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"Elizabeth," he says softly.

I bend and kiss him.

Not the way I kissed him on Oakham Mount, hungry and startled and half afraid. Slowly. Carefully. As though I were trying to tell him something there were no words for. I kiss his mouth, and then the corner of his mouth, and then his cheekbone, and the faint shadow at his temple where the bough struck him, very lightly, so as not to hurt.

He has gone completely still under my hands.

"Elizabeth," he says again. His voice is not steady.

He reaches up and pulls me down onto the seat beside him, and then closer, until I am half in his lap, with his arm around my waist and my head against his shoulder and the lilac hanging over us, dark and sweet. He takes off his coat without a word and puts it round my shoulders, though I am not cold. It is warm from him. It smells of him. I pull it close and breathe it in.

The nightingale is still singing.

"I want to remember this," he says into my hair. "This night. Exactly as it is. I want to remember it when I am an old man."

"You will."

"I lost one evening already. I do not mean to lose another." He kisses my temple. "I think about that sometimes. That I cannot remember the night you said yes. That it is the one night of my life I would most like to have, and it is gone." He is quiet for a moment. "But I think perhaps it does not matter. I have this one instead. And all the ones after."

I cannot speak. I turn my face into his neck so that he will not feel my tears on his collar.

He kisses me again. And again. Long, slow kisses, in the dark, under the lilac, with the stocks smelling sweet and the stars coming out one by one over the elms, until I have forgotten everything. Forgotten tomorrow. Forgotten Hunsford. Forgotten Mr. Pettigrew in the shrubbery and Jane being stern on her bed. There is nothing in the world but this, and him, and the warmth of his coat around me and his arms around the coat.

It is the happiest hour of my life.

I know it while it is happening. That is the strangest part. I know it the way one knows, sometimes, standing on a hill in the sun, that one will remember this exact moment for the rest of one's life.

***

Afterward we sit quietly. My head is on his shoulder. His fingers are moving slowly in my hair, which is coming down, as it always seems to do when he is near.

"Do you know," he says, after a long while, "I was thinking tonight of the Meryton assembly."

I laugh softly against his neck. "Of all the evenings to think of."

"I was thinking how dreadfully I behaved. I stood against the wall all night and would not dance. I said that unforgivable thing about you to Bingley." He sighs. "I was in a foul temper. I hated the room. I hated the noise. I hated having to be civil to people I did not know. And there you were, laughing at me from across the room with your sister, and I hated that most of all, because I could not stop looking at you."

"You looked at me?"

"I could not stop. I was furious about it."

I am laughing, still. I am so happy I could float up off the stone seat and away over the elms. I am so happy I have forgotten to be careful.

"Well," I say, teasing, pressing a kiss to his jaw. "If you had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner, Mr. Darcy, I might have danced with you, and spared us both six months of very bad—"

He goes still.

Not the stillness of a man listening. Not the stillness of a man about to laugh. A different stillness. Absolute. As though every part of him has stopped at once, his breath and his hands and his heart.

His fingers have stopped in my hair.

I lift my head.

In the faint light from the drawing room windows, I can just see his face. It has gone white. Whiter than it was in the lane at Rosings, with the blood at his temple and his eyes closed. His eyes are open now. They are fixed on nothing. On something a long way off, that I cannot see.

"Fitzwilliam?" I whisper.

He does not answer.