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Below, in the gold light, Darcy lifted his head. He looked up quite casually. He glanced, as a man does, over Elizabeth’s bent shoulder, up the long grey wall of the house; and his grey eyes travelled, and stopped, and fixed with perfect accuracy on a certain curtain in a certain window. He did not smile. He did not nod. He only looked, slowly, steadily, and very pointedly, for about three seconds.

The Colonel stepped back from the window. He did it rapidly, with dignity, in good order, and the curtain fell into place. He stood in the empty passage for a moment, adjusting his coat, and the unmilitary smile came back, wider than before.

On the lawn, Elizabeth looked up and saw the retreat and as soon as the thing was done she was laughing again. She had seen the curtain quickly shuffle back. She laughed with her head thrown back and one hand pressed to her side, and Darcy, in spite of himself, felt the corner of his own mouth go up. “Leave him,” said Elizabeth. “He has earned it.”

Darcy scoffed. “He has earned a great deal worse.”

She laughed again and said, “Then he shall have it at supper.”

She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, and he covered her hand with his own. They turned, slowly, and went back along the walk of limes toward the house, in the long light, two people no longer adversaries, and not yet, either of them, entirely free of the pride that had made them so. It would be a long business, and it would never, perhaps, be finished. But they had decided, at last, to face it together.

EPILOGUE

Elizabeth woke on the morning of her first wedding anniversary to find that her husband was not in the bed, which, in all honesty, was not an unusual discovery. She had made it a great many times in twelve months, and had long since learned to read the signs. The sheet thrown back on his side, the shape of his head still pressed into the pillow, the faint, warm, familiar smell of horse and soap that lingered in the linen like a signature.

Her husband often rose at five. In fact, he had risen at five, she gathered, since he was twelve years old, and marriage, it appeared, was not to be allowed to interfere with the habit. But the sheet was cold. And the grey light at the window had the green, watery look of the hour before dawn, and she lay for a moment in the vast soft bed with her eyes open, listening to the great house breathe.

As she examined the scene, she decided that he was gone a good deal longer than five o’clock that dreary Pemberly morning. She thought just then about the year; it was difficult not to for the past year had been the most extraordinary of her life, though almost nothing in it could have been said to be extraordinary. There had been a wedding in March, in the church at Longbourn, so quiet that her mother had wept for a week; and Jane, radiant and blushing, at Mr. Bingley’s arm in the same pew, for it had been Darcy’s one stipulation, made in a visit to his friend in a hard, plain, unflinching conversation, that two people who loved one another should not be kept apart by his cowardice any longer.

There had been a letter from Lady Catherine, three sheets long, which said a great many unpleasant things and ended, with a startling want of logic, by sending her love to Georgiana. There had been a note from the Horse Guards, in a large clear hand, to say that the Colonel had been appointed to a post in which his chief duty was to see that things were hurried; and a postscript, underlined, to say that he expected to be godfather to the first.

And there had been Pemberley. There had been three hundred and sixty-five mornings of Pemberley, with the light coming in at the east windows and a husband who was not there.

She got up and put on her wrapper and, after a moment’s hesitation, a greatcoat that hung by the door; it was black and worn and enormous, and smelled of tobacco and rain, and she turned the cuffs back four times and tied the belt in a knot. Then she went down through the sleeping house, past the gaping hall and the long gallery, and let herself out by the garden door into the cold and the dew.

The light in the stable-yard was the colour of a pearl. She heard him before she saw him. It came from the end of the long range, from the big loose-box by the harness-room, where a single lantern still burned in the dawn; a low, rough, hoarse murmur, going on and on, in the tone of a man who has been talking for a long time to something that does not answer. She went softly to the half-door and did not at first catch the words.

Then she did, and her hand went to her mouth. “...obstinate, stubborn, ill-conditioned, mule-headed, magnificent girl,” said her husband, in a voice cracked with exhaustion and unmistakable tenderness. “That’s it. That’s it, my beauty. Good. Good. Oh, look at that. Look at you!”

He was sitting in the straw, with his back against the planks and his knees drawn up. His shirt was soaked and streaked and rolled to the elbow; his hair stood in wet black spikes about his forehead; his chin was dark with a night’s growth, and there was blood to the wrists on his big scarred hands. Beside him, folded in the straw like a great glossy sack, lay the grey mare Juno, with her flanks heaving and her eyes half closed. And between them, in a small damp heap of legs, with ears too large for its head and a pelt like wet black velvet, lay a foal.

Darcy did not look up. He was looking at the foal with an expression she had never seen on his face, nor anywhere else on earth. It was a naked, helpless, enormous joy, the face of a man who has been working very hard in the dark for a very long time and has been given, quite unexpectedly, the whole of the sun.

She leaned on the door and did not say anything. After a while he drew a long, unsteady breath, and rubbed the back of one wrist across his face, leaving a smear; and then, as though he had known all along, he said, without turning his head, “You look rather cold, my love.”

She smiled. “I have your coat, husband”

“I know. I can smell it.” He shifted. “I did not mean to wake you. She started at midnight, and I thought it would be an hour. It was.” He stopped and then changed his course of speech. “I sorry, Elizabeth, I have been a fool, for I had planned something for this morning.”

“Did you?” She sounded surprised, but knew she ought not to be, for she had found, in the last year that her husband was the kindest, most thoughtful person she had come to know.

He nodded, and replied flatly, “I wrote you a speech.”

She let out a laugh before she could stop it; it was a crack of sound in the quiet, and the mare flicked an ear.

“In fact, I wrote four,” said Darcy, with great dignity. “They were all dreadful, and I burnt three of them. The fourth is in my other coat, and it is, I think, the worst piece of prose in the English language. I had meant to read it to you at breakfast, over the coffee-pot, with all the servants listening.”

She laughed louder at the last part. “Then I am heartily glad you were interrupted, sir!”

“So am I,” said Darcy smiling. “I could not have got through it.”

She came into the box in her borrowed coat, her booted feet in the straw, and sat down beside him with her shoulder against his arm, and for a long moment neither of them spoke at all.

The foal made a small, creaking, astonished sound. It tried to lift its head, and thought better of it. Darcy put out one filthy hand and laid it, with infinite gentleness, along the damp neck, and she felt the whole length of his arm shake very slightly with weariness.

“I am no good at speeches,” he said, quietly. “I know it,” he let out a small chuckle, “for you have told me.” He turned his head towards her and added, “So, madam, I will tell you instead what I know.”

She encouraged him and nodded once. “Do, sir.”