Page 116 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She had not meant it to be a secret. She had meant it to be a surprise. There was a difference, and she had told him so herself, in the study doorway in May.

She heard him coming down the path through the beeches. She knew his step. She would have known it among a thousand.

He came out of the trees and stopped at the top of the little slope above the water, and she turned her head and looked at him. He was in his shirtsleeves, with his coat over his arm, and his hair was untidy, and his face, in the long violet light, was so anxious that for a moment she was sorry she had waited so long.

"Mrs Reynolds said you were here," he said.

"I am."

"She said you meant to speak to me." He came down the slope, and stood in front of her on the shore, with the two skies behind him. "Elizabeth. I went to her. I did not know where else to go. You have been so tired. You cannot eat in the mornings. You were sick behind the yew hedge and would not let me send for anybody. I thought—" He stopped. His voice was not steady. "I have been so frightened. If you are ill, you must tell me. You promised. No secrets."

Elizabeth looked up at him.

Then she held out her hand, and he took it, and she drew him down to sit beside her on the flat grey stone, very close, so that their shoulders touched. She did not let go of his hand. She took it, very slowly, and laid it flat against her waist, just below her own. And held it there.

"It is not a secret," she said softly. "It is a surprise. I told you there was a difference."

He went perfectly still.

She watched his face. She had imagined this moment for a fortnight, a hundred times, in a hundred ways. She had not imagined this. He did not say anything. He did not move. He only sat on the stone by the lake with his hand under hers, pressed flat against her, and looked at her; and in the violet light she watched his face go through astonishment, and then understanding, and then something so enormous that it seemed too large for any one face to hold.

"Elizabeth," he said at last. It came out as barely more than a breath.

"January," said Elizabeth. "Mrs Reynolds says the end of January. She has done the sums. She did them before I did, I think." Her own voice was shaking now. "I wanted to tell you at the top of the rise. On the day we came home. I nearly did. But I wanted to be sure. And I wanted it to be here. By the water. Where your mother used to walk."

He still did not say anything. She began, a little, to be afraid.

"Fitzwilliam?"

And then he put his other arm round her, and drew her against him, and put his face down into her neck, and held her, with his hand still spread flat and warm against her waist, as though he were holding the whole of the world in it. She felt him shaking. She felt his breath catch, and catch again. She put her own arms round him and held on.

"January," he said, into her neck. His voice was broken. "January."

"The end of January."

"A child."

"Yes."

"Ours."

"I should certainly hope so," said Elizabeth, and began to laugh, and to cry, both at once, as she always seemed to at the most important moments of her life. "Whose else would it be, you absurd man?"

He laughed too, then: a cracked, helpless, wet sound against her hair. He lifted his head, and his face was wet, and he did not care. He took her face in both his hands, as he had on the drive at dawn, as he had in the hall at Grosvenor Square, and looked at it, in the last of the light.

"When you told me," he said, "on the hill at Oakham Mount, that I had not failed my sister, I thought I could never be happier than I was at that moment. And then you said yes, in the conservatory. And then you came up the aisle. And then you stood in the path. And then you ran down the drive with no shoes on." His thumbs moved on her cheeks. "I keep thinking I have reached the top of it. The very top. That there cannot be any more. And then you find some more."

"There will always be more," said Elizabeth. "That is rather the point."

He kissed her. It was very slow, and very gentle, and tasted of salt, and the swans went by on the golden water behind them, and the last of the light went out of the sky above the hills, and neither of them noticed.

When at last he drew back, the lake had gone silver-grey, and the first star was out above the house, and all the windows of Pemberley were lit.

"We must tell Georgiana," he said. "And Mrs Reynolds, who knows already. And your father. And Jane. And my aunt Matlock, who will want to be godmother. And my aunt Catherine, who will want to be godmother too, and will fight her for it, in the drawing room at Matlock House, with a cane."

"In the morning," said Elizabeth. "Tonight it is ours."

He looked at her in the dusk, and smiled, the slow private smile from the garden path at Longbourn.