Page 63 of Mr. Darcy Forgot I Said No

We walk round the shrubbery, Elizabeth and I, with Anne a discreet distance behind with Mrs. Jenkinson. We do not speak much. Elizabeth keeps glancing back at the house. On the third circuit, the drawing room window flies open and Mr. Bingley leans out of it, hatless, his hair on end, and shouts, "Darcy! Darcy! She has said yes!" across half an acre of lawn, so loudly that the rooks go up from the elms.

Elizabeth bursts into tears.

I give her my handkerchief, and she cries into it, and laughs into it, and says "Oh, Jane, oh, Jane," over and over, and when she has done she looks up at me with her eyes swimming and says, "You did this."

"Bingley did it."

"You sent him."

"I only stopped standing in his way. It was a thing I ought never to have done."

She looks at me for a long moment, with that look I cannot read, that I have seen on her face more and more since Kent. As though she is holding something very heavy, very carefully, and is afraid of dropping it.

Then she takes my arm, and we go in to wish them joy.

Jane Bennet is standing in the middle of the drawing room with both her hands in Bingley's. She is not smiling her usual smile, the serene, sweet, unreadable one that I once took for indifference. She is shining. There is no other word for it. She is lit from inside like a lantern, and every feeling she has ever kept so carefully hidden is there in her face for anyone to see.

I look at her, and I think of how near I came to putting that light out forever. And I look at Elizabeth, crying again, with her arms around her sister, and I think that I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve the woman who made me see it.

***

On Saturday the four of us walk into Meryton.

It is Mrs. Bennet's idea. She says the whole town must see us. She says it in such a way that it is clear she means the whole town must see her daughters with ten thousand a year and five thousand a year on their arms, and in particular, Lady Lucas must see it, and Mrs. Long, and whoever else has been insufficiently impressed by the Bennets in the last twenty years.

Jane and Bingley go ahead. They do not walk so much as drift, slowly, with their heads together, laughing at nothing. Twice he stops to point out a particularly fine cow. Twice she agrees it is the finest cow she has ever seen.

Elizabeth and I come behind. Her hand is tucked into my arm. It is a soft blue day, with larks going up out of the fields on either side of the lane, and the hawthorn just coming into flower in the hedges, and I am, without exception, the happiest man in Hertfordshire.

"You are smiling," says Elizabeth.

"I am not."

"You are. You have been smiling since the turnpike. People will think you have a softening of the brain."

"I have a cracked head. I am permitted a little softening."

She laughs. Then she looks down at the lane, and says, more quietly, "I like it. When you smile. I did not know you could, until Kent."

"I did not know I could either."

We come into Meryton by the high street. It is market day, and the town is crowded and noisy, full of farmers' carts and shouting children and women with baskets. People stare. People nudge one another. Mrs. Long comes out of the draper's and stops dead on the step. Lady Lucas, across the street, raises her quizzing glass. I bow to both of them. Elizabeth's fingers tighten on my arm, and I feel her shaking with suppressed laughter.

The militia are in the town. There are red coats everywhere, at the inn door, outside the bootmaker's, lounging against the window of the milliner's in twos and threes. Lydia Bennet will be somewhere among them, I expect, with Kitty in tow. I do not care. Let them all look. I have nothing in the world to be ashamed of, and the finest woman in England on my arm.

We pass the Red Lion.

And a red coat, standing at the corner of the inn yard with two others, turns to look at us.

I know the back of that head before I see the face. I have known it since we were boys together at Pemberley, sharing my father's tutor and my father's pony and, for a time, my father's love. I know the set of the shoulders, the easy, graceful lean against the wall, the way he turns, unhurried, as though he has all the time in the world and expects the world to wait for him.

The face comes round. Handsome. Smiling. Perfectly open.

It is George Wickham.

His eyes go to me. Then to Elizabeth on my arm. Then back to me. And the smile widens, slowly, the way a cat's does, when it has seen something interesting in the grass.

Chapter Fifteen — Elizabeth