Chapter Text
1817 was a memorable year for the county of Derbyshire. January opened remarkably cold, with snow whipping east over Kinder Scout toward Stanage Edge, covering the villages from Edale to Hathersage in ice and sleet. Winter lingered on through March and into April, emptying the post roads and freezing the River Noe.
And even when spring did at last arrive, all it seemed to carry was unending rain.
“Do shut the curtains, Kitty—you know how quick a draft flies through this side of the house, and how easily Ned is like to catch cold,” Elizabeth said to her sister, who was gazing out at the wooded hills that curved beyond the fresh-cut lawns of Pemberley.
“But look how the clouds come on, Lizzy. Do you think we’re in for another storm? All it seems to do is storm, with but a moment of sunshine a week.”
“And that moment, like as not, while we are sitting in church. I daresay it will storm tonight, and tomorrow night, and the next. No need to stare at it as it comes.”
Kitty sighed, pulled the curtains closed, and turned towards Lizzy. Her elder sister sat in a chair pulled close to the nursery hearth, with a son on her lap and a daughter at her knees. Five years of marriage had brought two children to the Darcy household, as well as not one, but two aunts. The idea of perpetually shuttling back and forth between the Bingley estate in Staffordshire and the Darcys’ in Derbyshire was exhausting to Kitty, so she cautiously petitioned Lizzy for a longer term at Pemberley. Lizzy broached the subject with her husband, who, while not holding complete approval over Kitty’s more energetically-driven escapades, did see himself as a kind of guardian over his recently-acquired sister.
“Besides,” Lizzy told him one evening, “you cannot help but recognize how her good humor has affected Georgiana.”
And that, of course, settled the subject. Georgiana and Kitty were almost of an age—Lydia Wickham was, of course, closer in years, if not temperament, to Miss Darcy, but that sister only visited Pemberley but briefly, and even then never in any room long enough for any kind of sustained conversation—and Darcy did, indeed, see how strongly his sister and Lizzy's youngest-but-one had attached themselves. Even when Kitty was off to family in Staffordshire or Hertfordshire, not a day went by when a letter did not arrive for one addressed by the other.
“It will save the mail coach, at least,” said Darcy.
And so it was settled: Kitty was to stay at Pemberley for as long as she so desired, and the bitter cold of her first full winter in Derbyshire gave way to the misty mornings of spring.