1

The house is situated in a valley of rolling foothills, in an attitude that it has been a part of Mother Nature for all these years instead of ostentatiously built …

Elizabeth Bennet repeated in her mind the oft-spoken refrain from Mr. Darcy’s stories of Pemberley in her head. Once plagued by nightmares of the terrible night her cousin, Mr. Collins, beat her in Kent, Fitzwilliam’s stories of Pemberley had soothed her during the weeks she recuperated at his London townhome.

She shook herself of the negative thoughts brought by remembering his descriptions as the Darcy carriage rolled past a graveyard without stopping to pay any respects. Elizabeth looked to her left at her intended calmly reading a book in his hands. He appeared unaware of how far the carriage had progressed from their last stop in Darley.

“Fitzwilliam? Fitzwilliam?” Elizabeth moved her head up and down at various angles to get his attention. The man answered once he finished the page.

“Yes, what is your concern?”

“I think we might be almost there.”

Darcy looked out the window to see that his future wife’s keen observation was, in fact, correct.

They had traveled a greater distance than he realized, due to his preoccupation with Radcliffe’s novel. He had not believed Elizabeth when she warned the story would be hard to put down. And now he could not stop reading, and found himself captivated by the drama.

“That is the village of Kympton’s cemetery. Not Pemberley’s. However, we are but a few miles from my home.”

Darcy leaned over Elizabeth to get a better view and inhaled the scent of lavender still captured in the locks of her curls pinned when they were still wet. His heart ached to take her into his arms and find solace for both of them in physical touch. His hand delicately brushed against hers, ungloved since they entered the carriage.

Elizabeth blushed. She took a deep breath and brushed his hand right back with her own. He finally clasped Elizabeth’s hand and drew it up for a kiss, refusing to relinquish it after. They both sighed as they were the only two in the carriage forcing their proper behavior, but the shades were up and they traveled a public road. Enough scandal had nipped at their relationship since the day they met.

Darcy inwardly chastised himself for so foolishly setting such a high expectation when they were to travel, unchaperoned, for nearly a week to Gretna Green. And their journey was to pause again for at least a day, perhaps two or three, before they continued. There was no choice but to see to Pemberley’s business that had been so woefully neglected since his sister Georgiana’s disappearance nearly a year ago.

Since leaving Netherfield Park, keeping his self-control despite Elizabeth willing to anticipate their vows, had become a Herculean struggle. Darcy’s hand burned with heat that rose through his body from their connected hands, making him wish to look anywhere but Elizabeth’s delicate clavicle as her breathing increased.

It was Elizabeth who squeezed her intended’s hand and then released, with a giggle and squirm in her seat to lean closer to the window. She pointed at the distinct flora and fauna outside that differed from her rambles on her father’s property. The small hairs on the back of her neck prickled when Mr. Darcy leaned over her and spoke the names of the plants.

“Those grasses with the prickly white flowers? I confess I wish to run through them just to feel the stalks bend at my skirts and the white flowers tickle my palms.” Elizabeth closed her eyes to imagine being able to walk freely once more in the county, a love of hers curtailed too often in the last year due to injury.

“Carex echinata. Star sedge, you see the flowers look sharp on the edges, but the petals are soft,” he whispered over her shoulder. “And do I get to join you in frollicking in the fields, madam?”

Elizabeth turned her head so they were very near now. “I would hate to enjoy such an afternoon alone. Will you be able to excuse yourself from your duties?”

Darcy gave her a polite smile as a large rock in the road jostled the carriage and Elizabeth pushed against him to steady herself. A break in the romantic tension between them, she willed herself to focus on their goal: Pemberley.

For the past two months, the house of Pemberley had built up in her mind as the ultimate haven, a fairy-tale castle in a land where none of her troubles could reach her. And there had been troubles. From the moment she dove out of the way of Mr. Darcy’s racing horse the day after the Meryton Assembly, Elizabeth Bennet had been shunned by her family for refusing her cousin’s suit; beaten by that same cousin when she visited his wife and her best friend, Charlotte; and she had played a large part in helping Fitzwilliam avoid the machinations of his family.

Fitzwilliam Darcy had recklessly sped to Meryton to accept his friend Bingley’s invitation to Netherfield Park. Distressed to be sent away from London to hide the most urgent search for his sister who had run off with Mr. George Wickham, Darcy had not minded his surroundings or speed.

Eventually he was summoned back to London as the two were found and made married, but then his family wished him to marry his sickly cousin, Anne de Bourgh. If Anne did not marry and produce a child, the Rosings estate would pass, from the trust where it now resided, into Wickham’s hands according to Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s last will. Darcy’s aunt and uncle shared the dark family secret of George Wickham’s origins. Raised by the steward and his wife at Pemberley, yet favored by Darcy’s father with a gentleman’s education, Wickham was the natural child of Sir Lewis de Bourgh from an affair with Elizabeth Burrell, a sister by marriage to His Grace, the Duke of Northumberland.

Through subterfuge, Darcy and Elizabeth enabled Anne and his cousin, Richard Fitzwilliam, to marry instead, thwarting the designs of the elder generation in the Fitzwilliam family to meddle in the affairs of the younger. The sins of the past would not haunt their futures.

And yet, one last visit to Hertfordshire to secure Mr. Bennet’s blessing for their marriage set them on the path they now traveled. Denied the privilege of marrying in her home county, Elizabeth Bennet held no choice but to elope with Fitzwilliam to Gretna Green.

As the carriage continued to roll by more interesting wildflowers, Elizabeth found her mind altered in resolve. She felt a thrill at the idea of Mr. Darcy taking a stroll with her in his home county that almost like a child, she suddenly felt as though it was the thing she needed most in the world at that moment.

“Shall we have time for a walk? I am so dreadfully tired of carriages.” Elizabeth grasped Fitzwilliam’s arm to again remove his attention from his book. As she had stared out the window, he had returned to his form of distraction and had read just enough to be enthralled once more. She laughed softly as the poor man sighed in exasperation.

“Are you up for a walk? Your ankle has not bothered you?” Tucking his book aside, Fitzwilliam moved closer to Elizabeth’s person again and stared out the window.

Elizabeth held her breath briefly as he neared before leaning back and nodding. Before more could be said about the walk and lack of pain in her healed ankle, Mr. Darcy spoke again.

“And… .” He started to say but waited, Elizabeth looking back and forth between him and the window. The carriage rolled past the gate house, and Darcy chuckled. “Now we are on our lands.”

“But we’ve only traveled a little more than a mile since the cemetery?”

Darcy nodded. Clasping Elizabeth’s hand, he felt a surge of joy pulse through his veins. The rightful mistress of his household had crossed the threshold onto his lands; a dream Darcy began having while she recovered at Netherfield Park from their ill-fated collision. “The house and main park rest on twelve thousand acres.”

Hearing Elizabeth suck in her breath, he squeezed her hand in his.

“Fitzwilliam, this is too much! And to think I am to be mistress of all this?” Elizabeth again inspected the landscape outside, appreciating the rambling hills of farmland and verdant fields left fallow. Her daily walks would never want for a new view and path, as she often wished for when she had lived at her father’s house!

He nodded and helped Elizabeth cross the middle of the coach so they might sit on the other side to face in the direction the carriage moved.

“See that hill?” He pointed, and Elizabeth crooked her neck, squinting her eyes to make out where he gestured.

“Yes.”

“When we crest the top of that hill, we shall stop the carriage and you shall be able to spy the house.”

True to his word, Elizabeth battled her nerves for only a half hour more as the carriage reached the hill and the brakes were applied. Fitzwilliam stepped out of the carriage and offered his hand to his Elizabeth. Poking her head out of the carriage door as she accepted his assistance, her eyes could not leave the startling vista below them in the valley.

The afternoon sun positioned low in the sky cast an enchanting gleam across the white marble and stone walls, capped with golden flashing on each windowsill. Elizabeth counted quickly nine columns of windows with multiple rows to convey the house stood at least three stories tall. Pemberley exceeded her wildest dreams from the stories she heard from Fitzwilliam. Suddenly, she felt overcome with emotion and needed a chance to comprehend her new life displayed before her. She asked the man by her side a simple question.

“May we walk the rest of the way?” Elizabeth reminded him her legs felt cramped from the two days of riding in the carriage from Netherfield Park to reach Derbyshire. And soon, they had another three days of travel ahead of them to reach the Scottish border so they could marry, as she would not turn one and twenty until late in the summer. With no dutiful fathers or crazed aunts chasing them down, Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam were free to elope at the most leisurely pace imaginable.

Mr. Darcy spoke with his driver. The carriage, properly hitched for the hill, began its descent as Fitzwilliam offered his arm to his lady.

“Thank you, Fitzwilliam. I desperately needed this.”

He nodded and concurred that his legs, too, needed a stretch.

“The housekeeper is Mrs. Reynolds?” Elizabeth tried to remember the many details Fitzwilliam gave to her in their talks about the house. He nodded, and she continued listing various staff names he had shared.

Another half hour later, they neared the beginning of the drive proper, and Elizabeth watched as an army of staff spilled out of the double doors to take their places along the steps to welcome the master and his soon-to-be wife. Her feet faltered at the hearty display of loyalty, and Fitzwilliam paused their progress to kiss Elizabeth’s hand in the full view of those assembled to signal his unwavering approval of the new mistress.

“Welcome, Elizabeth, to Pemberley.”