Winter returned to Pemberley, but it was a different winter from the last. The house, which had once echoed with a stately, almost lonely grandeur, now hummed with a warm, domestic vitality. The sounds were smaller, more intimate: the patter of Alexander’s quick, unsteady footsteps on the polished floors, his delighted shrieks as he played hide-and-seek behind the long drapes, the low, steady murmur of Darcy’s voice reading aloud from a book of nursery rhymes in the firelight.
Elizabeth watched this transformation with a deep, settled joy. The melancholy that had occasionally touched her in the early months of motherhood had been banished by the sheer, exhausting, and exhilarating reality of her son’s growing personality. Alexander was a sunbeam given human form—curious, determined, and p
