LXXII
First Light
Darcy woke in the grey first light to the warmth of his wife against his side and his hand still spread over the curve of her belly.
He did not move at once. He had not slept more than four consecutive hours since the cutter had put him ashore at Tower wharf back in January, and the body that had been holding itself in suspension for four months was, this morning, slow to acknowledge that the suspension had ended.
She was awake.
“Fitzwilliam?”
He drew breath. He had been about to remember where he was when she said his name, and she spared him the work of remembering.
He was at Matlock House. The verdict had come in at three.
He had come up to her in the dark. He was here.
She was here. The hand under his was hers, and the curve beneath his palm was his child, and the morning was the first morning of the rest of his life.
He turned his face into her hair. “Elizabeth,” he whispered and pressed a kiss into her tangled curls.
She laughed, very quietly. He had not heard her laugh in his presence since that last day they had together at Auchengray.
The sound of it sank into his bones as the news of the verdict had not yet had time to do, and he held her against his side a moment longer before he was prepared to permit the morning to begin.
He was, he discovered with no small embarrassment, awake in other respects.
He had not, in the small hours when he had got into the bed in his shirt and breeches, given much thought to the question of what his body would do upon finding itself, after four months apart, against the entire length of hers.
He had been too tired, and she had been too tired, and the warmth had been the only thing he had wanted of her, and he had fallen asleep almost instantly.
He had not, then, anticipated the morning.
He shifted his hips by a fraction of an inch, away from her, and prayed she had not yet had occasion to notice.
She noticed.
He felt the small alteration of her breath against his throat. She did not move. She did not, as he had been bracing himself to suffer, draw away. She merely breathed against him for a long moment.
Then she rolled over.
It was not a quick movement. She had grown considerably since he last held her, and she did not, at this date, do anything quickly.
She turned by stages until she was facing him on her side.
She put her hand against his chest under the open collar of his shirt, where the shirt had ridden loose in the night, and she laid her face into the side of his throat and kissed it.
He stopped breathing. “Elizabeth —”
“I do love hearing you say my name in your full voice. Say something else.”
“My love —”
“That is a fine alternative. Yes?”
She kissed his throat again, sleepier this time, and her hand moved from his chest up to the side of his neck, and from his neck up into his hair, and she drew his face down so that his mouth was against hers and she kissed him slowly, with unhurried patience, not yet entirely awake and not intending to let waking interfere with the pleasures in front of her.
His hand on her belly had not moved. He was holding very still, in the hope that she might consider this a chaste good morning between husband and wife and not press the matter further.
She was not so generous.
Her hand left his hair and travelled down the length of his side, and rested at last on his hip in a position from which she could feel exactly what he had been hoping she would not feel.
She made a small, considering sound against his mouth that suggested she had now confirmed what she had already strongly suspected and was satisfied with the confirmation.
“Lizzy. My love. Please —”
“Please what?”
“I cannot — I have not — I came straight from the cell last night. I have not bathed properly. I have shaved, but I have not — and you are — Good Lord, Elizabeth, you are five months gone. You cannot want —”
“I want.”
“My love —”
“Hush.”
She kissed him again, more deeply than the first time, and her hand moved on his hip with the unmistakable suggestion that she intended to be done with the question of his propriety within the next minute and a half.
He took her wrist. Gently. He held it against his hip with his own hand, neither pushing her away nor permitting her to continue, and he drew breath against her mouth.
“Elizabeth. Listen to me. I have wanted nothing in four months at the Tower more than I have wanted you. I have woken from dreams of you that I have not been able to put out of my mind for a day together. I have spent the better part of a hundred mornings imagining this exact circumstance. I am not refusing you. I am only — I am afraid. I do not know whether — at this stage — whether it would be safe. Whether it would hurt you. Whether it would hurt the child. I have not had access to any person of whom I could ask. I would not, my love, for the world, do anything that would —”
“Fitzwilliam, the only way you could hurt me at this hour is to leave the bed.”
He did not, for a second, answer.
She lifted her face to look at him. The grey light at the window was enough, now, that he could see her properly for the first time since he had come in.
Her hair was pulling loose from its braid and twisting down her back.
The fine hollow at the base of her throat was the same one he had spent months at Auchengray learning by the touch of his lips.
She was looking at him as if she had decided some hours ago what she intended for the morning and was waiting only for him to consent to it.
“My aunt assured me, when I had occasion to ask her, that whatever pleases me remains perfectly safe at this stage and shall remain so for some considerable time yet. The child is, by every measure I can take of him, in vigorous health. He kicks me at all hours. I require no further evidence of his survival. What I require, Fitzwilliam, is my husband, who has been kept from me for one hundred and twelve nights. I will not be put off until you have bathed, because if you propose to put me off, I will follow you to whatever room you propose to flee to and lock Hodges out, and I shall tell him precisely why.”
He laughed. It came up out of him before he had thought to suppress it, and he caught her face in his hands and kissed her hard. She kissed him back, and the question of whether he was prepared to consent to the morning was answered without his having had to do any further work towards it.
It was like the dark months and nothing like them. The same nearness. The same speech lowered for no one but each other. The same enclosed world. But there was no concealment now. He could see her face. She could see the cost prison had exacted from his.
He kissed her again, not hungrily now but repeatedly, as if the body were making up an account of losses and refusing to leave any of it unpaid.
Her brow. Her temple. The corner of her mouth.
The hollow below her ear. Each touch drew her more quietly into him, but she lacked some of the vigour of five months ago.
“You are tired,” he said at last against her hair.
“A little.”
“More than a little.”
“You have come back from prison only to discover that your wife objects to accurate observation in all forms.”
“I knew that already.” His hand shifted, barely, over the child. “Does it pain you?”
“Not now. My back at times. My feet when I have been too long up. A general conviction from everyone around me that I ought to be preserved in cotton and broth.”
“A sensible conviction.”
“Traitor.”
He kissed her smiling mouth and then grew serious again so swiftly she felt the change before she saw it.
“I thought of you at night,” he said. “Not always nobly. But often like this. Tired. Alone. Ill, perhaps, and trying not to trouble anyone. I thought of every moment I had missed with you and came near madness over it more than once.”
She turned towards him within the circle of his arm.
“I hated it too,” she said. “Not only the fear. The missing. The thought that this was happening to us and you were not there to put your hand on it and look grave and think yourself entirely responsible.”
His eyes closed once.
“I am entirely responsible.”
“For the child? Certainly. For the whole world? Not even you are equal to that conceit.”
He chuckled. “I am relieved to hear my arrogance has survived these trials in your estimation.”
“It has done more than survive. It flourishes.” She slipped her hand into his hair and drew his mouth to hers.
It was not, in the event, what he had been imagining for one hundred and twelve nights.
The Elizabeth he had in his arms in the bed at Matlock House was a different woman.
She was heavier in his hands than she had been.
She moved more carefully. She required small, deliberate accommodations, and he discovered, as he made each adjustment, that he had not been imagining anything sufficient to the reality.
He had not been with her since she had been carrying the child. He had not put his hands on her body in this state.
He had not felt the new fullness of her breasts under his palm.
He had not felt the warmth of the curve between them, or the sharp movement under his hand that was the child shifting against him as he moved.
He learned, by degrees and in the half-light, the shape of the woman he could have only partially imagined.
The line of her where her waist had once been, gone now to the soft and unmistakable rise of her belly.
The dark hollow under her jaw he had used to find in the dark at Auchengray, and which still tasted of her in the same way and made her arch against him as it had then.
The slow, generous warmth of her, opening to him with a sigh he had heard a hundred times by candlelight and had thought, on the bench in the cell beneath the court the previous evening, that he might never hear again.
He kissed her at the temple, and at the full lower lip, and at the place under her ear that had always been his, and along the line of her throat down to the hollow where his face had used to rest in November, and he found, as he went, that he was attending to her with a slow care he had not had in him on any previous occasion.
He had once thought himself an attentive husband.
He had not, in any previous experience, known what it was to have been kept from her for so long, and to be returned to her, and to feel the glory of her body quaking under his hands as it received him.
He had her. He had her, and he had the morning, and he had every morning that would follow this one.
He went carefully. He went slowly. He tried to make her comfortable, and he listened to the small sighs he had spent five months at Auchengray learning to read by in the dark, and waited for her to make the little groan at the back of her throat that had used to mean she was growing impatient with his patience.
He brought her to the place she had been working towards with a gentleness he had not known he possessed, and he held her as she came apart against him with a deeper, more powerful sort of violence than her body had ever offered in that moment.
And he discovered, in the moment that her gasps filled his ears, that he was weeping again, quietly, into the side of her hair where she could not see it.
She knew anyway. She knew his body too well not to. She did not say so. She only put her hand against the side of his face afterward and held it there, and he turned his face into her palm and kissed it, and he did not, just then, have any words for what he was feeling.
After a long while — when the morning had moved a little further along at the window, and the carriages outside were no longer occasional but steady — she lay against his side with her face in the hollow of his throat and his hand on the small curve she had let him keep his hand on through the whole of it.
She said, into his chest, “I had been afraid I should never hold you like that again.”
He stroked her hair. “Did you? I am glad I could offer you something that you would miss.”
“Do not tease me. I had been afraid for so long that I had stopped permitting myself to know I was afraid. The only time I felt safe was when I remembered how it felt when you held me.”
“You shall have it — have me — as long as you wish to. Tonight and tomorrow, and on the morning and evening after this one. You shall have me on every occasion thereafter that you choose, for the rest of my life. I promise you. I make a poor husband to be promising it in this condition without having bathed, but I promise it, nonetheless.”
She smiled and kissed the tip of his nose. “You are a perfectly adequate husband.”
“I am a filthy one.”
“You are mine.”
She kissed his throat. Her hand had come back to the curve at the front of her where his hand was, and she pressed his hand under hers, and the child moved once, small and definite, against his palm.
He held her a long while.
Outside, the carriages had begun to move more steadily in the street.
The household below was up. There would be coffee in the breakfast-room within the hour, and his sister waiting at the foot of the stair, and his uncle in his temper of the morning, and a great many things to be said and done in the course of the day that would constitute the first proper day of the rest of his life.