Page 111 of Mr. Darcy Forgot I Said No

There is a short, dangerous silence.

Elizabeth sits up.

"You cannot remember," she says.

"I am very sorry. I have been subject to lapses, you know. Ever since an accident in Kent. A tree was involved. I have it on very good authority that I once mislaid an entire Thursday."

"Fitzwilliam Darcy."

"Is it Tuesday?"

"It is Tuesday," she says, in a voice of ice. "It is Tuesday the thirty-first of July."

"Ah," I say. "Then it is the day Bingley's horse went lame last year. I remember it well. He was very much distressed."

She takes her foot out of my hand, slowly, and draws it back under her skirts, and folds her arms, and looks at me. It is the look from the Netherfield drawing room. It is the look that once took Miss Bingley apart over a card table without a single raised syllable. It is the most magnificent look I have ever seen, and I have seen it most days for a year now, and I have never once grown tired of it.

"One year," she says. "One year, today. And you have forgot."

"Forgot what, my love?"

"You know perfectly well what."

"I assure you, I do not. Pettigrew warned me this might happen. He said the head was never quite the same after a blow of that kind."

"Pettigrew," says my wife, "said nothing of the kind. Pettigrew wrote to you last month to say you were the soundest man in Derbyshire and that he wished you would stop sending him pheasants."

Her mouth is trembling.

She is trying very hard to keep it straight. I can see her trying. She presses her lips together, and lifts her chin, and glares at me, and her eyes are sparkling, and the corner of her mouth gives way.

I give way at the same moment.

I do not know which of us goes first. It is very likely a tie. I only know that I am laughing, and she is laughing, and she has thrown a cushion at me, and I have caught it, and she has come across the sofa after it, and somehow she is in my lap, with her arms round my neck and her face pressed into my shoulder, shaking.

"You are a dreadful man," she says into my coat.

"I know."

"I have been planning it for a week. I told Mrs. Reynolds. There is a cake."

"I know. She told me. She also told me you made her promise not to tell me."

"Mrs. Reynolds," says my wife, "is a traitor to her sex."

"Mrs. Reynolds has known me since I was four. She tells me everything." I put my book down on the floor, very carefully, without looking at it, and put both arms round her. "I remember, Elizabeth."

"I know you do."

"I remember all of it." I lay my cheek against her hair. "The church, and the heat, and your mother's fifth handkerchief. Anne in her wreath. Pettigrew's spectacles falling off. Your father's face when he took my hand at the altar. The carriage. The inn with the roses round the door." I feel her smile against my coat. "I remember a great deal about the inn."

"Hush," she says, going pink. "Lowe will hear you."

"Lowe is in the servants' hall teaching Georgiana's new footman how to tie a neckcloth. He cannot hear anything. And if he could, he would pretend he had not. He is very good at it. He has been doing it for ten years."

She laughs again, softly. Then she lifts her head, and looks at me. And there is something in her face that I have learned to know this last year, better than I know my own. It is the look she wore on the step at Longbourn, and on the hill at Oakham Mount, and on my sister's sofa among the knitting needles. It is the look Lowe saw. The look he would know anywhere.

I kiss her. Gently. In the firelight. With the house standing upside down in the lake outside the window, and her stockinged feet tucked up under her skirts, and one slipper still missing under the sofa.