Page 69 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She was right. He knew she was right. He had known it from the moment she said Pemberley, the way he had known she was right about the pistols. It was only that everything in him cried out against it, the way a man cries out when a surgeon sets a bone.

"How long?" he said.

"Until you have finished it. Until you can come and fetch us home." Her voice wavered. "Not one day longer. I promise."

"And you will write."

"Every day. About the weather."

It was so unexpected, so exactly her, that he laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle, and he pulled her against him and held her.

"Monday," he said into her hair. "Not tomorrow. I cannot let you go tomorrow. Monday, at dawn. From the mews, not the square, so that nobody with a spyglass sees you leave. Four horses. James and Hannah, and two grooms with blunderbusses, and outriders as far as Northampton."

"Blunderbusses," said Elizabeth, muffled. "Good heavens."

"I will have them. Do not argue with me."

"I am not arguing. I am only admiring your thoroughness." She lifted her head. "And Anne? She asked me this morning whether she might come too. She has never seen Pemberley, except once from the carriage, when she was nine. She says if she must die of something, she would rather it was a hill in Derbyshire than a drawing room in London."

Darcy thought of his cousin in her three shawls, coughing, laughing, looking round the green room and recognising the colour of the beeches.

"Her mother will never allow it."

"Her mother," said Elizabeth, "is going to stay in London and fight. She told me so at breakfast. She said somebody has to keep an eye on you, and that Richard is too soft." A small smile. "I believe she thinks Anne will be quite safe with me. She said I have more sense than any young woman she has met since 1774."

He laughed again, properly this time.

"Then Anne comes," he said. "God help Mrs Reynolds."

#

Sunday, 12th April

The trunks were corded and standing in the hall. Georgiana's pianoforte music was packed in a flat leather case with Mary's Handel on top. Anne's shawls had been counted three times by Lady Catherine and found wanting, and a fourth had been sent for from Bond Street. Mrs Dawes had filled a hamper with enough cold chicken and bread and seed cake to feed a regiment as far as Leicester, and had cried a little into it when she thought nobody was looking.

And Elizabeth sat in the middle of her husband's bed in her nightgown at eleven o'clock on Sunday night, with her knees drawn up and her arms round them, and listened to him tell her about Pemberley.

He had been telling her for an hour. She had not asked him to stop.

"The lodge is at the bottom of the hill," he was saying. He was lying on his back beside her with his hands behind his head, looking up at the canopy as though he could see it painted there. "The drive goes up through the wood for half a mile. You will not see the house at all at first. Only trees. And then the road turns, very suddenly, at the top of a rise, and the wood falls away on your left, and there it is. On the other side of the valley. With the hill behind it and the water in front."

"What colour is the stone?"

"Gold. Grey-gold. It changes with the weather. In the evening, with the sun on it, it goes almost pink." He was quiet a moment. "My mother used to make the coachman stop at the top of the rise, every time we came home. Every single time. Even when it was raining. She would put down the window and look at it, and say, there. Just that. There."

Elizabeth put her hand on his chest.

"I shall make the coachman stop," she said.

"I know you will." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. "Mrs Reynolds will meet you at the door. She is small and round and very severe, and she will look at you for a long time without saying anything, and you will think she disapproves of you. She does not. She is only deciding where to put you in her heart. She did it to me when I was born, I believe. I have been told she held me and looked at me for five minutes without a word, and then said, well, he has his mother's eyes, and we shall have to make the best of the rest."

Elizabeth laughed, and it caught in her throat.

"And my rooms?"

"Are ready. I wrote to her on Friday, by express." He hesitated. "They are not green. There was no time. But they face south, over the water, and Mrs Reynolds will have filled them with flowers from the glasshouse, and there is a window seat. My mother used to sit in it and read." He paused. "And they are next to mine. With a door between. I had it put in, at Pemberley too, at the same time as here. In December."

"With no lock?"