The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 41. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

Longbourn, the 26th of November

Darcy and I were married this morning, an hour apart, to two sisters, in the same small church, by the same overworked parson, and I do not think I have ever in my life been so thoroughly managed by other people while every one of them assured me I was doing exactly as I pleased.

We waited together in the cold vestry beforehand, the two of us, while the bells argued overhead and Mr. Bennet's man went at a spot of candle-grease on my sleeve with the flat of a heated knife.

"You are very white, Charles," said Darcy.

"I am very happy. It comes out the same colour on me." I got my collar to sit. "How is it you are not just as pale?"

"I used up my pallour in a lane in October," he said. "I have none left over for church."

The service I will not give an account of, having attended very little of it. I was occupied in looking at Jane, who was the handsomest thing that county has produced or is ever likely to, and in getting a ring past a knuckle, which no one warns a man is the whole of the difficulty in getting married. Then it was done, and she was Mrs. Bingley, and I turned about and Darcy was standing up in my place with Elizabeth, and did the whole thing over again with a steadiness I envied and a colour I did not.

The breakfast was at Longbourn, and my new mother-in-law was in such a state of triumph that I had fears for her heart. She had married off two daughters in a single morning, one of them to ten thousand a year, and she went along the tables telling everybody who could not get away from her that she had known from the first how it would fall out.

"I said to Mr. Bennet the very first evening," she told me, her hand on my sleeve and her eye on the plate, "I said, that young man will do for one of my girls, you mark me. And was I ever wrong? And now Lizzy and her Mr. Darcy besides, and Lydia with her Colonel — four daughters married and only Kitty of them left on my hands. Some people have all the luck in the world and never once know how it came to them; but I am sure I shall not grudge Lizzy hers, though she was always the difficult one."

She knows nothing. I set that down as the strangest fact in a year of them, and I am the one soul seated close to her who feels the whole weight of it. She sits at the head of her board with her girls safe and has no notion anything was ever wrong, nor from what, nor by whom, nor at what price, nor to whom the whole of it is owed. Long may she never find out.

I got my first proper look at Mr. and Mrs. Darcy together while the cake was being murdered by a great-aunt with a blunt knife. His wife said something to him from behind her glove that I was not meant to catch. He laughed aloud at whatever it was. I do not know what she said. I begin to think that is the point of the thing. I never know what she said. I only know it undid in one morning a reserve I have spent ten years failing to dent.

My mother-in-law has already done the sums on the next generation, aloud, at table, to the pardonable horror of both brides, and has settled on a great many grandchildren and begun upon their names. I let her run at it. Somebody in a family ought to be looking that far down the road, and it will not be Darcy and it certainly will not be me. I could not tell you the first thing about the children who will come after us. I hope only that they are happy, and take their mothers' looks over their fathers', and think kindly, when they are old, of the two foolish men who married the Miss Bennets.

Everybody knows Mr. and Mrs. Darcy settled matters between them on a walk to Oakham Mount. Nobody knows one word of what passed there, Elizabeth being as close as a locked desk on the subject and Jane too delicate to ask. I am neither. I asked Darcy what he said on the walk. He looked at me the way he looks at a man who has missed the point of a thing. I record for posterity that I generally have.

Late in the day, when the last carriage had gone off down the drive and the two brides were upstairs conspiring over something that needed both of them, Darcy and I were left a moment in the emptying room.

"You are happy," I said. I had not meant it for a discovery. It arrived as one. I had walked at this man's side through a murder and a scandal and a year of grey mornings and never once been able to say those words and mean them.

He looked at me with a faint smile and a gleam in those keen eyes, and he said, "You have observed something at last, Bingley."