Page 71 of The Marriage Articles

Elizabeth and Darcy stood a little apart from the rest. His hand found the small of her back, and rested there. The guests went back inside to the fire and the remains of the cake. Elizabeth and Darcy followed at their own pace, his hand where it was, the day cold and bright around them.

Epilogue

The mare’s hooves were striking the turf before Elizabeth had any thought to give the morning. Her body was at a gallop while some slower part of her mind was still abed, and she let it stay there. The wind had taken her hair out of half its pins, and she had no intention of apologizing to either.

It was a fine summer morning, the kind that came early and bright over the park and promised to be warm past comfort by noon. The mare, a chestnut Darcy had chosen for her two summers ago with more ceremony than the occasion strictly required, stretched into the gallop as though she had been waiting all night for permission. Elizabeth gave it freely. Down the long slope towards the river they went, past the oak that had lost a limb in the winter storms, past the hollow where the ground stayed soft and the horses learned to pick their way. The mare knew it all by now. So did she. That was the pleasure of it. Riding had ceased to be a thing she was learning and become a thing she did, as walking had once been, only faster, with a great deal more of the world to show for an hour of it.

Three years at Pemberley had made a rider of her. She had not expected that. She had expected to go on walking, as she had walked all her life at Longbourn, four miles before breakfast and indifferent to the weather. But Pemberley was larger than any distance a woman on foot could comfortably encompass, and Darcy had put her on a horse with the same quiet persistence he applied to everything he had decided was good for her. The morning walk had become the morning ride, and she could not remember being sorry about it even once.

Behind her came a second horse, a heavier gait gaining at a pace that meant to catch her. Elizabeth did not look round. She knew the horse, she knew the rider, and she knew what the rider was about to say.

“Elizabeth!” Darcy drew level with her, his own horse blowing a little from the effort of the pursuit. “Slow down!”

“I am enjoying this too much!” she called back, but she gathered the reins and eased the mare to a canter, though every line of her body protested.

“You might enjoy a trot as well,” he said, keeping pace beside her.

“I might,” she allowed, still reluctant, “but I shall enjoy it considerably less.”

He did not argue the point. Arguing points he considered already settled was not his habit. He merely kept pace beside her and looked at her with that quiet gravity he reserved for occasions on which he intended, eventually, to be obeyed, and which he imagined was unreadable.

“In your condition,” he said, “a gallop is not wise. You should slow altogether.”

Elizabeth eased the reins. The mare came down to a trot, protesting in her gait, and Elizabeth was a little cross about it, and a little amused at being cross, since the man was, as usual, right.

“You are pleased with yourself,” she said.

“I am relieved. It is a different thing.”

They walked the horses along the river path, the water moving slow and pale in the early light. Elizabeth settled into the slower rhythm with the resignation of a woman who had known she would lose and had entered the race anyway. That was half the pleasure of the gallop, if she were honest with herself. Being told she should not was a pleasure of its own kind. It was care, and she had learned to read it as care, though there had been a time, in the first uncertain months of their marriage, when she had read everything he did as governance. The papers in the drawer of her dressing table bore witness to how wrong she had been. She had not taken the papers from that drawer in three years.

“I suppose you will wish to speak of last night,” he said.

“I had not planned to, but as you invite it.” She turned in the saddle to regard him. “Fitzwilliam, you were dreadful.”

“I was nothing of the kind.”

“You stood at the side of the room and frowned at every gentleman under five and twenty who came within ten yards of your sister.”

“Georgiana danced every dance she wished to dance.”

“She danced them under the eye of a man who looked as though he were pricing the company for faults. Lady Matlock said to me that she had not seen such an expression since your father caught the steward watering the port.”

He was quiet for a moment, which was as near as Fitzwilliam ever came to conceding a point without the inconvenience of words. “She is nineteen,” he said at last. “She had a card that was full before the second set. I am not required to admire the men who filled it.”

“You are required to stop terrifying them. She will want to marry one of them one day, and you will have frightened the poor man into a retreat.”

“Then he will not have possessed a proper resolution.”

“Fitzwilliam.” She laughed. “You cannot dismiss the entire male population of Derbyshire on the grounds that no man is good enough for her.”

“I can try,” he murmured.

That was so perfectly Darcy, so solemn and so entirely without shame, that she could do nothing but shake her head at him. They had turned for home. The house stood above the park in its pale grey stone, the long windows of the gallery catching the morning, and the mare, sensing oats, lengthened her walk without being asked. Elizabeth rested one hand against her waist, which showed nothing yet and would not for some time, whatever Mrs Reynolds suspected.

“If this one is a girl,” she said, “I pity her.”

“Why should you pity her?”