Page 48 of You Willfully Misunderstand Me

Kitty and Jane set about winding the greenery along the church's worn pew-ends themselves, Jane's quiet steadiness a welcome counter to Kitty's habit of tying each bow twice as elaborate as the last until Jane gently undid half her work and redid it more simply. Mrs. Bennet moved between them the whole while in a state of happy management bordering on the militant, pronouncing one arrangement too sparse and the next too proud, until Mr. Bennet, arrived and took the ribbon from his wife’s hands with a firmness born of long practice and said only, "Come and sit a moment, Mrs. Bennet. The flowers will do very well without further improvement.”

By the time the sun had climbed fully over the hedgerows, the little church stood transformed, not grand, for Longbourn's means and Darcy's own preference for quiet ran to the same modest scale, but full of color and green and the soft,honest scent of a garden's last generous offering before winter, laid along every pew as though the whole of the county's late summer had been gathered up and set aside expressly for this one morning.

Not long after, Darcy waited for his Elizabeth at the front of the small church with Colonel Fitzwilliam beside him, dust of the previous night's ride scarcely brushed from his coat, greeting Elizabeth beforehand with a warmth that held no trace of the awkwardness she might once have feared, given all that had passed.

Mr. Bennet gave Elizabeth away with a dryness of manner that fooled no one who knew him well enough to see past it, and Elizabeth, taking his arm for the last steps of the aisle, caught the particular brightness in his eyes that he would have denied, had anyone been unwise enough to remark upon it.

"Well, Lizzy," he murmured, low, for her alone, "I find I am giving away my cleverest daughter to the one man in England clever enough to deserve her. I do not know that I entirely forgive him for it, but I find I cannot fault his taste."

"Thank you, Papa."

"Do not thank me. Thank whatever God saw fit to wreck a harbor at precisely the moment it did. I have long suspected His Providence of a sense of humor, and I find this has settled the matter entirely."

Darcy, when she reached him, looked at her with an expression only of plain, unhurried joy; seeing him thus made Elizabeth feel entirely, unaccountably satisfied.

They stood opposite each other as the vicar opened his book, and Elizabeth, meeting her betrothed's eyes across thesmall space that still, technically, separated Miss Bennet from Mrs. Darcy, found she had never in her life felt so entirely, uncomplicatedly certain of anything as she felt in that moment, waiting only for the words that would make it official.

Darcy was thankful that the ceremony itself was brief, as such things generally are, and Elizabeth found she remembered afterward only fragments of it clearly; the vicar's voice, steady, and the particular warmth of Darcy's hand closing over hers when the ring was given; Mrs. Bennet's audible sniffling from the second pew, indistinguishable, by that point, from joy or nerves or simple relief that the whole uncertain business had at last resolved itself so satisfactorily. She remembered the moment she was asked whether she would have this man, and the ease, the sheer, uncomplicated ease, with which the answer came, without a shadow of the doubt or reproof that had once stood so thickly between them.

"I will," she said, and meant it entirely.

Darcy's own vow, when it came, was delivered in a voice that held, beneath its steadiness, a man who had once believed himself entitled to love without the trouble of earning it, promising now, before witnesses, to spend the whole of his life earning it regardless.

***

The wedding breakfast that followed was smaller than Mrs. Bennet's ambitions and larger than Darcy's natural inclination, which Elizabeth privately considered an excellent compromise between the two. The Lucases were in attendance, Sir William offering Darcy a series of ceremonious bows that Darcy bore with considerably more patience than he would once have mustered; the Philipses came as well, Mrs. Philipsalready gathering material enough to supply Meryton's gossip for a fortnight, though this time, at least, the material required no invention. A scattering of other notable families rounded out the company, drawn as much by curiosity as by goodwill, though Elizabeth found she minded the curiosity rather less than she once might have, secure now in a happiness that had no further need of anyone's good opinion to sustain it.

The explanation offered, at the wedding breakfast, for so hasty and quiet an affair was simple enough, and had the considerable advantage of being entirely true, if not entire in itself, that Mr. Darcy, detained unexpectedly by business in Kent, had already missed the wedding date he had originally hoped for, and was not disposed to countenance any further delay upon his return. It satisfied Mrs. Philips well enough, and satisfied Lady Lucas better still, and neither lady troubled herself to inquire what the business in Kent had actually comprised, which suited Elizabeth and Darcy both very well indeed.

It was not, strictly, the whole of the truth, but neither was it any great distortion of it, for Darcy himself privately held that the wedding had already been delayed a full six weeks beyond what he considered its rightful date. He would, given the choosing of it, have married Elizabeth the very day her father gave his consent in the library at Longbourn, license or no license, banns or no banns, and considered every day since merely a debt owed him by circumstance, and paid now, at last, in full.

Even Lady Catherine's absence, for she had neither come nor written, though Colonel Fitzwilliam reported her temper somewhat softened toward Anne, who had returned to Rosings chastened and quiet and was said to be considering, at hermother's rather forceful suggestion, an extended visit to Bath, could not dampen the day's easy warmth. Anne herself had written a brief letter to Elizabeth some weeks prior, awkward and sincere in equal measure, asking forgiveness for a part in the scheme she swore she had never understood the whole of until it was too late to prevent it, and Elizabeth, who understood better than most what it was to be deceived by a man skilled in deception, had written back forgiveness freely given, though she privately thought it would be some while yet before Anne trusted her own judgment enough to fully believe herself forgiven.

***

Darcy had, in the small space of days between his return from Kent and the wedding itself, secured a modest house at the edge of Meryton, hastily let, at no small expense, so that the two of them might have some few days entirely their own before the world reasserted its claims upon them.It is not Pemberley, nor anything approaching it, he thought soberly. It was by all means a plain, comfortable house of no particular distinction, the sort a modest gentleman's family might have occupied for a season, but it answered its purpose admirably, being near enough to Longbourn that Elizabeth need not feel herself wholly parted from her family in the first days of her marriage, and private enough that neither Mrs. Bennet's transports nor Meryton's curiosity could follow them past its door uninvited.

They had arrived late at the let house, having spent the better part of the day with Elizabeth's family, the wedding breakfast stretching on, by slow and happy degrees, well into the evening, as neither Mrs. Bennet's raptures nor the general goodwill of the gathered company showed any early sign of exhausting itself. It was full dark, the last of the well-wishers finally seen off and Longbourn's candles beginning to gutter,before Darcy handed Elizabeth up into the carriage and they set off at last for the quiet house that awaited them at the edge of Meryton, the two of them alone together, in the fullest sense, for the first time since the church that morning had made them so.

It was not until they had arrived that Elizabeth finally had a quiet moment alone with her husband. The word came to her now with a naturalness that rather surprised her; she had, after all, heard the name ‘husband’ said often enough in relation to Mr. Darcy while she was on the Isle of Man. And yet it had lost none of its private delight for having been so well rehearsed; if anything, each time she reached for it now, it felt less like a word newly hers and more like one she had simply been waiting, all this while, for the world to finally agree with.

Elizabeth was shown up to the bedroom by a maid hired only that week for the purpose, a quiet, capable young woman named Susan who asked no questions and offered no opinions, for which Elizabeth found herself grateful beyond what the small service strictly warranted. She stood a while before the looking glass once Susan had gone, her hair let down from its wedding arrangement and falling loose about her shoulders, and found she hardly recognized the woman who looked back at her, not because anything in her face had changed, but because everything behind it had.

She heard his step in the passage before she heard the knock, unhurried, though not without its own quiet urgency, and had only a moment to compose herself, an effort that proved, in the event, entirely unnecessary, for whatever composure she might have gathered dissolved the instant she heard his voice through the door.

Elizabeth turned toward the door, her heart beating with an unfamiliar mixture of nerves and gladness in equal measure, “You may enter.”

"Mrs. Darcy." He said it slowly, savoring the shape of it.

"Mr. Darcy," she replied. "I find I much prefer seeing you compared to that good English oak," she said pointing to the door he had just entered.

He laughed, turning to look at the door, before turning back to face his wife. "I find myself wanting to say it again and again, now that it is mine to say freely, without disguise or deceit. Mrs. Darcy. My love. My true wife." A faint, unguarded smile touched his mouth. "I confess I had begun to wonder, this past season, whether I should ever have the right to say it at all, and now I find I cannot seem to stop."

He heard her laugh, softer than he expected, and something in the sound gave him pause;she is nervous, he thought, and found the thought did not trouble him so much as steady him, for he had spent enough of the day being nervous himself to recognize it in his wife.

"Then say it as often as you like, sir, for I find I have no objection whatsoever to hearing it." Elizabeth's eyes were bright, though whether more with laughter or with feeling she could not herself have said. "Only I would remind you that I have waited a great while to hear it too, some six weeks since you said it last on the Isle of Mann.”

"Six weeks," Darcy repeated, and something rueful moved across his face. "I had not thought to be held so precisely to account for the counting of it, though I own the number iscorrect, and I have felt every day of it rather more keenly than I let on in my letters."