Thank you all for taking the time to read my story - this is the final chapter and I hope that you enjoy it :) There is a small epilogue to follow which I will post in the next few days. I have appreciated and loved all of the comments and feedback that you have left and I hope the frustration from the last few chapters will be cleared up in this one!
The young boy looked up at her with eyes as wide as saucers, he couldn't have been much more than seven, dressed in his smart shorts and a cream hand-knitted jumper with a red stripe at the bottom, he scratched the back of his leg with the sharp buckle of his shoe and instead of relieving his itch, it had just caused a scratch which hurt more that the itch had itched. He had his hands in his pockets, holding tightly to a small, polished pebble that his mother had given to him off the beach that morning as the sun was rising. She had smelled like toasted almonds and cigarettes, and the faint scent of perfume infused in the comforting blue jumper that she had been wearing as she hugged him tightly in their house on Fleetwood Road.
"Can you play cricket?" The lady in the black suit asked him sharply. "Your jumper looks like one my son used to wear when he was at school."
She spoke funny, he thought, like the woman off the wireless who introduced the songs his mother sang to when she thought nobody was about. The boy shook his head quickly, his hands nervous as he picked the skin around his fingers. He nervously looked around the room, hearing the ominous tick of the huge clock at the opposite end. The room was cold, even in September and he wished that the large fireplace was lit, although it was so big that he suspected the heat would be immense. His attention moved back to the lady in front of him, he had noticed her hair first; had never seen a lady with such yellow hair, curled on top of her head, her red lips pursed as she continued to question him.
"Would you like to learn how to play cricket, young man?"
He nodded quickly, as she wrote his answer down on the buff-coloured card.
"And what is your name" she smiled kindly. "I can't very well call you 27486 for the duration, can I?"
She said something under her breath to the sour-looking old lady sitting next to her, and he was fascinated by the scarf she was wearing, it was made from an animal he didn't know and the cold dead eyes of whatever it was looked at him glassily. He had never seen one of those in Southend, but then again, he had never seen a house this big back home in Essex either.
"I'm Thomas Bingley, Ma'am," he said in a small voice.
"Bingley, eh? Well, that's a name I think we will remember," she chuckled. He smiled wanly, not understanding the joke.
They had brought the evacuees up on the bus from Lambton, there were twelve of them in total adding to the five that had already been sent from Manchester, more than enough for a cricket team, she thought. Earlier that day forty-seven children had marched across St Pancras Station with a banner emblazoned with Earls Hall school, they had been handed two sticks of barley sugar for the adventure – it was always called an adventure – and it was only as the train was pulling away that they realised that their parents were crying as they waved goodbye.
The twelve children billeted to Pemberley were accompanied by their schoolmaster, a broad, handsome gentleman called Jonathan Sykes, he originally hailed from Preston, but had moved to Southend to be with a woman he didn't end up marrying. He had been seriously injured in the last war and was consequently excused from service the second time around, wearing a patch to cover the hole where his eye once was, the residual scars streaking across the right-hand side of his face like a roadmap. Millicent discovered that he was good at cricket and had studied at Brasenose College with her brother, George. They became firm friends, talking about anything and everything as they worked the grounds, digging up the 16th century flowerbeds to plant potatoes and carrots.
Hitler's bombs failed to materialise, and by the summer of 1940 most of the children had been summoned back home by their parents. Only two boisterous chattery girls, Laura and Charlotte Jones remained, along with Thomas Bingley. He was getting good at cricket now and could either be found in the grounds practising or in the library, absorbing as much information as he could, as he dusted the books as part of his daily chores. Mrs Reynolds, observing the Jones' girls making the fire, scolded them for constantly chattering and not concentrating on their work. 'If thou don't shut thee rattle. I'll belt thee tabs!' she bellowed in the strong Derbyshire accent that she only ever used in front of them and never in front of Lady Millicent.
The news of The Blitz reached Pemberley in dribs and drabs, for the most part they were sheltered away in the grounds and it was only occasionally that they heard the faint drone of bombers overhead making their way to Manchester or Liverpool. Then the casualties started, and the three Pemberley evacuees were moved to the Wyatt Tower, where Mrs Reynolds stood guard over their small rooms at the top of the house, the beds in the long gallery filled by the wounded young men who were shipped in from the battlefields of France to the makeshift military hospital at Pemberley with alarming regularity. Thomas often found Lady Darcy in her study, organising and planning, and he would sneak down to the kitchen to bring her tea and a biscuit, quietly knocking on the door before he entered. Sometimes she would ask him to join her and they would put a record on the gramophone, dancing around the small room as she lit a cigarette whilst pulling him into a twirl. Her hair wasn't as yellow now, he noticed, and small flecks of silver were pushed back behind her ears, but she still wore red lipstick and smelled like his mother.
The exhibition of Wartime at Pemberley was proving popular today and the Long Gallery was humming with people and noise and the soft click-clack of boots and shoes on the wooden floor. It was a warm day and visitors had flocked inside, escaping into the breezy coolness of the building; a woman was busy scolding her toddler, using a gentle but firm voice, as he threw himself on the floor, an older couple meandered up the stairs gently holding hands as they chatted softly, a couple of teenagers in walking boots and t-shirts looking serious and reading everything, a middle-aged woman and her daughter speaking in hushed tones. The collection of photos and artefacts had been found hidden in a cupboard down in the bowels of the house; all boxed up and categorised, detailed and documented in her great-grandmother's spindly, firm handwriting. Lizzy loved the picture of Millicent and Jonathan, standing in the Dutch Gardens, busy planting broadbeans and onions – him resting his boot on a spade, whilst she grinned up at him wearing dungarees with her hair tied up in a scarf. But it was the picture of the first wave of evacuees – Pemberley Easter Hunt 1940 – that she found the most poignant; wondering how many of those little faces, grinning at the camera holding Easter baskets with their knobbly knees visible, survived the bombardment that they returned to.
The clippings and cuttings in the paper always referred to Millicent as 'the mother of the Duke of Derbyshire', rather than as a person in her own right. Funny, Lizzy thought, how the ladies of Pemberley were only ever mentioned in relation to the men that they married or gave birth to. Millicent had never married, always danced to her own tune and had probably been the happiest of the most recent of her line – running her home, raising her children and doing it all wearing a string of pearls and a full-face of make-up. This unusual Lady Darcy had managed to keep the house in the family for so long, selling what she needed to, downsizing the estate and opening the house up for occasional paid visits; despite Pemberley being immortalised in English literature, the threat of abandonment and demolition in the post war years had always been a very real danger, and she knew that Millicent, with her clever mind and inherited business acumen, had been the reason for its survival.
Winston, injured and discharged, returned home in the summer of '43, he had been serving in the RAF – flying out over Dusseldorf on a targeted raid one September evening, trying not to think of the hundreds of innocent civilians below who were unlikely to survive the night; later limping home on a tank leaking fuel into the sea, they had crashed into a field on the south coast. Winston had felt the intense pain as his lower leg shattered, he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life because of it, but as their squadron sat silent and still, battered and bleeding, they called out with laughter and relief grateful to be alive under the starry skies of England.
Jonathan Sykes never went back to Essex, instead he proclaimed loudly one autumn afternoon in 1944 that he had found his soulmate and companion of his life in the Lady of the House. They would live at Pemberley together for the next twenty-two years, where he would always make her morning cup of coffee himself and insisted on calling her 'M'Lady' when she acted pompous in front of him, much to her great vexation. Sometimes the greatest love is found in the small, quiet moments of the night, the gentle cool hand on a burning fever.
He died the night before the World Cup Final, peacefully and without drama in his own bed, which cast a rather sombre shadow on the celebrations of the following day. Kenneth Wolstenholme blared out from the small television set in the corner of the Stag Parlour as England made a play for the goal, "They think it's all over!" "It is now," said Millicent, jutting out her chin and refusing to cry, despite the sad looks and pitying glances from her friends and family, as she sat silently writing at Fitzwilliam Darcy's desk making plans for the funeral.
Millicent didn't stay sad, she was a Darcy and it simply wasn't good form to grieve for too long. She had had three romantic loves in her life and she was grateful for all of them, but the greatest love affair she had embarked upon was that with herself – she had lived so many lives, all of them remarkable in their own way, each one defining who she was at that moment in time. As she climbed the stairs up to her small bedroom for what would be the last time, she hoped that she would be remembered by those whose lives she had touched, even if it was in the most unremarkable of ways.
The Jones' girls never stopped talking or cleaning fires badly and, after working with the Land Girls for the latter half of the war and providing Pemberley with much needed supplies and amusement, they returned to the remains of their homes in the suburbs of Manchester. When Winston opened the house up to the public in the early seventies, Laura Jones paid the entrance fee and caught the shuttle bus up the drive towards the house that she had lived in for most of her childhood. She found herself overcome with happy memories as she sat in the servants' hall with a cup of tea, remembering the moment that Lady Darcy had told her that she wasn't being separated from her sister as she had feared but that they would be living in this house from a storybook, the mornings when she cried for her mother and Mrs Reynolds would snuggle her close until the tears stopped, and the day they all found out, huddled around the wireless in the drawing room, that Hitler was dead and the War was over, all cheering with honest, thankful joy. Laura, now Mrs Palmer to the class of infants that she taught in Hyde, found herself quietly weeping as her husband averted his eyes and passed her a handkerchief.
Later, before they got back on the train to Manchester, Mrs Palmer took a small bunch of flowers to the small churchyard in Lambton where she knew Lady Darcy had been buried not eight months earlier. Laura looked down at the unassuming grave, so unlike the grand Darcy mausoleum inside the Church, and shed a small tear. She attached a small note:
You taught me that adventure can always be found in the pages of a book. Sleep well Lady M.
The room was much busier now and John had signalled over from the other end that someone was looking for her. Lizzy smiled at the elderly gentleman with the flash of white hair and the broad smile, he called her over and she embraced him warmly, he walked with a cane now, but was still as firm and broad as he had been in his youth.
"Hello, Miss Lizzy," he said in his warm, Derbyshire-tinted accent. "Well, I must say, this is all very grand isn't it? Who'd have thunk it of us."
Thomas Bingley, orphaned by the stray bomb that fell on the house in Fleetwood Road, never went back to Southend. Instead the Darcys took it upon themselves to pay for his education and he was admitted to Eton at the start of Michaelmas Half 1946. He eventually played cricket for Derbyshire and lived in a small house in Lambton with his wife. They had raised three daughters, one of whom they named Millie after her godmother. As he stood in the long gallery, almost in the same place where his bed once stood, he felt a sudden rush of emotion for the long-lost days of his childhood. If he concentrated hard enough, he was sure that his old body could still smell Arpege and cigarettes, could still hear Lady Darcy singing 'Wild Women Don't Have The Blues' as the gramophone crackled.
It was lunchtime when Lizzy, armed with a book, escaped through the throng of people in the bright gallery and trudged down the north staircase emerging out into the warmth of the May sunshine. The courtyard was alive with people; children running about, HHS members queuing to have their cards scanned for entry, volunteers and staff and everyone bumping together in this great crowded hum of noise. She politely excused herself past a very tall man with a large dog, who was arguing, albeit fairly graciously, with Kate from the ticket office, and then quickly skirted around a loud, American couple who were asking if Colin Firth was about to emerge from the Lake in his wet shirt, she heard one of the ticket girls say lightheartedly, 'only if he's escaped from my handcuffs', and it made her laugh, even if the Americans were unimpressed.
She was shooed past the queue for the garden by Don, whose smile on seeing her turned to a warning as she nearly knocked over a small child who appeared from underneath a bench. The lawn was packed with people – picnics, children running about with balls and frisbees, parents sunbathing on brightly patterned picnic blankets and drinking wine from plastic glasses, a couple of girls from the Austen group wearing Regency dress and taking selfies holding parasols, as their boyfriends stood awkwardly to the side wearing stiff cravats and top hats. All of this was Pemberley; taking everyone into its big old heart and captivating them with its magic and she loved the days like this when that magic, that love everyone felt, was so evidently on display and the visitors treated the house like their own.
The pergola was empty, and she plonked herself in the middle of it and opened her book, trying to concentrate on the words, even as the bubbles in her belly were popping with anticipation. She had already seen the production crew setting up in the Library, only a small team today, and an historian who had contacted Joyce about the Fitzwilliam connection. She had never dreamed that Benn Williams, jobbing actor as he called himself, would be somehow related to her through Mabel Fitzwilliam-Darcy. That the boy from Oldham who pushed himself hard through college and earned a place at Cambridge, who would lose his accent but would never forget where he came from, would be the owner of the gold watch that once graced the pocket of Fitzwilliam Darcy. His grandfather Thomas, a distant cousin of Rupert Fitzwilliam, had given him the small, smoothed pocket watch when he graduated, and he had held it in his hands, feeling the faint outline of the dedication that had once been engraved upon it. A family tree has roots that run deep and strong, but the branches of it spread out far and wide, the leaves falling through time and reappearing in the most unlikely of places.
Mabel Darcy never really recovered from the death of her husband, but she was determined to do something worthwhile with her life, something that would make a difference. It had been enough for her father that she had made a good match with a man who loved her and made her happy, but her mother had always wanted more for the girl who had lived. Mabel Darcy travelled far and wide; packing up her youngest children and leaving the house at Nostell that she felt was becoming a catacomb of grief, a shrine to a lost love. She visited Egypt, America, the Holy Lands, collecting artefacts and treasures, venturing further than most women in an age where a woman could be Queen in her own right, but where women were still the possessions of their husbands. She documented everything in the detailed and extensive travel journals that she would eventually become famous for, blazing a trail across the globe in a manner befitting the only daughter of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. It had been the wax cylinder recording of Mabel's voice recorded when she was an old woman, now digitised and replayed for visitors in the exhibit about her life, that fascinated and haunted Lizzy – almost as if Mabel was grasping at her through history.
She closed her eyes for moment, wanting some clarity in her head, feeling unsure, convinced, certain, doubtful. But she would know, she would know when she saw him again. The sun was hot, even under the shade of the wooden shelter, and she could hear the murmur of people, laughing in the distance, birdsong, the happy shouts of a youngster playing croquet on the lawn.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
Stop. Breathe. Deep breath. Her heart beat faster in her chest and she didn't want to move. She took another breath, and she heard the soft shuffle of shoes on the gravel, the gentle creak of the wood as it yielded to the weight of another. Slowly, blinkingly she opened her eyes, trying to focus on the fountain straight ahead.
"Or are your thoughts worth more than that nowadays," he said gently, "because I only have a fiver, do you have change?"
Lizzy turned to look at him, he had a beard again, but he looked softer with it; his sideburns were trimmed to a suitable length and there were a few extra crinkles around those blue eyes of his. He looked nervous, unsure. The hint of a hesitant smile crossed his lips as he tried to gauge her reaction. She looked back at him and even though she tried to stop them, she could feel the emotions of the last few months burning up within her; how her sadness of waking up the night after the premiere to find the bed empty had turned into anger, how she had spent evenings drinking wine and calling him all of the names under the sun as Deb refilled her glass and demanded that they eschew all men, and then the nights as the tears ran down her face as she cried herself to sleep, locked up and hidden in the privacy of her room, trying to remember the touch of him on her body, the scent of him on her skin. It was these nights that she thought about now.
"Where the fuck have you been?" she said, tearfully, angrily, her voice filled with a rage as he reached out for her and pulled her into the familiar broadness of his chest. "No, you don't get to hug me – you don't get to pretend that it's all okay." She pushed herself away from him and moved over to the other side of the bench, putting a distance between them that all at once felt too close and too far.
"Lizzy," he said, "I did it for you."
She harrumphed loudly, "no, you didn't. You don't.." quieter now, smaller, "…you don't be with someone like that… and then leave!" She roughly shoved her book into her bag and rose to her feet, as he looked down, unsure what to say, and then the words came to him, falling out of him furiously.
"Where?" He yelled after her as she stomped up the steps. "Honestly? Stuck in my own personal hell and miserable, sad and lonely without you!"
She stopped stomping and she turned slowly to see him standing there, looking up at her pleadingly, breathless, hopeless. He wanted her to realise that the last few months of his self-imposed exile had been necessary, that every day he had longed to call her, hear her voice on those days when he needed the sparkle of her to pull him out of the dark. He noticed that a few visitors had started to wander over towards them, intrigued by the shouting and drama in the corner of the Rose Garden.
"You don't get it though," she said through her teeth, "you…you didn't need to be without me." She softened now, taking a tentative step back down towards him. "You didn't need to be all of those things when I could have been there for you."
"No," he stated firmly. "No, you couldn't have been, and I didn't want you to. You needed to be without me. I was the problem."
She looked at him questioningly and he saw the familiar tenderness in those grey eyes of hers that he had thought about so much over the last few months. He reached to take her hand in his own, surprised when she offered it willingly. It was good to feel the delicate grasp of her fingers around his, and he intertwined them into his own. She wondered why he looked so sad and then she felt those familiar prickles again, couldn't quite tell if they were good or bad, was he trying to tell her that this wasn't a good idea, that this was another false start, that this was all they would ever amount to.
"After the airport I started having the occasional drink, convinced myself that it was just one, and I was fine with just one, it was okay to have just one. Then why not two? Then three? Before I even realised that I was doing it I was drinking a bottle of whisky, and it didn't even occur to me. It was the worst of times, but I hid it very well. The premiere was a bad day, it became a bad month. The only thing good to come out of it was you, because you were the reason that I knew I had to get better. I had to conquer it."
Lizzy felt immediate remorse, "have you been to rehab?" she asked delicately, holding onto his hand tightly. "You should have told me…"
He shook his head, "Lizzy, I didn't tell anyone." He paused for moment, stroking the back of her hand with his thumb, "I needed to disappear for a while, so that when I came back you would know."
She looked at his face again, searching for answers, "I would know what?" Her voice was small, unsure.
"It was all for you, Lizzy. I needed to be the man worthy of you," it was barely a whisper, he looked up at her, he was so earnest, looked so young and scared. Her heart was filled with love for him, she was sure that if you looked closely enough you could see it rushing out of her in frantic bursts of gold and silver.
"I was so sure that that you were going to tell me to get lost, what I did was so shitty and every day I hated myself for it, regretted not telling you where I was, why I left like I did," he explained, "but then… this morning I looked through your pictures…"
"You looked at my pictures?"
"I looked at your pictures every chance I could, wanted to see how you were, what you were doing, wanting to imagine being there with you, eating Eggs Benedict or helping you fasten that pink polka dot dress," he looked sheepish. "Sometimes I just wanted to see your face" There was a moment and Lizzy had to refrain from holding him tight and never letting go. "It made me think that there was still a chance…"
The Rose Garden was getting busy now and it was when they heard the small squeal of recognition from the girls in the Regency costumes, who came bounding over asking for autographs and selfies from Mr Darcy himself, that they decided to move, walking over to the quieter end of the garden, they crunched on the gravel path over to the top lawn, where they could look down past the quarter-cut yew tree towards the house, the vastness of Lantern Wood behind them in the distance.
"I made a promise to myself that if I was lucky enough to see you again today that I would tell you how I felt, regardless of whether you felt the same way or not," he said, tentatively reaching for her hand.
"I said something similar to myself last night," she admitted, with more than a shade of embarrassment.
He smiled at her, "you see, Lizzy, I'm not the way you found me. I'll never be the same."
She scrutinised his face and then said flatly, "because you make my dreams come true?"
He looked confused, "what?"
"What I want, you've got and it might be hard to handle..."
"Are you delirious?"
"It's Hall & Oates," she laughed. "You were literally just quoting it, you absolute arsehole!"
He put his arm around her, "I told you I was bad at this," he grinned.
"You are terrible at this!"
They stopped in front of the bench where he remembered her wiggling past him nearly two years earlier. He thought of all the lost time, the missed opportunities, the times he had let her slip through his fingers, and he knew that he couldn't – that he wouldn't - let anything come between them again.
"I am," he took her hand and kissed it softly, "but so are you. Let's hope that us being together will cancel the terrible out."
"Being with you would never be terrible," she beamed up at him, her grey eyes gleaming, "being with you would be the most wonderful thing I could possibly imagine." She knew that she wanted to be with him, to see where this adventure they had embarked upon would lead. He made her feel so many different things, but the main thing he made her felt was loved and she wanted to spend every day loving him back. She was so close to him now, only a whisker apart, she could feel the heat of his breath on her cheek, could smell that close, familiar smell, felt the graze of his beard on her chin and she hesitated, her hands shaking with anticipation.
"Interesting you should say that," he murmured, "because I am planning on being terrible and wonderful with you for the rest of my life."
There was a look, an understanding, a promise. Her laughter fell like sunshine into soul and he kissed her there on the grass under the shadow of the famous Pemberley portico, his heart full of love and hope, and his arms wrapped tightly around his dearest, loveliest Lizzy.