Page 84 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She did not know why she was watching it. He could not possibly come tonight. Tom Hollins would not even be in London until tomorrow. It would be two days, three, before Fitzwilliam could be here. She knew it perfectly well.

She watched it anyway. All night. Until the moon came up at two, and silvered the whole valley, and went down again. Until the sky in the east over the hills began to turn from black to grey to the colour of the inside of a shell.

And a little before five o'clock in the morning, with the first birds beginning in the beeches, a single horseman came over the top of the rise, very slowly, on a horse that was stumbling with weariness, and stopped.

He stopped at the turn, exactly where the wood fell away. He sat there on the tired horse, very still, in the grey first light, looking across the valley at the house.

Elizabeth was on her feet before she knew it. The Cowper fell off the window seat onto the floor. She did not pick it up.

She was out of the door, and down the stairs, and across the great hall past the startled night porter, and out through the front door into the cold dawn in her nightgown and shawl and bare feet, before she had drawn another breath.

Chapter 23: The Night Ride

The road north. Tuesday night, 28th April, to Wednesday dawn, 1812

The ostler at Market Harborough had been right. It was black as pitch past Leicester.

Darcy rode through it by the stars, as he had said he would, and by the pale ribbon of the road where the chalk showed through, and by the smell of the hedges on either side, and, when all of that failed, by nothing at all but the horse's own sense and his own blind will. The inn yards came up out of the dark one after another like islands: Leicester at ten, where he woke an ostler by hammering on the stable door with the butt of his pistol; Loughborough at midnight; Kegworth; the long black climb up out of the Trent valley towards Derby with the wind in his face and a cold drizzle beginning. He changed horses where he could. Where he could not, he got down and walked beside the one he had, and let it breathe, and talked to it, low, the way he had talked to his first pony when he was six.

He did not think very much. He had found, somewhere after Market Harborough, that it was better not to.

When he did think, it was in pieces, like the inn yards coming out of the dark. Her letter in his coat, with the ink running. A light on the far side of the lake last night at one o'clock. Georgiana on the floor of the blue room in London, shaking without a sound. Wickham on the sands at Ramsgate, laughing. Samuel Hobb in the chandler's shop saying I seen him get up on the roof. A week. He had been in Derbyshire for a week, and Darcy had been sitting in his study in London being sensible.

I am not frightened. That is not true. I am very frightened. But I know what to do.

He held on to that. He held on to it the way a man holds onto a rope in a flood. I know what to do. She had written it in the dark, fast, the letters running together, and she had meant it. He knew her. When she said she knew what to do, she did.

The moon came up at two, as the ostler had promised, a lopsided half-moon lying on its back over the hills, and suddenly he could see the whole country: the long dark swell of the land going up towards the Peak, the pale road winding into it, the black clumps of woods and the silver thread of the Derwent in the valley bottom. He knew where he was. He had known this road since he was in a cradle. Derby, and then Duffield, and then Belper, and the river, and the hills closing in on either side, and the smell of the air changing, cold and clean and green, the smell of home.

The last horse was a raw-boned grey from a posting house at Matlock Bath, and it was nearly done by the time they came through Lambton at half past four, with the sky just beginning to pale behind the eastern hills. He did not stop at the Green Man. He looked at it as he went past, dark and shut and silent, and thought of a fair gentleman at the pump in his shirtsleeves, whistling, and put his heels to the tired horse.

The lodge gates were open. The lodge-keeper's wife ran out in her nightcap at the sound of hooves and stared at him and put her hand over her mouth. He did not stop for her either.

The road went up through the wood.

It was darker under the trees than it had been on the open road; the dawn had not reached here yet. The horse stumbled on the roots and he held it up. The beeches closed overhead, grey and silent. Somewhere a wood pigeon began, very softly, and stopped. He could hear nothing else but the horse's breathing and his own.

Half a mile. He had counted it a thousand times as a boy, on his pony, racing Wickham home. Half a mile of trees and then the turn.

The wood fell away on the left.

He pulled the grey up at the top of the rise, exactly where his mother had always stopped, and sat there in the saddle in the thin cold light, and looked across the valley.

There it was. The house. On the other side of the water, with the hill behind it and the lake in front, the whole long front of it just catching the first grey light, colourless, like a drawing in pencil. The lake lay below it like a sheet of pewter, with a little mist lying on the surface. Not a light in any window. Not a sound. It looked exactly as it had looked every time he had ever come home, all his life. Nothing burned. Nothing broken. Just his house, asleep, in the dawn.

He let out a breath that seemed to come up from the soles of his feet.

"There," said Darcy, aloud, to nobody. His voice cracked on it.

And then the front door of Pemberley opened, and a small white figure came out of it, and began to run.

#

The grass was soaking. It was the first thing Elizabeth knew, after the door: the shock of it under her bare feet, ice-cold, drenched with dew, so cold it burned. She did not stop. She ran down the long slope of the lawn in her nightgown with her shawl flying out behind her and her hair coming down, straight as a bird, towards the water.

The mist lay on the lake like smoke. The little stone bridge over the stream at the head of it was slippery with wet. She went over it without feeling it. Beyond it the drive began, pale gravel, winding up through the park towards the wood, and the gravel hurt, a thousand small sharp stones, and she did not care. She ran.

He was coming.