Page 87 of Till Death Us Do Part: Book 2
Everyone laughed a hearty sound, clinked glasses together, toasted their success, cleared the table, got out the ledgers, and went to work.
Many hours later, Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy sat alone at last, in her sitting room, curled up on a sofa (with the door locked this time), speaking of what had come before and what would come after.
Elizabeth said, “Do you know, Fitzwilliam, that today is six years to the day from the first time I saw you.”
He had been slightly dozing, so he perked up curiously. “Where was that?”
“You and Mr Bingley were touring Netherfield. You raced across a field. You may have been on Omega—I cannot remember. I think he beat you.”
Darcy laughed. “You have just proven your memory loss theory. There was never a day, nor will there ever be one, when Bingley bestsme!”
She chuckled. “Who would have guessed back then that we might have a six-week courtship, a three-week engagement, and a five-year wedding afternoon.”
“Who indeed?”
She sighed. “When you left me in Hatfield, I called out to you, but you did not hear me. I yelled, “Fair warning!” at the top of my lungs. I was going to threaten you with what I ultimately did. I always wondered if you would have listened.”
Darcy looked thoughtful. “As pathetic as it sounds, I doubt I would have,” he said with a frown.
She reached over, took firm hold of his hand. “I disagree. I was frightfully angry at the time. I know what is in your heart and your character, Fitzwilliam Darcy. I believe you would have mended your ways forthwith. We would not have been happy in a day or a month, or even a year; but I do believe our falling in love was inevitable.”
He took advantage of his wife’s nearness to reach over and kiss her. “You offer more credit than I am due, but I will take it. No man can imagine not falling in love with you, given half a chance.”
She laughed, returned his kisses, and they fell asleep in each other’s arms, content in their mutual love and the felicity for the future.
Naturally, they woke up several hours later barely able to move, but they retired to bed for a good night’s sleep, accompanied by the most beautiful (but dog-free) dreams.
For the rest of their lives, through children and grandchildren; family and friends; land and industry; trials and triumphs; good times and bad; sickness and health (hopefully sans memory loss); obedience and obstinacy; youth and old age;they would remember that day in Edinburgh when the most blatantly incorrect scientist for a dozen generations at least had brought them together at long last, in love and happiness,till death us do part.
30.Epilogue—Both Paths
“Mama, you will not believe what that horrid man said about me!”
“What did he say, my darling?” Elizabeth Darcy asked her eldest daughter, Caroline, while her husband looked on in amusement, assuming it could not be too terrible, since the boy was still standing, her fists were unbruised, and her gown lacked any blood.
Caroline complained. “He said I cannot tempt him to dance!”
It was less than ideal when that tidbit came right while Mr and Mrs Darcy were sipping punch. It produced the unfortunate effect of both members of the happy couple spitting punch all over the other, while breaking into raucous laughter. It would have been terribly embarrassing if it were the first time, but the Darcys were widely considered slightly eccentric by the members of theton. Even after five and twenty years of marriage, they were generally judged as entirely too affectionate, and too willing to show their affection. They were also well known to enjoy a good joke from time to time, so nobody would have thought anything of it.
Mrs Darcy had taken thetonby storm when she entered the first circles, and they had never really looked back. The Darcys had, quite early on, abandoned the gentry’s traditional disdains of both trade and intelligent wives. They were currently part of a large business empire that encompassed Pemberley, Rosings, Matlock, railroads, canals, shipping, banking, stores, and another dozen or so businesses in England, Scotland, the Continent, and the Americas. Everybody of any significance comprehended that if you wanted to know how to operate a business, and you were talking to a Darcy, a Gardiner, a Baker, or a Fitzwilliam (if desperate), then you were probably on the right track.
Unfortunately, even though, as the eldest, Miss Caroline Darcy, had been subjected to entirely too much of her parents’ sense of humour, this particular explosion was just too much. She stomped her foot, in a way that Mrs Darcy always asserted was just like her Aunt Lydia when she was young.
Caroline had a difficult time believing the Countess of Woodbury had ever been anything other than entirely proper. Aunt Lydia was well known as a rigid taskmaster and stickler for decorum. She never let any of her four children out of line, even for a minute—or at least, that was what they always told Caroline when they occasionally got together every year or so.
Mrs Darcy had four sisters, and the Darcys had apparently found husbands for all of them, but they were not particularly close. Elizabeth told her daughter they had been like peas in a pod as children, but such bonds do not often survive to adulthood. The Darcy children never questioned it, and the Darcy parents never explained.
Between the six children of her namesake, Caroline Baker, who lived less than fifteen miles away in Derbyshire; and the three children of her Uncle Richard, the Earl of Matlock, who were only twenty five miles; her best friend Miriam Hervey and her three sisters; and the half-dozen Bingleys they visited at Rosings a few times a year—Caroline had never felt a great need to expand into the rest of the formerly Bennet sisters families. She would have been overwhelmed with friends and family even if she never left Pemberley.
Aunt Lydia and Aunt Mary had remained close, with Mary wed to the rector that held a living in Lydia’s home village. On their rare visits, Caroline noticed that Aunt Mary’s three children generally mixed and matched with Aunt Lydia’s children randomly to the point where she could never actually identify which cousin belonged with which aunt without a seating chart. Miss Darcy had visited both aunts several times,but the two sisters were far closer to each other than any of the others.
Her Aunts Katherine and Jane had also formed a rather tight bond. The seven children between them swapped back and forth at will since they only lived a few miles apart, all the way down in Cornwall. Jane Poldark’s husband owned a prosperous mine that supplied quite a bit of raw material to Darcy industries, and Aunt Katherine’s husband ran a prosperous trading company. Mrs Mason and Mrs Poldark were closer than the other sisters, but nothing like Mrs Elizabeth Darcy was with her closest confidant, Mrs Caroline Baker.
Of course, those thoughts did not help the young lady’s current situation.
Caroline, quite put out, stomped her foot again, and whined. “I am serious! This is not funny.”
Darcy and Elizabeth managed to quit laughing eventually and took to the entirely serious business of calming their somewhat excitable eldest daughter down. Such excitability was generally frowned on by her governesses, all of whom considered her father to be a bad influence, since he found it hilarious, and her mother, even worse.
