Chapter Twenty-two #2
And Darcy would put his palm over her belly and tell her that he was ever so affected by the idea of her bred by Wickham. “I should be quite gratified if we find it’s his.”
But when little Jacob Darcy was born, he was an image of his mother.
Everyone said that babes favor their fathers. Everyone held him and searched his features and proclaimed him a perfect copy of Elizabeth. “He looks exactly like his mother, no hint of anyone else in his face.”
And they never did know.
There were two more babes after that, two little girls named Laura and Miranda, and these girls clearly favored their fathers. Laura was obviously Darcy’s and Miranda quite clearly Wickham’s, but if anyone noticed this beyond their parents, they did not comment upon it.
But because of Jacob, it likely didn’t matter.
Both of the men felt as if the boy were theirs and the other man’s, and that communal sense of fatherhood filtered down into the way they dealt with the other children.
It was not perfect, of course. The children did not know the extent of Wickham’s involvement with Elizabeth and Darcy.
They could not think of him as a second father or anything like that.
He was termed Geegee, for Jacob had been unable to say George, and he was constantly present, however.
The children were used to the family lawyer being around them all the time, and they never questioned it.
Sometimes people commented on how it was that Wickham never married.
If Georgiana were present, with her baronet husband, she would laugh and say it was because she had broken his heart all those years ago, and he was still pining over her. And Wickham would laugh and say that no one compared to Georgiana, and her baronet husband never liked that.
There was no ill will between Wickham and Georgiana now.
There had been apologies, awkward conversations, awkward run-ins, all manner of interactions, and now it all seemed like a distant memory, like some youthful indiscretion that everyone found funny now, even if it had once been painful and awful.
If Georgiana was not there, Wickham would usually smile and say that if he got married, he should have to grow up and find his own place to live, and that he would much rather just stay at Pemberley, and everyone would laugh, for Wickham did have his own house in town and was considered by all to be a respectable and independent lawyer.
He typically did not work when they were in the country, but when they were in the city, he would be busy all the time.
Elizabeth herself did not know when it was she stopped feeling jealous of her husbands’ past together or when she stopped worrying that they did not care about her, that she was only a passing fancy in their on-going love affair.
Shamefully, she could not say it was gone when she was carrying Jacob in her. She still sometimes thought it then, and after.
It had mostly faded by then, and she thought of it rarely, but it would come back to torment her here and there, and as the years wore on, it came back less and less, and then one day it never did come back.
She was happy.
There was something about being adored by two men, being worshiped by one while the other sank his prick into her somewhere, being kissed and suckled at the same time, having two voices telling her that she was a very, very good wife and they were so very pleased with her.
There was something, too, about watching her husbands together, seeing the way they loved and pleasured each other, something intoxicatingly good.
She was a lucky woman, in the end, that was the way of it.
Perhaps their path to happiness had not been like others’ paths, perhaps it had been fraught and full of pain and difficulties, but they had made it here eventually.
As the children grew, she often had moments where she stopped, looked about, and felt as if her breath was stolen by the sheer sweetness of her reality.
Sometimes, she would stand in the shade of a tree on the outskirts of Pemberley, watching Jacob sit and try to read whilst his sisters giggled and put dandelion crowns on his head—something he endured wordlessly, only huffing as they decorated him with flowers.
Sometimes, she would come into Mr. Darcy’s study as he bent over the ledgers in the room and think that she could hardly believe that this handsome man was hers, forever.
Sometimes, she and her husbands would steal away in the heat of the summer and swim naked in a little clear pool in the wood. She would float on her back and look at the sky, right herself and see her husbands kissing, their fingers linked.
Sometimes Wickham would whisper positively filthy things in her ear and she would gasp as his hands moved over her clothes and she would remember the way this started, how he had assured her she was not ruined.
He had been right, she thought, had he not?
No, not ruined, not at all, not even a little bit.
Sometimes, the night air was sweet overhead and the branches of trees encased the country home as the stars shone down on Derbyshire, encasing her little family here together.
Sometimes, she felt too lucky, too blessed.
And sometimes, with a certainty she did not dare question, she knew it was all exactly as it should be.