Page 71 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

He had thought about what he would say to her. He had lain awake after four o'clock, with her asleep at last on his shoulder, and thought of a hundred things. Wise things, tender things, practical things about the inns and the horses and the letters. He could not remember any of them. He walked across the cobbles towards her and stopped in front of her and could not speak.

She could not either. He saw her try. Her lips parted, and nothing came, and her eyes filled.

So he did not say anything. He took her hands, both of them, gloved, and held them. And then, because the grooms were watching and the footmen were watching and Lady Catherine had turned round from the wall and was watching, and he did not care, not in the least, he pulled her into his arms and held her against him in the middle of the stable yard with his face in her neck, and felt her arms go round him under his coat and hold on as though she would never let go.

They stood there for a long time. Long enough for the horses to grow restless, and the lead groom to cough, and Richard to turn his back and study the stable clock with great attention.

"Write to me," he said into her hair, at last. His voice was a stranger's.

"Every day."

"About the weather."

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. "About the weather. And the beeches. And whether Mrs Reynolds has decided where to put me in her heart."

"She will put you at the very top." He lifted his head and looked at her face, and memorised it: the dark eyes swimming, the freckle by her mouth, the curl escaping from under the bonnet. "Everybody does. It is very tiresome. There is no room left for the rest of us."

She laughed properly then, and the tears spilled over, and he wiped them away with his thumbs, one side and then the other.

"I love you," she said.

"I know," said Darcy. "I love you. Go. Before I lock you in the cellar with the pistols."

He handed her up himself. She sat down beside Georgiana, across from Anne, and he shut the door, and she put down the window at once and put her gloved hand out of it, and he took it and held it.

The lead groom looked at him. Darcy nodded.

The coach began to move.

He walked beside it, holding her hand through the window, across the cobbles, under the arch of the mews, out into the grey empty street. He walked beside it to the corner of North Audley Street. Then the horses lengthened their stride, and the wheels began to roll faster, and her fingers slipped out of his, one by one, the way his had slipped out of hers in the lane at Longbourn in December.

He stood on the corner in the grey dawn and watched the coach go up the street, and turn the corner by the chapel, and disappear. He watched the place where it had been for a long time after that. He did not know how long.

At last a big hand came down on his shoulder.

"Come on, old fellow," said Richard quietly. "Come home. We have work to do."

#

Elizabeth did not cry in the coach. She had decided that at the corner of North Audley Street, when his fingers slipped out of hers. Georgiana was sitting beside her, white and silent, and Anne across from her with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her shawls, and Hannah in the other corner sniffing into a handkerchief. Somebody had to not cry. So she sat very straight, and looked out of the window at the grey streets going by, and did not.

They went up through Islington and Highgate as the sun came up, and on through Finchley, where the Rose and Crown at Whetstone leant sideways by the road with its sign creaking in the wind, and Elizabeth looked at it as they passed and felt her throat close and looked away. By Hatfield Georgiana had fallen asleep on her shoulder. By Stevenage Anne had begun, very quietly, to snore.

They changed horses at Baldock at eleven. The inn yard was noisy and busy and nobody knew them, and while the ostlers led out the fresh team, Elizabeth got down to stretch her legs, and walked to the end of the yard, and stood by the gate looking back down the road the way they had come. South. Towards London.

She put her hand in her reticule for her handkerchief, and found a letter.

She had not put it there. She knew every single thing that was in that reticule; she had packed it herself at four o'clock that morning by the light of one candle while he slept. It was folded small and sealed with plain wax, and on the front, in the hand she would have known in the dark, it said: To be opened at the first change of horses. Not before. I shall know.

She stood by the gate of the inn yard at Baldock with the wind pulling at her bonnet strings and broke the seal.

My dearest, loveliest, most obstinate Elizabeth,

By the time you read this you will be forty miles from me, and I will be sitting in the study pretending to read letters from my steward, and Richard will be pretending not to watch me do it.

I wrote this at two o'clock this morning, while you slept on my shoulder. You fell asleep at last at a quarter to two, in the middle of telling me that you were not tired. You always do that. I have never told you, because I did not want you to stop.

I have been thinking about what my mother used to say, when she made the coachman stop at the top of the rise above Pemberley. There. Just that. I never knew what she meant. I thought it was only the view. I think now that she meant: there is the place where I am safe. There is home.