Chapter Thirteen
SOMETIME IN THE night, she awoke to cramps and she was horrified to realize she had started her monthly bleeding in her husband’s bed, wrapped up between the both of them.
She was embarrassed, and she didn’t know what to do, but they woke and obviously saw the stain.
Wickham took immediate charge. “It’s nothing, and it’s normal. You’re her husband, and this will happen. I should not be here, however, so you will wait until I am away to ring for her maid—”
“In the midst of the night?” said Darcy. “Let us just go to her chamber to sleep and have someone deal with the sheets in the morning. It’s barely any blood.” He yawned, scratching his bare belly.
“Not all of us,” said Wickham. “I should go to my room.”
“Yes, fine,” said Darcy. “But you and me, Lizzy, let us go.”
She couldn’t allow him to sleep in that bed, so she acquiesced, but she was embarrassed to have him there as she tucked rags into a pair of drawers—which she wore during this time instead of tying a belt round her waist or pinning the rags to her dress. The drawers were easier.
He was yawning in her bed, only wearing small clothes, half asleep when she crawled in next to him. Then he folded himself around her. “What’s wrong?” he murmured.
She buried her face against his chest. “Oh, I am mortified, obviously.”
“About that?” he breathed.
“It is disgusting,” she said.
“It’s just blood,” he said. “I’m not bothered. I like that part of your body, even if it’s bleeding.”
She sagged into him.
“What if I tell you something mortifying in return?” he said. “Would that make you feel better?”
“You do not have to do that,” she said.
“I know nothing about how to please women,” he said softly, into her ear. “I have never brought a woman to her climax with my own hand. I’ve certainly never done it with my mouth. You are lucky to have George, but without him, you should be quite disappointed in me.”
Oh, so that was why, wasn’t it? She lifted her face and scooted up so that they were eye to eye. “Is this why you didn’t wish to be with me alone the night of the opera?”
“You see straight through me.”
Oh, she had misunderstood everything, and if she hadn’t thought he was rejecting her, maybe she wouldn’t have lay with Wickham without him. But thank heaven, she was not with child, not with Wickham’s child from it. Thank heaven.
She touched his face, smiling at him. “I shall teach you just how to touch me, then, Fitz, hmm?”
He smiled. “All right.” He kissed her. “Now?”
“Now? I am bleeding.”
“Oh, does it hurt, then? Is it—”
“No… well, there are some cramps, but honestly, the touching would probably help, but—you don’t wish to touch that.”
“It’s only blood, Lizzy,” he said, fingers going under her drawers. “I told you, I like that part of you.”
She giggled, feeling helpless, feeling happy, feeling like maybe everything she had been worrying about might be foolish, in the end, that these two men were in fact both in love with her, and not only in love with each other, and that…
She kissed him, guiding his hand. “Here,” she said.
“It is not difficult, truly. It is just about finding the right spot and making the same movement again and again, much like with your body, in fact.”
“Show me where, then,” he breathed. “God, Lizzy, since I have seen you come with him, I have wanted to do it to you.”
“Here,” she said, moving him.
His fingers moved over her, and she moaned. “There?” he said, his voice going loose and pleased.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Oh, yes, Fitz.”
THAT NIGHT WAS the dinner with the Matlocks.
Colonel Fitzwilliam was there, as was his brother, the heir to the earldom, and his wife.
Elizabeth had not seen the colonel since the dinner at Gracechurch Street, and she had not spoken to him alone since the conversation before Mr. Darcy’s first proposal, and she still remembered that moment between them.
Second sons cannot marry where they choose.
She had wondered if he had been trying to tell her something, that he would have been interested in her if he could have been, but that he could not. Regardless, in the wake of his cousin’s announcement of their engagement, the colonel had not looked at her.
True, in the carriage ride from Kent, he had been his cheerful and jocular self, as if that hadn’t happened, and she had been so out of sorts then that she had hardly given much thought to the colonel’s reaction.
She wondered at herself now. Perhaps, having been lavished with the attention of two men now, she thought herself some sort of siren, that all the men she encountered wished to be with her. Perhaps she thought herself woman enough to command the affections of all of them.
I have no time to think anything of Colonel Fitzwilliam, she chided herself.
The dinner was a bit awkward, she thought.
There was a strained nature to the way that the countess, the earl, and the viscount (for the eldest Fitzwilliam had a courtesy title) spoke to her, the sorts of delicate questions she was asked, the way they reacted to being told that she had relatives on Gracechurch Street, that the colonel had dined with them.
But as they were leaving, the countess said to Mr. Darcy, “She is charming. I can see why you are smitten with her.”
“She is the most perfect a wife I could ask for,” said Mr. Darcy, and took her hand in his and kissed her knuckles.
She felt the kiss all the way through her, and he looked at her with the look of a man who had held her pleasure in his hand that morning, who had gloried in the knowledge of how to bring her to her peak, who was changed by it.
In the carriage, he asked more questions about her bleeding and the cramps.
“We can, of course, go to bed when we get home,” she giggled at him. “It may be a bit messy, but if you don’t mind—”
“I was thinking of George,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. You cannot be gotten with child during your bleeding, and this means he could have you, which he has not yet done and must be quite eager for.”
“Oh,” she said, likely too brightly. “Oh, yes, of course, he must be.”
He caught something in her tone. “You don’t wish it?”
“I do,” she said, reassuring him. “I quite do. I very much want George in that way, and I am sure he will be pleased.”
When they got back to the house, Mr. Darcy deposited her in his bedchamber and went to seek Wickham.
When he came back, with Wickham in tow, the other man was obviously drunk. He smelled of liquor and he was not steady on his feet.
Elizabeth went to him straightaway, understanding it all too quickly. She put a hand to his cheek. “You were hurt to be excluded.”
Wickham focused on her. “Lizzy,” he said, his voice a bit garbled. “I wasn’t hurt. I’m not hurt. I can quite handle both of you going to dinner.”
“No, you clearly cannot,” she said. “I well understand, though.” She turned to Mr. Darcy. “Fitz, you must see—”
“I’m here to tup you, Lizzy,” interrupted Wickham. “That’s what all of this is about, anyway. It’s about this, here, now, all of us without our clothes. Shall we undress you?”
She caught Mr. Darcy’s eye.
He shrugged at her. “We cannot ever take him to dinner with my aunt and uncle. If he is hurt, he must get past that. It is impossible.”
Wickham flinched.
Oh, just like Mr. Darcy to say entirely the wrong thing. She pressed against Wickham. “All right, then,” she breathed up at him. “For tonight, I am yours, hmm?”
Wickham kissed her, and he tasted of strong drink. When he pulled away, he tugged on her, tugging her towards the bed.
Elizabeth felt that a number of things had not been seen to that needed to be seen to, chief amongst them that there should be something laid down on the bed, something absorbent, to catch the bleeding, and she tried to convey this to Mr. Darcy who was busying himself with pulling a chair over to the bed. Because, of course, he wanted to watch.
She should likely put a stop to all of this.
She would be bleeding tomorrow, and there would still be time for Wickham to do this, but he would not be drunk, and the evening would not be fresh on everyone’s mind in the way that it was. She should stop them.
But she had not stopped them once, during all of this madness. She had agreed, and usually eagerly, to everything they had asked her to do.
She found she was not entirely sure how, now, to deny them.
Darcy got a blanket out of a trunk. It was ragged and old, and he spread that out and told her she should not worry about anything getting on that. He said to Wickham, “She’s a bit embarrassed about staining things, so let’s not make it into anything, shall we?”
But this only made Elizabeth feel worse.
She sat on the bed, fully clothed, while Wickham stripped off everything.
Eventually, he came in close and breathed in her ear, “We cannot let on that I have done this already.”
What did he think she was going to do, announce it to him?
She glared at him.
He looked away, chagrined. He turned over his shoulder to Mr. Darcy, who was settling into his chair with a view of the bed. “You want a show, do you, Fitz?”
“No,” said Darcy, shaking his head. “No, you can pretend I’m not here, truly. I want you to feel close to her. I want you to feel as if she as is much yours as she is mine. I want… I do care about you, George.”
Wickham turned back to her, and she could see the guilt all over him, guilt that he’d taken her without Darcy’s permission, that they’d done this without his knowing, and this angered Elizabeth, because though she was quite aroused by the idea of being someone else’s possession to be given here or there, she wanted, in truth, to be in charge of her own body.
When she had taken Wickham into her bed, it had been her own choice, not Darcy’s. Just because he was her husband didn’t mean—
Oh, but what was she thinking?
Of course it meant that. He did, in fact, have full say over what happened to her body, as her husband. She really did belong to him.
Wickham knew it, and she knew it, too.