Page 36 of Darcy's Legacy Tortoise
“Perhaps,” said Darcy, raising the one formerly forbidding eyebrow at me, “we had better show Sir Bertram how it is done.”
“You, husband, are quite untamed.” I should have liked to prove him right; but the children were watching. “I would not have Sir Bertram’s wedding upstaged by ours.”
“Then I shall inform your mother that the kidnapped knight has been found—at the strawberry altar.” He made to go, as though to carry the glad news of the tortoise’s recovery across the lawn, and I caught his sleeve.
“Leave Mamma the theft a little longer. It is the happiest she has been in living memory. Take it from her now, and she will only go back to being happy about the lace—and the lace cannot survive another hour of her.”
He laughed—the new laugh, the undefended one, the one his sister cannot navigate by—and I thought: he belonged here, on the Longbourn lawn, exactly as he had belonged that first afternoon in a Cheapside drawing room, kneeling on a carpet so a child might pet a tortoise. I had seen it then and refused to believe it; I saw it now and could not have unbelieved it for the world. He had brought us a tortoise to win himself a door, and the tortoise had gone on quietly marrying us all—Jane toher Bingley, me to my Darcy, and now Rose to her Sir Bertram: three weddings in a single June day, every one of them the old creature’s doing.
Sir Bertram put out his head for one last strawberry, took it from Thomas, and drew, by slow and contented degrees, back into his shell.
He had waited a very long time to be married, and he could afford, now, to rest.
The End
EXCERPT - WHAT DARCY’S DOG KNEW
What if Mr. Darcy’s dog recognized Elizabeth Bennet’s worth… before his master could admit his own heart?
Excerpt Copyright 2025, Rachelle Ayala
What Darcy’s Dog Knew: A Pet Matchmaking Romance
CHAPTER 1: A WOLFHOUND CHOOSES
I wasn’t sure which required more fortitude—the cool glass beneath my palm or the prospect of three weeks in Mr. Collins’s parsonage. If one believes a parsonage might serve as a sanctuary, one clearly hasn’t spent any significant time with a man who considers a dove to be a sound marriage advisor.
Standing at the window of the small but painfully tidy chamber Charlotte had prepared for me, I surveyed the quiet proof of a newlywed life. The books were aligned like a regiment of well-ordered soldiers, the workbasket—perfectly placed to catch the afternoon light—looked as if someone had spent an entire afternoon trying to make a living out of a neat stack of mail. The view of the lane was so unremarkable that any guest could immediately plot an escape route to the garden. Charlotte, practical to her bones, had evidently decided that her finest matrimonial strategy was to maintain three months of conspicuous inconspicuousness.
The letter in my pocket crinkled as I shifted my weight. Jane’s latest missive, bright as a summer day in London and devoid of any mention of the gentleman who vanished from Netherfield, could only have been written by a girl who never admitted to being a little jealous. I’d read it four times on the journey, scrutinizing each carefully constructed sentence for the unhappiness my sister would never express outright.
I am quite well. I have called on Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst. They were perfectly civil.
Perfectly civil. Jane, who found goodness in everyone and would have described Attila the Hun as “perhaps a touch enthusiastic about horsemanship,” had managed only “perfectly civil” regarding the Bingley sisters. It was a small, calculated concession. I snorted to myself.
A door slammed somewhere below, followed immediately by Mr. Collins’s voice, which projected through the floorboards as if he had been granted the singular honor of delivering a royal proclamation to the entire parish. My shoulders tensed beneath my traveling dress. I had committed to three weeks of this, for Charlotte’s sake, and I would survive it through liberal applications of long walks and the strategic deployment of selective deafness.
“Lizzy!” Charlotte’s voice floated up the stairs, expertly modulated to convey urgency without alarm—a skill she had no doubt perfected in the short months of her marriage. “Lady Catherine’s carriage has been spotted on the lane. We are summoned to Rosings for dinner.”
“How swift her summons.” I had been at Hunsford for precisely four hours—barely enough time to unpack my plainest gowns and contemplate the merits of feigning consumption. A glance in the small mirror showed me presentable enough for a country neighbourhood. I descended to find Mr. Collins already in raptures about the honor, the condescension, and the particularly flattering notice her ladyship took of his humble household.
“And I am told,” he announced, quivering with significance, “that her ladyship’s nephews have arrived for their annual Easter visit. Mr.?Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam. You will recall Mr.?Darcy, Cousin Elizabeth, from the Netherfield Ball, where I had trodden on your toes at least thrice.”
“I recall him perfectly, Mr. Collins.”
“A most distinguished gentleman. Ten thousand a year, and the grandson of an earl on his mother’s side. You will wish to make a better impression than you did in Hertfordshire, I am sure.”
I summoned my sweetest smile, the one that had caused my father to retreat hastily to his library on more than one occasion. “I shall endeavor to be precisely as impressive as I was before.”
Charlotte caught my eye with a look that blended sympathy and warning. Mr.?Collins, oblivious as ever, continued his effusions all the way to the carriage.
Rosings Park embodied excess in a manner that only truly vulgar wealth could achieve. I counted fourteen windows across the front façade alone, each one gleaming with the kind of aggressive cleanliness that spoke of an army of servants and a mistress who inspected their work with a magnifying glass perpetually in hand. The great hall swallowed us whole—marble floors, portraits of disapproving ancestors, and enough gilt to make the eye water. A footman led us toward the drawing room with the solemnity of a funeral procession.
And then something enormous and grey appeared from the shadows with all the subtlety of a cannonball and planted its nose firmly in my hand.
I yelped most undignifiedly. The creature—a dog, I realized, though of a size that seemed to belong more properly to mythology—gazed up at me with liquid amber eyes and the unmistakable expression of a soul who had been waiting its entire life for this precise moment.
“Caractacus!” a sharp voice rang out. “Come here at once!”
