Page 45 of Mr. Darcy's Christmas Letters
Mr. Darcy rubbed the back of his neck. “I would not see my aunt when she came to London. Perhaps if I had, I might have spared us a few miserable months.”
“It does not matter now,” she assured him. “For despite everything, we shall soon be wed.”
He pressed her hand in his.
On the second day, Mr. Darcy explained that he had requested the marriage license before he brought Bingley back to Hertfordshire. When she saw the brief flash of melancholy cross his face, she regaled him with stories of her youth at Longbourn. Her escapades while visiting with the Gardiners in London, her taste in books—biographies over histories, comedies over tragedies—and how she had always wanted to learn to play the harp, but the instrument was too expensive to purchase when they already had a pianoforte—anything to make him smile. Mr. Darcy asked her a hundred questions and listened carefully to every answer.
Over the remaining days, while she continued to amuse him with tales of her irreverent ways, Mr. Darcy told her stories about his own childhood, how he and Colonel Fitzwilliam had spent much of their summers together at Pemberley, how he had run from his home to Lambton and ridden to the far edges of his father’s property, what he recalled from the time when both his parents lived, how his father had changed and become a much more solemn man after his wife died. How the weight of his responsibilities had almost crushed him when, at twenty-two, he had found himself helping to bear his father’s casket to the church yard.
“It was too soon,” he said softly. “I was not ready.”
“I cannot imagine you ever would be, but you were so young.”
“My father never allowed either Georgiana or me to doubt that he loved us,” Mr. Darcy told her quietly, “but he treated Wickham in the same way, and knowing that Wickham in no way deserved it, but feeling unable to disappoint my father by revealing that man’s transgressions . . . that was difficult.”
Elizabeth squeezed his hand. “I cannot tell you how I regret what I said to you in regard to him.”
“It is no matter, Elizabeth,” he told her. “I am not that man any longer. Your reproofs soon taught me that I wanted to be a better one, and I hope that I have succeeded in that.” He stroked her cheek with the back of one hand. “Not that my work there is done.”
“You are not the only one who felt the need to change,” Elizabeth replied, leaning into his touch. “I am a different woman than the one who rejected you out of hand. Wiser, I hope. Less gullible, certainly, and I hope also less prejudiced.”
“Elizabeth,” he asked haltingly, “why did you keep the letter I gave you in Kent? It was certainly not kind.”
“I did not want to believe it, at first,” she admitted. “It was so dismissive of Jane and hinted that I held some sort of infatuation for Mr. Wickham.”
He shut his eyes and shook his head.
“Please look at me,” Elizabeth said.
Mr. Darcy did as she asked.
“It was not very long, though, before I saw how foolish I had been. I needed to keep that letter to remind myself how easily I had been led and how I had allowed my prejudice against you to blind me to certain truths. It was a lesson I sorely needed. And your adieu was kindness itself.”
“Will you burn it now?”
“Must I?”
“Those words haunt me nearly as much as the proposal in Kent. Knowing that they still exist is painful to me.”
“I suppose I do not need it anymore, for I have a more recent one. One I like a great deal better.”
Darcy brushed her forehead with his lips. It was not the first time he had done so, and the intimacy of it no longer surprised her but made her happy.
His voice was low and impossibly tender. “I promise I shall write you many more like the second if only you will burn the first.”
Elizabeth leaned her head on his shoulder. “Very well. If it bothers you that much, I shall burn the first letter.”
He released a deep, bone-rattling sigh, and Elizabeth’s heart ached for him. “I shall fetch it now, and we will burn it together.”
“Thank you, love” was all he said.
Elizabeth examined herself in the glass. The blue silk dress she had meant to wear to dinner at Pemberley suited her very well indeed as a wedding gown. All it had required was a bit of the silk Mr. Darcy had gifted Jane on the occasion of her marriage so that Kerr could add long sleeves. Kerr had come to Longbourn last night in order to prepare Elizabeth for the wedding, and the young woman bobbed up and down on her toes, she was so pleased with her work.
“Oh, Miss Bennet,” Kerr said with a pleased sigh. “You do look a picture.”
“It is the dress,” Elizabeth said modestly, admiring it. “I am so happy to finally have an occasion grand enough to wear it.”
“Elizabeth?” Kitty’s voice floated through the door. “May we come in?”
