Page 42 of Miss Bennet is Gone

But it did not come. There was only this room, and Jane’s hands quick and sure at her hair, and the deep settled certainty, steadier than any nerves, that the thing so long prevented was about to happen, quietly, among the people who loved her, in the country that was to be her home.

When she was dressed, Mrs. Gardiner came forward with the small, folded handkerchief she had carried from London, and unfolded it, and there in her palm was Lady Anne Darcy’s brooch recovered from the woman who had stolen it, carried six hundred miles, kept against this morning.

“Lady Matlock gave you this,” Mrs. Gardiner said, “and it was taken from you, and now it is yours again, and she asked that I be the one to pin it on you, because I held you when you were small. So hold still, my love, and let your old aunt do this one thing.”

And she pinned Lady Anne’s brooch at Elizabeth’s throat. Elizabeth put her hand over it, and over her aunt’s hand, and the three women stood a moment in the upper room and did not need to say any of it.

The chapel at Pemberley was small and old and full that morning of loved ones. Mr. Bennet walked her in, his hand over hers on his arm, and gave her away in a clear voice that only Elizabeth, who knew his language, could hear the cost and the joy beneath.

Georgiana played them in, on the small old instrument at the side of the chapel, having asked to and been told she might. She played very well and stopped in the right place, and then went and sat down beside her aunt, on the far side of the small unfilled space where Lady Anne might have sat.

The Colonel stood up with Darcy. Richard, who had taken Rosings in hand and a great deal else, looked at his cousin’s face through the vows with the quiet satisfaction of a man watching an account come right at last.

Lady Matlock sat in the front pew, and beside her she had left, whether by accident or design no one asked, a small unfilled space, the place where Lady Anne might have sat were she still with them.

And then it was done, the plain enormous words said in the small chapel, the ring on her hand, the thing that a month of locks and lies had been unable to prevent now simply and irreversibly true, and Elizabeth Darcy walked back out into the happy morning on her husband’s arm, married, mended, and home.

The wedding breakfast was small and went on a long time, the Longbourn noise and the Pemberley quiet meeting somewhere in the middle and getting on better than anyone expected.

And in the afternoon, when the eating and the toasting had wound down and the guests had scattered through the great house and out into the bright grounds, Darcy found his wife standing alone on the terrace at the back of the house, looking out over the lawns running down to the water, the very gravel sweep curving away below them.

“I made you a promise,” Elizabeth said, when he came to stand beside her, “though you could not have heard it, because I made it in a room you had not found yet, on a piece of paper I hid under a table.”

She did not look at him, she looked out at their family scattered across the lawn. “I told you, wrote to you, that I meant to recite the whole of it back to you one morning on the gravel sweep at Pemberley, and make you feel every hour of it. I kept the letter. I am going to give it to you to read, one day, when we are both old enough to bear it, all of them, all the letters I wrote you in that room and could not send. But not today. Today I find I do not want to recite a single hour of it. I only want to stand here, on the gravel sweep, on my own two feet, married to you, with your mother’s brooch at my throat and the whole of my life on the right side of every locked door there is, and feel that it was true after all, that you came, and this is the part that lasts.”

Darcy put his arm around her, and she leaned into him, and they stood on the terrace above the sweep where she had promised to stand.

Below them the water took the late afternoon light, and the long shadows of the Pemberley trees came across the lawn toward the house, and the day that locks had tried to prevent went down quietly and entirely happy over the hills of the place that was, from that morning, her home.

24

A year on, Pemberley in late spring was a green and noisy place, and Elizabeth Darcy, who had once spent untold days in a room with one grey blanket and a barred window, woke most mornings to so much light and so much sound that she sometimes lay still a moment simply to be amazed at the quantity of it.

The grounds were in full leaf, the long lawns running down to the water gone deep and lush, the trees that had thrown their shadows toward the house on her wedding day now in their whole summer weight.

The house was full. Her father was visiting. Mr. Bennet had taken to Pemberley with a thoroughness that surprised everyone but Elizabeth, who understood that a man who loved books above all things had simply discovered the finest library in the country and a son-in-law who would let him sit in it undisturbed from breakfast to dark, and had concluded that there were worse uses for the autumn of a life.

He came for a month and stayed two and threatened to make it three. Jane and Mr. Bingley were there as well, settled now at an estate a half-day’s ride off that Mr. Bingley had taken largely so as to be a half-day from Jane’s sister.

They had brought with them the newest and loudest member of the family, a red squalling scrap of a babe some three months old, over whom the whole house went foolish and around whose sleep the whole house now arranged itself, as houses do.

Georgiana was eighteen now and at home, and had turned out to have a gift for babies that surprised no one but herself. She was to be got through a London season soon by the combined generalship of Lady Matlock and her new sister Lizzy, an arrangement she regarded with a resignation that fooled nobody.

There was a great deal of coming and going, of letters and visits and the ordinary days of a family that had decided, after the year they had, to hold one another rather closer than families generally trouble to.

Lady Matlock came often and held the baby with the competence of a woman who had once held babies of her own.

She and Mrs. Gardiner, when they were at Pemberley together, would put their heads together over the tea things in a friendship that had been forged in the worst of times and had turned out, to the mild astonishment of both, to be one of the great pleasures of their lives.

The Gardiners came in the summers. The Colonel came when Rosings, which he still managed and was slowly, carefully setting to rights, could spare him. It was a full house and a happy one.

A letter had come from the north that spring, the first in the whole year, not from Lady Catherine, who had kept her silence as completely as she kept everything, but from Anne.

It was brief and strange and entirely characteristic, a few dry lines that asked for nothing and apologized for nothing and reported, in the flat clear voice Elizabeth remembered from a barred room, that her mother’s health was failing, that the Highlands were colder than anyone who had not lived in them could be brought to believe, and that she had, with her own portion and her own hand, begun to buy books.

I find I am acquiring a taste, Anne had written, late, and badly, and entirely on my own authority, which I am given to understand is the only way the thing is got. You were right about that, as it happens. I do not expect you to answer this. I only found I wished you to know that the shelf is no longer locked.

Elizabeth had read it twice, and folded it away, and answered it, against Anne’s expectation, with a list of books.