Chapter Seventeen #2
Of course, his name was on the deed. He had inherited it.
Was it her house in the same way it was his?
Lydia arrived in mid August and stayed into September. At first, Georgiana seemed to find her startling and Lydia seemed to find Georgiana entirely too quiet, but as the weeks went on, they spent more and more time together.
Elizabeth tried to speak to Lydia about the attempted elopement, about Wickham’s beating the man who had tried it, but Lydia would say very little.
“He isn’t the Wickham we used to know,” she said. “He has become quite grim and serious and he does not seem to have any fun anymore.”
When Lydia left in September and went back to Hertfordshire, Elizabeth thought there was a collective sigh of relief at the peace and quiet. It had been good to host her, but it was good for things to return to normal.
That month, her bleeding was late.
It was late for days, and then the days became a week, and then a week and a half.
DARCY HELD HIS wife in the circle of his arms and drifted towards sleep.
He thought she might stay with him tonight.
Sometimes, he sensed something in her, and he wasn’t always sure what it was that he sensed, but he could tell that she was not entirely pleased, and he would send her off to her own bed, thinking perhaps it was he who displeased her.
She would not tell him if he did.
There was no point in something like that for her, after all. She had been miserable after Wickham left them, and he’d known that, but she had quickly made the best of it, putting a bright face on everything, and she never spoke of Wickham anymore.
Darcy thought of him too often.
He wondered at that business with Lydia. It was entirely unlike Wickham to defend someone’s honor or to worry about the safety of young women, but then it was Elizabeth’s sister.
It was also unlike him to leave in the way he’d left.
He had not asked for money.
And there had been no requests since.
After being discharged from the regiment for whatever he’d done to that other officer—Darcy had made inquiries and apparently the other man had cracked ribs and a broken nose—there had been neither a request for money nor any indication where he’d gone.
Darcy had resources to keep an eye on the other man, but these resources had failed him.
He had no idea where Wickham was anymore.
“Fitz,” said his wife, his Elizabeth, now. “I think I must tell you something.”
Tenderly, he brushed her hair away from her face. He loved her. She loved him, too, and he had no complaints about their activities in the bedchamber. How could he? She was perfect and beautiful and sometimes, shyly, she would ask if she could have him in her mouth, and what man got that?
He had thought that they were working towards something, the three of them, and that they were going to keep exploring the depths of pleasure and depravity, but…
well, he didn’t know, because it wasn’t as if he didn’t have an appetite for such things.
He had thought about asking her to allow him to breach her arse, because she had indicated that she would allow it to happen.
He thought she’d likely let him, even.
He simply didn’t.
It all seemed sort of foolish, that kind of behavior, he supposed. He remembered the fire of it. He even would like the fire of it to come back. But he had no notion how to get it.
“What do you wish to tell me?” he murmured, gazing into her eyes.
“My bleeding is late,” she said. “I cannot say if I am definitely with child, for there are no other signs, but my bleeding is a week and a half late.”
He was stunned. “Oh, that is wonderful news.”
She burrowed into him.
“You’ll stay tonight then?” he breathed into her ear. “Sleep here in my arms, both of you?”
She squirmed into him, and he could tell she had liked that. “Let us not get ahead of ourselves, Fitz. I am yet one person.”
He was happy.
Two days later, however, she bled.
She fretted over it, apologizing to him, telling him that she thought it was likely just her bleeding being erratic, that she did not think she had lost a babe, or that even if so, a loss this early was nothing to worry over, and she should not have told him, not until she was certain.
But he was a bit relieved, sad to say.
Certainly, when Wickham had been around, there had been a mad rush to get her with child, he thought, but that hadn’t even been necessary in the end, because they could have managed it easily with Wickham having her during the weeks of her bleeding.
He wanted a child.
Sort of.
In a distant and vague way.
He assured her they had plenty of time, that there was no need to worry over it.
And then he stopped summoning her to his bed.
IT WAS NOT as if he decided to do it, and then carried out the behavior thereafter. It was not exactly intentional.
While she was bleeding, if she had truly lost a babe, it seemed that he should leave her be, and then afterward, another week stretched on, and he grew accustomed to not doing it.
And then it had been two weeks and she cornered him in the hallway to ask about it, and he said it was nothing.
She was a bit agitated. She asked him pointedly if he had some country house he planned to put her in, if he was done with her.
He said that she was his wife and this was her country house and he was decidedly not done with her. “It is normal for the frequency to fade is all, I think.”
He was not entirely conscious of why he was doing it, anyway. He was not through with her, not at all, and it was not even that his interest had waned.
Deep down, he knew it had something to do with her being with child. Some part of his mind had already settled it. He simply could not face what he had settled, not with any conscious part of himself.
“He said it,” she said. “He said that you would tire of me, that you would be done with me within six months, that I should always be some youthful mistake of yours, when you went out of your head and married some girl far beneath you with a pretty face and lovely tits.”
He had to smile at that. “Sounds like George.”
She folded her arms over her chest.
He resisted pointing out that it only made her breasts more prominent.
He resisted ogling them. “He does not know me the way he thinks he does, Lizzy. He has never understood me. He put this to me, too, you know, that I would abandon the girls we had, erm…” He made a face at her. “Perhaps we oughtn’t talk of this.”
“Did you abandon them?” she said.
“I most certainly did not. I did everything that I promised them. There were not many women like that. The first girl, when we were very young, that was a bit prolonged, and she was quite…” He considered.
“Is ambitious the word? Shrewd? A bit of a businesswoman, trading her, er, favors for things from me. I housed her not far from here until she made a match, and she is married now, to an apothecary, and she’s come rather up in the world.
She got what she wanted from me, you may be assured of that.
And Mrs. Younge, who sold out poor Georgiana, she owns a boarding house, now.
So, there has been no abandoning, not on my part.
I take my responsibilities seriously, whereas he has never had an actual responsibility in his life. ”
“Yes, all right,” said Elizabeth. “But you are not taking them into your bed anymore either.”
“I don’t think you’d like it if I was.”
“Well, it has been weeks, Fitz! Is it because of the babe? Because I don’t think it even was a babe.”
“No, it’s not that,” he said, and even to his own ears, it wasn’t convincing.
“Is it because I have not conceived?”
“No,” he said, and this, at least, sounded believable.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with me. It seems to be taking quite some time.”
“We were married in April and it is but October,” he said. “It does not seem out of the ordinary to me.”
“Yes, but we were so frenzied,” she said.
In truth, whatever it had been with Wickham, with the three of them, it had been but a very brief time. Since then, they had been anything but frenzied.
“Let it be, Lizzy,” he said, quite firm. He did not want it poked at.
He was not ready to face it.