LXXI #2
When at last she released him for long enough to permit speech, he was laughing properly. She had not heard him laugh in four months. The sound of it undid her more than the kissing had.
“I am free, my Lizzy. It is over. I have been acquitted. The verdict came in at three. You are safe. I am safe. It is done.”
Free. Acquitted. Safe.
The last word landed last and shuddered through her whole body, and her forehead came down against his, and she stayed there a long moment with her hands still on his face and his breath unsteady against her mouth.
“Say it again.”
“It is done. I am here. You are safe. The child is safe. There is no further proceeding against you. The misprision was dismissed within the half hour. The earl is at the courthouse signing the papers. Richard is on the road behind me. I came ahead. I could not wait. I should have let you rest. I am sorry I woke you —”
“Do not apologise. Not for that! If you apologise to me at this hour for coming to me in this room, I shall never forgive you.”
He laughed again, low and tired, and kissed her forehead.
Her hand found his jaw, and she felt the rasp of two days without shaving, and the long hollow of his cheek that had not been there in December, and the small hot tear that had got past him at some point in the last quarter-hour and had not been wiped away.
She stroked his face, the angles of his jaw, the nose she knew so well, the brow she had kissed a hundred times in reality and a thousand in dreams.
“You are so thin. And you sound tired.”
“I am.”
“Lie down.”
“My love, I cannot. I have come straight from the cell. I have not bathed in longer than I care to admit. I have not shaved. The coat I am wearing is covered with stone dust, and the breeches have been in the dock since nine in the morning, and I am ashamed even to take your hand in this condition, let alone —”
“You need rest. Lie down, Fitzwilliam.”
“Elizabeth, I — ”
“I do not care what your coat has been in. I do not care for the linens. They can be washed. They have spent the night under me weeping into a pillow and I shall give Mrs Hatchett the wash of the bed in the morning without a second thought, and I shall do it tomorrow and the day after and every day for the rest of my life, because I shall never again, Fitzwilliam, never again as long as I draw breath, take for granted the opportunity to share a bed with my husband on the night I have been given him back. Lie down.”
He did not, in the dark, answer. She heard the soft thump of his coat coming off and then the heavier thumps of his boots, and the sounds of him undressing as far as he was prepared to undress.
There was the give of the mattress as he folded back the coverlet and got into the bed in his shirt and breeches and lay himself down on his back.
She was against his side before he had fully settled.
Her face went into the hollow of his throat where it belonged.
His arm came over her shoulders. His other hand came across his body and rested on the curve at the front of her night gown.
He breathed out.
She felt the breath go through him. She felt the long, slow release of four months of held breath leave him in one quiet exhalation against the top of her head, and her own eyes filled again without permission, and she pressed her hand over his hand on her belly and pressed her face against his throat and held to him.
They lay a long while without speaking.
“Your pillow is wet.”
She smiled into his collar. “It was that or the entire bed. I limited myself to the pillow as a courtesy to Mrs Hatchett.”
He laughed. The laugh shook her against his side, and she heard the small wet end of it that was not quite laughter. “I will buy you a new pillow.”
“You will not. I have grown attached to it.”
“A new pillow. As soon as I can arrange it. A new pillow, a new bed, and a new room. Tomorrow, you take up residence at Darcy House. Within a fortnight, I will have you in a house at the end of a long drive in Derbyshire, of which you have been mistress on paper since July. I shall not have you another night in any room of my uncle’s.
I shall not have you another night in any bed I am not in. I want you home.”
She lifted her face from his throat. The dark was beginning to lighten by the smallest degree at the window — not morning, not yet, only the first thinning of the absolute black — and she could see the shape of his jaw above her in the way one sees a shape one has known for a long time without requiring light to see it.
“I only want the bed and the pillow and the house if you are also in them. I have had four months of fine rooms in this house, and they have not signified to me without you. Pemberley shall not signify either, if you are not there.”
“I shall be there. I shall be wherever you are from this hour. I shall not be parted from you again by anything short of my own death, and the prospect of that has, for the present, been deferred.”
“Do not say it lightly.”
“I am not saying it lightly. I am a man who walked out of a courthouse half an hour ago and intends to be careful with the time he has been given. I am with you. I shall remain with you.”
She put her face back into his throat.
His hand moved on her belly. He stroked it once, very slowly, with the careful reverence of having been kept from it before, discovering in the dark that he had been thinking of doing it for some months.
His fingers spread flat over the curve. She felt the warmth of his palm through the thin chemise.
She felt the small kick from inside that came up to meet it, the way the child had been kicking all afternoon, which had eased the moment his hand had settled to something gentler.
“Did you feel that?”
“I felt it.”
“He knows you are here. He will know your voice soon, as well as I know it.”
Darcy made a sound that was not quite speech.
She felt his throat move under her cheek.
He did not try, at first, to answer. He stroked the curve again, slowly, and his hand stilled, and he drew breath against her hair as a man draws breath who is trying not to weep at the second attempt of the night and is not entirely succeeding.
“Lizzy… oh, my Elizabeth, I —”
He stopped.
She heard the slight change in his breathing and waited. He did not, at once, finish. She lifted her hand to his face in the dark and traced his cheek and the small wet at the corner of his eye that he had not been able to keep from her.
“What were you going to say?”
“That I cannot wait.”
“To?”
“To see —”
He broke off again.
She stroked his cheek. She was beginning to lose the war with her own body, and the warmth of him along her side and the weight of his hand on her belly and the long, slow rhythm of his breathing against her hair were making it impossible to remain entirely conscious for very much longer.
“To see him?”
“To see — yes. To see him. To see you. To see this. To see —” He drew breath. “I have been imagining you in the dark for four months. It is most of my memories of you. I had not allowed myself to imagine you in any light. I find I should like to.”
“There is a candle on that side of the bed. Light it. I would not refuse you anything at this hour.”
He did not move.
She slid her hand up his cheek, and into his hair, and brought his face down and kissed him once, slowly. “But Fitzwilliam, you do not need the candle.”
He drew breath. He held her closer against his side. “No. I do not need the candle. I do not need the light to see you. I have not needed it for a year.”
He kissed her once on the forehead.
The candle was not lit.