Page 35 of A Selfish Disdain

"Fitzwilliam. I am glad you have come. Perhaps you will succeed where I have failed in making this young woman understand."

He cut her off before she could continue. "I have heard what you came to say," said Darcy, "having stood outside this door a moment, and I find I have heard entirely enough of it. Miss Bennet has answered you, I think, with more patience than the questions deserved. I will not ask her to answer them again."

"You cannot mean to defy me in this. I have known you since you were in your cradle, Fitzwilliam! I will not stand by and watch you throw yourself away upon."

He interjected at once, more anger in his tone than before. "You will stand by, Aunt, or you will not. The choice is entirely your own to make, and I find myself, for the first time in our long acquaintance, indifferent to which you choose. But you will not speak to Miss Bennet, in her father's or in mine, in the manner I have just now heard you use. I am going to marry her. I would have preferred to tell you so myself, in my own time, and with rather more ceremony. You have seen fit to deprive us both of that courtesy, and I find I cannot regret the outcome, whatever I might regret of the manner in which it has arrived."

Lady Catherine stared at her nephew for a long moment, as though seeking, in his face, some sign of the boy she had once commanded so absolutely, and finding, evidently, nothing there she recognized. "You will regret this, Fitzwilliam."

She crossed his arms to his chest and boldly said, "That is my concern to carry, Aunt, and not yours."

She left, in the end, with the same violence with which she had arrived, her carriage door thrown shut behind her with a force that rattled the parlour windows; and it was some little while after the sound of her wheels had faded entirely from the lane that either Darcy or Elizabeth found themselves equal to speaking again.

"I must apologize," said Darcy, at last, "dearest, loveliest Elizabeth. My aunt has embarrassed me beyond belief.”

"You need not," said Elizabeth, shaking her head a little, while smiling as she looked up into his handsome and sober face. "I found I managed rather well without your assistance, until the very end of it."

"I noticed." Something in his expression, still tight with the aftermath of the encounter, eased and looked, now, nearer amusement. "I confess I arrived prepared to defend you, and found, upon listening at the door rather longer than I ought to admit, that you required no defending at all."

"Then why did you come in?" She asked, her chin still sticking up in the air slightly, and her eyebrows lifted, while her eyes remained brightened with a teasing challenge.

"Because," Darcy started, moving nearer to her and taking both her hands in his, "I found I could not stand outside the door one moment longer, listening to anyone speak to you in such a manner, defending or not. I am not as patient a man as I have always believed myself to be." He squeezed her hands, there in the small parlour, with the housemaid still hovering uncertainly in the doorway and Mrs. Bennet's voice already audible in the hall demanding a full account of what had just transpired. "I begin to think the wedding cannot come soon enough my dear, if it means I need never again stand outside a door while you are made to defend yourself alone."

Elizabeth, who had borne Lady Catherine's whole assault without the smallest tremor, found she had considerably less composure to spare for this reply, and answered him only by the particular brightness of her smile, which he seemed to find answer enough.

EPILOGUE

Four Months Later

The wedding of Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy took place on a fine morning in early spring, in the same small parish church that had witnessed Jane's marriage the autumn before, and if Mrs. Bennet's transports upon this second occasion were, if anything, rather more thoroughly indulged than the first, as her younger daughter married not only a man of good fortune but to one whose situation and consequence exceeded everything she had ever privately hoped for any of her five girls.

Elizabeth stood before the altar in a gown considerably plainer than her mother would have chosen, looking up into Darcy's face as the vows were spoken. In that moment, she could not summon any memory of the proud, grave stranger who had once mistaken her for a servant in a room full of curtain-trimmings.

She could only summon, instead, the man who had held her steady through a carriage's violent bolt in the dark, who had confessed the whole of his heart to her in a fevered room she still could not think of without a small private shudder, and who now stood beside her promising, in the plain and ancient language the church provided, to do formally what promised to himself he would do forevermore.

As was expected, Mr. and Mrs. Darcy enjoyed a well-stocked wedding breakfast at Longbourn, where all twenty-four families of the neighborhood found their way to visit, along with Darcy’s family, with the exception of Lady Catherine and his cousin, Anne.

The couple had been invited to spend their wedding night at Netherfield before they traveled to a long, meandering journey through the Lake Distract, a desire of Elizabeth’s for a long while.

In the months leading up to their wedding, both Dary and Elizabeth found that Netherfield had settled into a happiness that suited both its master and its mistress that even the neighbourhood's most determined gossips found considerably less to occupy their attention there than the drama of the previous autumn had furnished.

Jane had grown confident in her role as mistress of a considerable household, managed her servants and her accounts and the general business of Netherfield's daily life with a competence that surprised no one so much as herself, and Bingley, watching his wife preside over her own dinner table with an ease that had been entirely absent in the anxious early weeks of their marriage, was heard to remark, more than once and with an undisguised pride that made Elizabeth laugh each time she heard it, that he did not know a finer mistress of a house in the whole of England, and did not care who disputed the point with him.

The nursery, prepared with such energetic haste before the wedding stood ready some months later to receive its first occupant, a daughter, born in the early spring with her father's easy temper and, by Mrs. Bennet's fond and frequent insistence, her mother's unmistakable eyes, and christened, after some good-humoured debate between the parents that Elizabeth privately thought had never been in any real doubt of its outcome, with her aunt Elizabeth's own name as her second.

After the Darcy's brief stay at Netherfield, they set off to the Lake Distract, first stopping for a day at their London townhouse, which Elizabeth was eager to see, before departing north.

While in London, Reeves, whose wound had healed cleanly under Dr. Ashworth's continued attention and the Thatchers' own rough good sense, returned to his position in Darcy's household, and warmly greeted the new mistress.

Reeves himself was promoted, before the year was out, to a position of considerably greater trust and considerably less exposure to highwaymen, a change he accepted with the same good humour he had shown throughout the whole ordeal, remarking only, when Darcy offered it to him, that he hoped never to have occasion to test his employer's gratitude quite so dramatically again.

Mr. Gardiner, fully recovered from the fever that had begun the whole extraordinary chain of events, took an evident pleasure in his niece's engagement, declaring to anyone who would listen that he had always thought Elizabeth the cleverest of his nieces and was gratified beyond measure to see her cleverness matched, at last, by a gentleman equal to appreciating it properly rather than merely enduring it.

Mrs. Gardiner, for her part, extracted from Elizabeth, in the course of several long and comfortable conversations that spring, a full and unhurried account of everything the earlier letters had only sketched, and pronounced herself, at the conclusion of it, entirely satisfied that her niece had chosen well, and rather better than well, whatever the strange and frightening road that had led her there.

Lady Catherine did not attend the wedding, nor did she trouble herself to send any communication beyond a single cold note of formal acknowledgment that Darcy read once, in Elizabeth's presence, and set aside without visible emotion of any kind.

"She will come round in time, or she will not," he told her, when Elizabeth asked whether the estrangement troubled him. "I find, upon reflection, that I mind it a great deal less than I once believed I would. I have learned, this past year, to weigh a great many things rather differently than I once did, and my aunt's good opinion, I confess, has fallen considerably in that particular reckoning."