the family Darcy had longed for with a fervor that unsettled him.
“Thomas, can you say—” Darcy took the boy’s hand and redirected it from the snail to Elizabeth. “This is your Mamma. Can you say, Mamma?”
At the sound of “Mamma,” the boy’s face crumpled, his eyes scrunching and face reddening. The air hung still as Little Tom took a breath, to adequately arm himself for the scream that came from deep in his chest.
“Mamma! Mamma!” He threw himself on the dirt path and howled, the aching cry of a child calling for the one person who could never come to him. “Mam... ma!”
Georgiana’s hand flew to her mouth, and Elizabeth went still beside him—not with composure, but with the restraint of a woman absorbing a blow she refused to display.
The nursemaid swooped down the path to gather up her charge, but the boy threw up his arms, resisting. Yet Hartley, being stout and strong enough, hefted his kicking, squirming, and screaming body over her shoulder as she hurriedly retreated up the gravel path toward the nursery.
Elizabeth carefully picked up the snail, cupping it gently in her palm, and carried it to the violet clump at the base of the wall, where she set it upon a broad, damp leaf.
“Your friend shall be here tomorrow, Thomas,” she promised, though the boy was already halfway to the house and could no longer hear her. “Right here. Whenever you are ready.”
“I should not have said that.” Darcy offered. “He was not ready to call you ‘Mamma.’”
“No, perhaps he never will.” Elizabeth arranged the violet leaf over the snail. “But do not despair, husband. You said it because the afternoon was kind, the boy was quiet, and you wanted very much for the next step to follow from the last.”
She kept her gaze fixed on the snail, adjusting the violet leaf once, then again, as if the creature’s comfort were of the utmost importance. Darcy recognized the occupation for what it was: a kindness to them both and a moment to gather what had been scattered.
A rustle from the rosemary border announced Hannah, who emerged carrying a flat basket of herbs and wearing the expression of a maid servant who has been listening from behind the shrubbery.
“Has the little one gone up to the nursery, sir? I did see Mrs. Hartley carrying him, and he did appear exceedingly cross. But the snail was a lovely idea, ma’am, if you don’t mind my saying. Cook will be quite sorry she missed it. She is rather partial to snails, as it happens.”
“Not in the same manner, one hopes,” Elizabeth replied dryly, and Hannah laughed before she could stop herself, pressing her fingers to her mouth as though she might somehow push the sound back inside.
Georgiana, who had been sitting quietly on the path throughout the tumultuous scene, rose and brushed her skirts with a thoughtful air. “The snail must have a name. One cannotpromise a child that his friend will return tomorrow if the friend possesses no name. It is a matter of trust, you know.”
“Oh, he does rather look like a Sidney,” Hannah agreed readily. “Most snails do, ma’am. It is a well-established fact below stairs. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Darcy?”
Elizabeth looked at the violet leaf, where Sidney was extending his stalks and beginning his afternoon repast. “I think Sidney is the most self-possessed creature I have met in Derbyshire, and I include the master of Pemberley in that assessment.”
