Page 117 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

"Tonight it is ours," he agreed.

They walked back up to the house together through the dark beeches, very slowly, hand in hand, with the star over the roof and the lighted windows growing larger ahead of them. And in the great hall, when they came in, Mrs Reynolds was standing at the foot of the stairs with a candle, pretending she had only just come out, and she looked at the master's face, and then at the mistress's, and her old eyes filled.

"Well, sir," she said. "Well. And about time, too."

Epilogue

Pemberley. Midsummer Eve, 1813

The library at Pemberley faced west, over the park, and on a fine June evening the sun came in at its tall windows so low and so gold that it lay across the whole length of the floor like a carpet, and lit every gilt letter on every spine on every shelf, until the room seemed to be made of light.

Fitzwilliam Darcy sat in the big leather chair by the window with his daughter asleep on his chest, and did not move, and did not want to.

She was five months old. She had been born at a quarter to four on a snowy morning at the end of January, after a night that he did not like to remember and would never forget, in the blue room that faced south over the lake, with Mrs Reynolds and the Lambton midwife and Jane, who had come north through the snow with her own small son in her arms, and would not be sent away. He had walked up and down the long gallery all night. Richard, home on leave with his arm in a sling from Burgos, had walked up and down it with him, and not said anything, and at three o'clock had quietly taken the brandy decanter away. At a quarter to four, the door at the end of the gallery had opened, and Jane had come out, and smiled at him, and he had sat down on the floor.

They had named her Anne, for his mother.

She had her mother's dark hair already, a soft dark down all over her small round head, and her mother's dark eyes, and, according to Mrs Reynolds, who had looked at her for five minutes without saying anything and then pronounced judgment, her grandmother Darcy's chin and her father's temper. She slept now with one small fist closed tight on the lapel of his coat, the way Georgiana had used to hold the edge of their mother's shawl, and her breath came warm and soft and very fast against his neck.

On the wall opposite him, in the place of honour over the fireplace where his great-grandfather's portrait had hung for sixty years, there was a frame.

It was a plain frame, of dark oak. Inside it, on a sheet of heavy cream paper, in a clerk's small careful copperplate, was a fair copy of a single page from the betting book at White's. Every word of it, exactly as it stood in the great leather volume in St James's Street: an old wager in a drunken sprawling hand, struck through with three hard black lines; beneath it, an apology; and beneath that, a new wager, in a small firm upright hand, with a short line under the signature.

At the bottom of the frame, on a small brass plate, someone had had engraved: Untaken.

It had come at Christmas, from Lord and Lady Edward Aldridge, as a gift for the child who was not yet born. Caroline had written the card herself, in a very grand hand, on the very best paper. Edward insisted. I told him it was vulgar. He says that is the whole point. I cannot argue with him. It is very provoking. C. A. And underneath, in a different hand, sprawling and cheerful: She adores me. She will never admit it. Neither will you. E. A.

Darcy had hung it himself. He had taken down his great-grandfather to do it. His great-grandfather now hung in the passage outside the gun room, and, Mrs Reynolds said, looked a good deal happier there.

The house was full tonight. It usually was, now.

Georgiana was in the music room with Mary, playing Handel very loudly, as a duet, with the windows open, so that the gardeners stopped work on the lawns to listen. Mr Robert Kerr was in the music room too, turning pages, badly, because he could not take his eyes off his betrothed. They were to be married in the spring, at St George's, Hanover Square, with Lady Matlock giving the wedding breakfast and Lady Catherine insisting on paying for the flowers. Darcy had made the young man wait a year, on principle. He suspected, privately, that it had been the longest year of Mr Kerr's life, and did not regret one day of it.

Mary Bennet lived at Pemberley half the year now, and studied the pianoforte with a master from Derby, and had begun, very shyly, to compose. She played loudly still. But she smiled now when she did it.

Anne de Bourgh was down by the lake, walking. She had walked on the beach at Ramsgate every morning for six weeks the summer before, in all weathers, while her mother sat in a bath chair on the promenade and glared at the waves. She had come back to Rosings brown and strong and fierce, and had informed her mother that she intended to go to Scotland next, to climb a mountain, and her mother had not said no. Lady Catherine had bought a house on the front at Ramsgate. She said the sea air suited her. Everybody knew it was not the sea air.

The letters still came every day. Jane, from Netherfield, about her son Charles, who had been born in December and already, according to his mother, resembled an angel and, according to his grandmother, a Bennet. Lady Matlock, every fortnight, signed your aunt Audrey, and generally containing a new cap for her god-daughter, knitted, badly, by her own hands. Mr Bennet, very rarely, very briefly, and always ending with give my love to the child. Tell her that her grandfather is extremely clever and she must on no account take after her grandmother.

And once, in April, a letter with a strange stamp, that had been seven months on the sea.

It was from Sydney Cove. It was very short. It was addressed to Mr Darcy, but it was for Georgiana, and he had given it to her unopened, and she had read it by the window of the music room, and then folded it very small, and given it back to him, and said, thank you, and nothing else. He had read it afterwards. George Wickham had been made a corporal. He had a patch of land along the river at a place called Parramatta, where he meant to grow oranges when his enlistment was up. He had asked to be remembered to Miss Darcy, and said he hoped, sincerely, that she was happy, and that he was sorry. That was all. Darcy did not know whether to believe it. He had found, rather to his own surprise, that he hoped it was true.

Of Lady Theodosia Rowe, nobody spoke. She was still in Wexford, in the damp house on the cliff. It was said that she had taken up good works among the fishermen's widows, and went to church three times on a Sunday with her aunt. It was said she did not go into society at all. Darcy did not know if that was true either. He found that he hoped she was not quite so alone as she had been, all those years, at his aunt's table, waiting for somebody to look at her.

The library door opened.

He did not have to turn his head. He knew the step.

She came across the gold floor in a white muslin gown, with her hair coming down, as it always was by evening, and her cheeks brown from the summer, and a smudge of garden earth on one hand. She stood beside his chair and looked down at the two of them, her husband and her daughter asleep on his chest in the sun, and her face did the thing it always did, when she looked at them: went soft all at once, and very bright, as though somebody had lit a candle behind it.

"She is asleep," she said, very low.

"She has been asleep for an hour. I have not dared to move. My arm has been dead since six o'clock."

Elizabeth laughed softly, and bent, and kissed the dark down on the small round head, and then, lingeringly, her husband's mouth.

"Come outside," she said. "Both of you. The sun is going down. I want to walk up to the top of the rise."