Page 87 of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Exile

“You were going to forget.”

He was not going to forget. “I was building to it.”

“You were taking too long. Someone has to move things along.”

Elizabeth stifled a laugh. Darcy looked at her, his lips twitching. “It does open,” he confirmed. “There is a seam along the equator. Richard and I used it as boys to sequester our treasures and exchange precious artifacts. Marbles. Bits of colored glass. Once a toad, which I maintain, was Richard's idea.”

“It was absolutely his idea,” Richard countered to Elizabeth.

“I have not opened it since I came home. I did not…” Darcy stopped, his hand rubbing over his face. “I have not been ready to see what is inside. If there is anything.”

“It was the only thing your father left for you. There is unquestionably something inside.”

Elizabeth’s gaze, so tender and understanding, comforted him. He found the seam along the equator, pressed the two small catches, and lifted the northern hemisphere away. Inside, nestled in the hollow where two boys had kept their best secrets, was a letter. He looked at it for a moment.

“I had a letter too,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Mr. Wrayburn gave it to me as I left. It was from your father.” She paused. “He was proud of you.”

Darcy looked at the letter in the globe and said nothing for long enough that the fire settled in the grate. Richard, for once, did not speak. Then he took the letter out and unfolded the page. It was short, and the handwriting was effortful.

Fitzwilliam,

I am proud of the young man you were and the gentleman you have become. Your mother saw it and tried her best to help me see it too, but I was too proud. She always said my pride would cost me what I loved most. She was right, as she was about everything.

You became the man I intended you to be without any of my help, which is the most damning testimony to my failures I can imagine. Reynolds and Reinhardt have kept me informed. The man they describe to me—careful, honest, respected, capable of earning trust without the advantage of an influential name—is a better Darcy than I ever managed to be.

I regret the years we have lost. I regret many things, but that is not the purpose of this letter. My goal is to spare you from any guilt you might impose upon yourself and the bitter regret that accompanies it. If you were here now, I am certain we would have made peace. I feel this in my bones, and it is my dearest wish that you allow yourself to know the same. I will die at peace with a heart full of respect and love for you. My son, Daniel Robinson Fitzwilliam Darcy.

As I am on my deathbed, I will presume to demand one final thing from you. It is this: Live happily. Fill Pemberley’s halls with laughter and love. Yes, this implies that I expect you to marry Elizabeth Bennet, but son, you truly would be a fool not to fall madly in love with her. Give her a proper chance, although if I understand your character and hers, you will fall harder and faster. She is the one who will require more convincing. I trust you will use the powers of persuasion you learned with Reinhardt to earn her respect and win her heart.

With more pride than I ever managed to show you and more love than I knew how to say,

Your father

Darcy closed his eyes. He stood in the drawing room of Longbourn with the faded globe beside him and the fire at his back and ten years of exile and grief and stubborn hard-won identity settling in his chest. And, like a bounteous gift, he felt peace.

His father had known. Had watched. Had been proud. It was late. It was imperfect. It was, nonetheless, exactly what he had come home for.

He opened his eyes and looked at Elizabeth. Her eyes were bright, her hand warm on his arm, and she did not say anything because she understood, as she seemed to understand most things about him, that this was not a moment that needed words.

Darcy held his father's letter and Elizabeth's hand, and was, for the first time in ten years, entirely at home.

EPILOGUE

The chapel at Longbourn had never been so full.

Elizabeth stood on the porch with her father, listening to the low murmur of people settling into pews, the occasional laugh, their rustling settling into a quiet that meant everyone had arrived and was waiting.

She had expected to be nervous. She had been nervous about considerably less significant occasions, and this was the most significant occasion of her life, yet what she felt, wearing her mother's pearl earrings and her sister Mary's carefully pressed ribbon, was pure, undiminished joy and anticipation.

She had taken her time. She had balanced the Longbourn accounts twice through winter and once through spring, had taught Lydia the rudiments of household economy and Kitty the basics of estate correspondence, had spent long evenings with her mother discussing the kitchen garden and longer evenings with her father watching him become, gradually and with occasional setbacks, a man who came out of his study for dinner. She had called on Charlotte every week and received reciprocating calls that were increasingly brightened by mentions of a certain colonel whose visits to Lucas Lodge had become, Charlotte maintained, entirely incidental.

The hay was in, and the wheat stood tall and gold across the home fields—a harvest richer than any Longbourn had seen in years, and only weeks from the scythe. It would be enough, this time, to clear the loan from Uncle Gardiner and carry them through the winter besides. Longbourn was not precisely flourishing yet, but it was on its way.

More importantly, Elizabeth had let Fitzwilliam Darcy court her. It was the best decision she had made.

She thought about the girl who had written letters that were never sent, first curious, then furious. She thought about the young woman who had managed an estate on her own and refused a man she did not love and knocked on a door at the top of a staircase because she needed to know the truth. She thought about all the versions of herself that had existed between those two points, and she felt an unexpected tenderness toward all of them, including the ones who had been wrong about things.

She had been right about Robbie.