Page 35 of Darcy's Legacy Tortoise
“And is it?”
“I have not the faintest idea. I told her it was the finest lace in England, which contented everyone and committed me to nothing.”
“You are learning. Six months ago you would have given her the provenance, the price, and a short lecture on the weaving of it.”
“Six months ago,” he said, “I had not the advantage of your instruction.”
He said it lightly enough, but his eyes did not, and for a moment—on a crowded lawn, before the whole of Meryton—I forgot to be witty, which has befallen me perhaps twice in my life and both times on his account.
Georgiana rescued me by arriving, and turning upon her brother a look of open suspicion. “Elizabeth, I must ask you something, and you must answer me honestly, for no one else will. What have you done to him? He smiled twice in the church. When Mr. Bingley dropped the ring, he laughed—aloud—in front of the rector. And his frown is gone, the particular one,here, between the brows. I steered my whole childhood by that frown; I knew his temper the way a sailor knows the sky. Now there is nothing there at all, and I find it most unsettling. I rather miss the brooding.”
“It is not lost,” said Darcy, joining us. “Only out of practice.”
“Then summon it. I should like to be sure of my own brother.”
He set his jaw, drew his brows together, and produced a frown of such thunderous magnificence that two Lucases altered their course rather than walk beneath it. He held it the length of a breath—and then his mouth betrayed him, and the whole grim edifice slid into a grin with no dignity left in it at all.
“There,” I told her. “You see the difficulty. He can no longer hold it. You shall have to learn to read the weather of a happy man instead.”
“That is a great deal harder,” said Georgiana, with feeling. “There is so much less of it to go on.”
And then, disaster struck, since a Longbourn event would not be a proper one without a source of consternation. Eight-year-old Alice came across the grass at a dead run, holding a very small grass-stained cape that had begun the day white.
“Sir Bertram is gone,” she shouted, flapping the small cape. “I have looked everywhere, and found only this.”
“Gone!” Mamma’s handkerchief flew to her bosom. “That valuable antique—that knight, that Sir Something-or-other—stolen, off my own lawn! I said to Mrs. Hill this very morning, with half the county trampling the grass, we should be fortunate to keep the spoons. Mr. Bennet! Ten thousand a year, and we cannot keep a tortoise upon the premises!”
“My dear,” said my father, taking up his post at her elbow against the impending nerves, “the creature is sixty years old and travels at a pace best measured with a calendar. I think wemay acquit the county of theft; there is not a felon in England with the patience for it.”
But the word was loose, and words at a wedding breed faster than rabbits. Within two minutes the lemon cakes stood abandoned, and the entire company had flung itself into the most frantic search ever mounted on behalf of the least hurried creature alive.
Sir William Lucas took command from the terrace, as a man who has once been presented at St. James’s and never entirely come home. Mr. Collins—who had come, I am persuaded, chiefly to compose a letter to Lady Catherine upon the vulgarity of double weddings—arranged himself with great gallantry behind my mother, the better to defend her while keeping her squarely between his person and any tortoise that might turn dangerous.
And my husband—master of Pemberley, ten thousand a year, the proudest man ever to darken the Meryton assembly—went down upon his hands and knees in his wedding clothes and put his head into the hedge.
“He likes cover,” he reported, muffled by the privet. “Shade, and soft earth to dig in. He will not have stopped in the open.” A grass stain was making itself at home upon his knee; he did not appear to notice it, or to care. “Where is Thomas? He trails after Bertram like a duckling. If anyone knows where the old fellow has got to?—”
“Strawberries!” we said at the same time, and without telling anyone, Darcy and I, the newest husband and wife pair, rushed around the corner of the house, down the path to the kitchen garden, where the strawberry beds lay warm beneath the southern wall.
And there, we found not only Sir Bertram, but the rest of the Gardiner children, with Alice taking her place at the back of the procession.
It was a tortoise wedding with Sir Bertram sitting in the middle of the bed, eating the strawberries Hill had meticulously grown. Cross-legged beside him, ruinous to her wedding muslin, sat Rose in a crown of daisies. Samuel presided over them with a garden cane held aloft like a crozier. And Thomas knelt at the bridegroom’s side and fed him fruit and berries from a stolen dish.
“You cannot come in, Cousin Lizzy,” said Rose, without troubling to look up, “because we are in the very middle, and you cannot stop a wedding in the middle—everybody knows that. Samuel is the bishop, on account of the stick. I am the bride. Sir Bertram is the husband, only he is being slow about it, but Samuel says slow is allowed when you are very old, and Sir Bertram is the oldest person here, older even than Grandpapa, so he may be as slow as he pleases.”
“I am the bishop,” Samuel confirmed, in case I had missed it, and rapped the cane upon a flowerpot.
“I see I have come late,” I said. “Am I permitted to ask after the groom’s intentions?”
“He has agreed.” Rose laid a small, proprietary hand upon the dome of the shell. “He ate the strawberry, and eating the strawberry means yes. Thomas has been asking him all afternoon, and he has said yes a great many times. Mr. Darcy promised I might marry him when I was grown, and I have decided I am grown enough now—and besides, Sir Bertram did not wish to wait, and one ought never to keep a husband waiting.”
Darcy surveyed the proceedings with the gravity of a man arriving at a state occasion. “Then the wedding wants only one thing more,” he said. “Who is to give the bride away?”
It was a deficiency Rose had not previously noticed, and she corrected it at once. “You are, Mr. Darcy. You gave Sir Bertram away first—you carried him to London in a basket—so you knowhow it is done, and a person who knows how it is done ought to do it.”
I watched my husband of three hours receive this commission, accept it, and bow to a small person in a crown of daisies as he had bowed that morning to the rector. Then he took his place at Rose’s shoulder—the master of Pemberley, grass upon both knees—and gave her solemnly into the keeping of a sixty-year-old tortoise who was attending chiefly to his strawberry.
“I present to you Sir and Lady Bertram,” Samuel proclaimed at last. “You may kiss the bride.” He frowned at the groom. “Why has he gone into his shell?”
