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“It will carry me perfectly well, Mamma.”

“I do hope so, my love, I do hope so. Only I had rather pictured something with a bit more gilt.” Mrs. Bennet dabbed her eyes and seized Elizabeth’s arm. “You must write the instant you arrive—the very instant. I shall need to know about the rooms and the servants and whether there is a pianoforte, for Mary has been quite insupportable about pianofortes and how they must be tuned.”

“I will write, Mamma.” Elizabeth kissed her mother’s cheek, which was wet, gently extricated herself, and turned to find Darcy at the carriage step with his hand extended.

She accepted his hand. His grip was steady, but as she looked up while mounting the step, she found not the careful composure she had come to expect. He looked tired, faint lines etched around his eyes, his lips pressed together in something closer to a grimace than a smile, and somehow older than he had seemed three weeks before, when he first arrived at Longbourn with questions she had not known were hers to answer.

She settled into the seat, well-sprung and comfortable despite the carriage’s worn exterior, the old leather creaking beneath her borrowed silk. Darcy entered after her and chose the seat opposite, not beside.

“Are you well?”

“Yes.” She dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “I have never been away from them. I had not thought…”

He leaned forward and touched her knee. “You will visit often, and they are welcome at Pemberley. It is part of your conditions.”

She nodded, unable to blink back the tears that watered her face. She did not normally weep, and it bothered her that Darcy would witness her weakness, and so, as the horses stirred and the wheels rattled over the gravel, Elizabeth turned and pressed her face against the window.

Her father raised one hand in a gesture that might have been farewell or blessing or simple acknowledgment that his second daughter had passed beyond his keeping. Jane already stood with Bingley, and together, they waved, already united in posture. Her marriage had given Jane the freedom to reject Mr. Collins. Her family would be cared for, and her sisters would be safe. Lydia was already dragging Kitty toward the lane, pointing out Colonel Fitzwilliam in his regimentals. Mary stood apart, and Mrs. Bennet fluttered her handkerchief with a vigor meant to be visible from Derbyshire.

The church tower rose behind them, grey stone against a white March sky, and the bare elms along the lane stood like witnesses who had seen everything and would say nothing. Then the carriage rounded the bend, and Elizabeth was alone with her husband for the first time in her married life.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PEMBERLEY AT FIRST SIGHT

Four days confined in a carriage had left Elizabeth’s back aching and her patience frayed, but worse still was her husband’s studied withdrawal. He was unfailingly courteous, yet infuriatingly determined to give her no cause for complaint and no opening for intimacy beyond what their strict legal arrangement required.

At every coaching inn, he secured her a private room while he shared quarters in the common room with drovers and tradesmen. Elizabeth had imagined a gentleman of his wealth would never stoop to such discomfort, yet each night he entrusted her with his pocketbook and the brass-locked portable writing wedge containing his private papers and valuables, leaving them in her keeping and retrieving them at dawn with a silent bow.

He addressed her with unfailing courtesy, but would not divulge how he passed his nights, nor offer the faintest hint of his expectations for their marriage or her new dominion as mistress of Pemberley. If she were to take her mother as a model, her duties would consist chiefly of producing a small army of children, exchanging gossip with the neighbors, and cosseting her multiplying nerves.

The travel-scarred carriage rattled over another stone bridge—one of a dozen they had crossed—when the man beside her went rigid. Darcy did not merely look out the window; his shoulders squared against the squabs and his chin lifted with the sharp, instinctive alertness of a hound catching the scent of home.

“That is the River Derwent,” he said, leaning forward, pointing to the pewter ribbon before them. “My grandfather built the stone bridge. He dammed the upper stream and created a lake.”

“The entire Derwent?” Elizabeth asked, amazed at the industry of Darcy’s grandfather.

“Oh no, just a tiny stream feeding into it,” Darcy explained with more animation than she had seen since their wedding day. “He stocked the lake and then spent the remainder of his life failing to catch anything from it. My father claimed the fish recognized the Darcy name and refused to be landed out of spite.”

Elizabeth allowed a wry smile to tickle her face. “Do you fish, Mr. Darcy, or do they recognize you and refuse to bite?”

“I have not the pleasure, because I have not had the leisure.” He pointed out the opposite window, as if to divert her attention from non-biting trout. “We enter the park through those gates. The lane runs for nearly a mile before the house comes into view.”

The wrought-iron gates soared, elegant and imposing, the Darcy crest worked into the metal with a flourish that must have cost a small fortune in its day. Now the iron bore patches of rust at the joins, and one hinge protested with a squeal as the gatekeeper, an old man limping with dignity, drew it open for their carriage.

Darcy waved to the gatekeeper, who graced him with a gap-toothed smile. Elizabeth was surprised, because her own father routinely ignored the servants who kept his table stocked and his drive maintained—not that Longbourn was the paragon of good maintenance—far from it.

And so she added this observation to her knowledge of her new husband. To the other things she noticed. That he could read in a lurching carriage without the slightest hint of travel sickness, an advantage she considered deeply unfair; that he handed her down at every inn with the tender care one might afford the thinnest Sèvres porcelain teacup. He did not converse before his coffee, and she was strangely glad, as the silence over his morning coffee and her morning tea was not the ordeal she had braced herself for. And that she missed his wry commentary on mundane subjects and the absurdities she noticed, realizing with a pang that she was already uncommonly greedy for his voice.

The lane curved through heavy oaks, their bare branches against the grey March sky, then the oaks thinned, and the trees parted.

“Oh,” Elizabeth gasped.

The valley unfolded before them like a book laid open, its wide green pages sweeping through the park. Beyond the stream the land rose gently, and there—seated on the opposite slope with the quiet authority of an imposing mansion that had occupied precisely that spot for hundreds of years and saw no reason to account for itself—was Pemberley.

It was grander than she had imagined: three stories of honeyed limestone, two broad wings extending with a certain self-satisfaction, and what appeared to be thirty chimneys punctuating a roofline that seemed to go on simply because it could. Hundreds of windows caught the pale March light. The house did not glitter, but held the light with patient dignity, much as a handsome woman of beyond a certain age receives a compliment.

“That is your home,” she said, and heard how foolish she sounded.