Page 34 of Darcy's Legacy Tortoise
“I need you to know one more thing.” Her expression was open, like the woman at Gunter’s who watched the strawberry ice melt. “I fell in love with you on the day Rose asked whether Sir Bertram dreamed, and you told her that all creatures dream, and she saidthen he will never be lonely, and you looked up from the carpet and caught my eye, and I knew then. It frightened me, and I fought it with every weapon I had, until that day you knelt in the lending library, broken in front of me, and Ishould not have walked away, but I did because I did not know how to stand in the wreckage I had caused.”
Her pain echoed beneath my ribs. She had not left that library because she felt too little; she had left because she felt too much, and I had spent nine days believing the wound was mine alone. I yearned to offer comfort.
“You are here now, and I am here. And you are very pretty; the dress is green, and I am still in love with you. I fell in love when I found I could not look away, and that started when I walked into that hot, stuffy assembly room and saw you rolling your eyes.”
She gasped, bit her lip, and then blinked. “Maybe my eyes only appeared to roll because I couldn’t let you catch me looking. And you fell in love with me anyway.” She drew a breath. “So—are we forgiven, the both of us? I for my eye rolls, and you for your jaw clenching?”
“Yes.” I reached across the small space between us, and her hand met mine, clasping it tighter than propriety recommended. But though Mrs. Gardiner could be seen at the garden window, and Sir Bertram basked on his stone, I grew bolder, and I said, “Dear Elizabeth, I would wish to court you, but I have not asked because I will not manage you. I want to walk at your side and shorten my stride for you and bring you strawberries, and I will trust your goodness and take your barbs or your apples, because I cannot envision a life without you.”
“I feel the same, but I am afraid you have not arranged for my father’s consent or my uncle’s supervision.”
“I did arrange it before I promised not to manage things,” I admitted. “I had already obtained permission to call on you shortly after orchestrating Bingley and Jane’s reunion.”
“That was quite presumptuous of you, Mr. Darcy.” The teasing tone had returned. “And what about my father?”
“I decided the time you needed was time well spent, so I wrote to your father—our situation, my mistakes, all of it. He replied that it was not the mistakes that signified, but what a man learned from them, and gave his consent to any man brave enough to take you on.” I drew a folded paper from my coat. “He enclosed this, and charged me to deliver it to you precisely.”
She unfolded it. I had read it twenty times on the walk from Mayfair and could have recited it, but I watched her eyes travel down her father’s cramped hand instead.Darcy - She is my favorite, and you had better deserve her, or I shall set the tortoise on you.
Her lips pressed white. She read it twice, and a sound escaped her that was half a laugh and half something wetter. “You brought it with you.”
“I did.”
“Then you were still arranging, Mr. Darcy.”
“I call it preparation.” I closed her fingers over the paper; it was hers now. “I did not arrange your answer—which, I will point out, you have still not given me.”
“You have not asked. You said you wished.” She laughed, bright and unguarded, clutching the letter and tapping her knee, doubled over until the laugh turned to a half-sob. She wiped her eyes. I sat, awed by the storm of feeling in her, and promised myself I would spend my life earning the trust it took for her to let me in.
Two words in her note—for me—had done the plain, undefended thing she had always found so hard, and I, who arrange the world, had still not managed the one question that mattered.
“My father likes you,” she said when I failed to fill the silence. “He never likes anyone. He finds most men tedious and most women exhausting, and the fact that he replied by express rather than his customary three-week sulk suggests either genuineapproval or genuine terror. I suspect the tortoise tipped the balance.”
“Your answer, Miss Elizabeth.” I lifted her hand to my lips and pressed a kiss against her knuckles, brief and proper. Her breath caught, and it told me where her heart lay, but I needed those words. “A simple yes will do.”
“Well, that depends, Mr. Darcy.” The corner of her lips turned up mischievously, and she withdrew her hand. I felt the loss immediately. “Whether you dare kiss me in front of old Bertram basking on his stone.”
“A tortoise guarding your virtue?” I did not wait for an answer—she had dared me, and a dare from Elizabeth Bennet is as near an invitation as pride permits. I drew her in. It was improper; Mrs. Gardiner stood at the window, and the whole of Cheapside might have been watching, but I wanted her answer, and so I gently touched my lips to hers. Her breath caught against my mouth—and then she softened, the quills down at last. She kissed me back, fervently, as I knew she would—her free hand knotting my waistcoat as though, having forgiven me, she had decided to keep me. She tasted of strawberries, and of every month I had wanted her and never said so, and I drank her in—the essence of a woman who had devastated my heart with that first glance.
The tortoise approved. When we broke apart, we glanced over. He had finished his slow turn, neck stretched, eyes closed, basking in the sun.
“Unguarded and simply existing,” she said. “Like us.”
And I kissed her again, and realized she hadn’t answered. But I decided to bask, and the kissing was more than enough. For now and forever.
EPILOGUE: THE MISSING KNIGHT
Elizabeth
Three hours a wife, and already I had mastered the first law of matrimony: a woman in a wedding gown is common property. I had been embraced by every matron in Hertfordshire, complimented upon a complexion I do not possess, and asked four separate times—with four identical expressions of pious curiosity—whether Pemberley was truly as large as people said. I confirmed that it was. It seemed the kindest answer, and the likeliest to return the lady to the lemon cakes.
I had thought I should feel different as a married woman. I had stood at the altar before God and the whole of Meryton and waited to be made new; instead, the only thing that had changed was my name. Elizabeth Bennet was now Elizabeth Darcy. And Mamma was exactly as she had been the morning we set out for London.
“Two brides,” Mamma informed Lady Lucas, and Mrs. Long, and a footman who had not asked, “in a single morning. I do not say it was easily done.” It had not been done by her at all; but I had been married three hours, and was feeling charitable.
I wore green. Not bridal white—that was Jane’s right, and Jane wore it as Jane wore everything, as though the cloth had waited all its life for the honor. But green was ours, mine and Darcy’s: the deep, clear green of a Cheapside garden where a proud man had once knelt in the grass and undone me without meaning to. Mamma had argued against it for a fortnight. My aunt had only smiled. And my husband, handing me down from the church, had looked first at the green and then at me with an expression I do not intend to describe to anyone, the reader least of all.
“You are wanted,” he said, appearing at my elbow with the air of a man enjoying himself. “Your mother requires you to confirm, before Mrs. Long, that the lace is Brussels and not Nottingham.”
