EPILOGUE
George Bennet Carlisle Darcy was nine weeks old when the first hard rains of November came.
Elizabeth had been at the window of the small parlour above the south lawn since the rain had started — not in the chair Mrs Reynolds had pressed her to take, but standing with her son in the curve of her arm and her hand on the small warm weight of the back of his head, which had become her preferred posture for considering weather.
The fire had been built up. The rain was steady.
The light at three in the afternoon had begun to go the colour of pewter.
The door opened behind her. She did not need to turn. She knew his step. She only touched her fingers to her lips. “He is asleep, Fitzwilliam.”
His steps softened as he approached. “I only came to look at him. To look at both of you, here in the light of the window. The most beautiful sight in the house.”
She turned then, slowly, because George was warm against her and she did not wish to disturb the warmth.
Darcy came across the parlour and stood beside her at the window, and he rested his hand against the back of the child’s head, his fingers spread over her own where they lay against the small downy curve of the skull.
“How is he?”
“He has slept the entire afternoon and shall be awake the entire night, I am sure. I am, in consequence, considering being awake the entire afternoon and asleep the entire night, in defiance of him.”
“That has not, in my observation, proved a strategy of any reliability.”
“No. I have a son who has made plans for me.”
Darcy bent and put his face briefly against the crown of the child’s head. He drew breath there and held it for a moment. He had been doing this since the morning the child had been born, with the wonder of having spent too many months half-believing he would never be permitted to do it.
He straightened. His hand stayed on the back of the child’s head.
“The post has come.”
“Anything of interest?”
“Several things. Pemberton writes that the final disposition of Sterling’s estate will be settled before Christmas.
The Crown has determined that what was not seizable will be distributed among the parties on whose evidence the conviction was secured.
Foss shall at last be pleased. Webb shall now be a comfortably retired man of means, which is a fine thing because I ruined him for any other business.
Marsh also wrote. His wife and the children are well. ”
She lifted her face. “Have they settled into their new home in East Riding?”
“Yes, in a cottage on the property where he is employed, and the children at the village school. The steward is the brother of an old friend of my father’s, and was glad of a clerk with Marsh’s experience.
The youngest has acquired a kitten of indeterminate breed.
The daughter — Anne, you will recall — has been given charge of the kitten on the condition that she also read aloud to her brother every evening, and is, by all reports, taking the office with considerable gravity. ”
“Tell them — tell Mrs Marsh — when you next write — tell her I think often of them.”
He kissed the crown of her head. “She knows. Marsh wrote his wife’s greeting for you explicitly.”
Elizabeth bent her face into the soft, pale hair of her own son and did not, for a moment, answer.
The evening came on with the rain. They had supper in the small dining-room, because the great one was, by general agreement of the household, not to be opened until they had guests enough to fill it.
Georgiana was at Matlock for the month with the countess, who had decided in October that her niece’s musical education had been neglected during the troubles and required immediate attention; she would return at Christmas.
Jane was at Pemberley still, in the small set of rooms off the south corridor that Elizabeth had given her in September and that Jane had not yet, two months in, shown any inclination to vacate.
Richard was with his regiment and not coming home this winter for any consideration he had been offered.
He had written a letter to Jane the previous Tuesday, by Darcy’s observation — a third letter to her in a fortnight, by the same observation, which exceeded the number of letters Richard had written to Darcy himself in the same interval by a margin Darcy had not been able to make innocent in his own mind, however he tried.
He had not yet raised the matter with his wife. He suspected she had been aware of it for considerably longer than he had.
The child had woken at six. He had been fed. He was asleep again, in the nursery off Elizabeth’s dressing room, with the under-nurse listening at the door because Elizabeth had not yet, nine weeks in, been able to surrender the night entirely to any other woman.
Darcy had come up at nine.
He found her in her dressing room with her hair down and a shawl over her chemise, sitting in front of the fire with a piece of needlework in her lap that she had not added a stitch to in some considerable interval.
“My love.”
“I am awake. I have been pretending not to be.”
He took the needlework out of her hands and set it on the table beside her.
He bent and kissed her, properly, on the mouth — which he had not been permitted to do in any sustained way for the first several weeks of the boy’s life, on the orders of the physician her aunt had recommended, and which they had been permitting themselves again, by stages, in the past month.
“Mrs Pratt has gone to bed. The under-nurse is at the door of the nursery and is, by my information, fully equipped to manage the next four hours without consultation. I have spent the better part of the evening determining this in considerable detail, on the grounds that I had specific plans for the use of those hours and did not wish them interrupted.”
“And what manner of plans, Mr Darcy?”
He bent and kissed her again, more slowly. “This kind.”
He drew her to her feet — slowly, with the unhurried solicitude that had become his habit since the child had come — and unfastened her shawl and let it fall over the back of the chair.
He lifted her chin with his hand. He looked at her in the firelight as a man looks at something he has been keeping the rest of his life in the same place against the chance that the rest of his life would arrive.
She smiled against his lips. “Fitzwilliam, you are being so gentle, I cannot decide if your intent is to seduce me or lull me to sleep.”
“Then I shall ask the wife of my heart, who has not yet, in a year and a half of marriage, refused me anything I have asked her in the privacy of her own chamber, whether she would consent to come to bed. What we do there is entirely up to you, but I was hoping for something rather… more than sleep.”
She put her hands against his chest. She slid them up to the open collar of his shirt, and to the line of his throat above it, and into the soft hair behind his ear that she had once told him was fine.
“I should consent, Fitzwilliam, to a great deal more.”
He laughed.
He carried her, slowly, the short distance into the bedroom, and he laid her down in the great bed with the curtains already drawn back at one side and the candle already lit on the table, and he came down beside her with his hand at the side of her face and his mouth against her temple.
“Let me look at you.”
He looked.
He looked a long while, by the light of the one candle, and let himself want her slowly.
His eye went to the line of her shoulder where the chemise had slipped from it, warm in the candlelight; to the hollow at the base of her throat, where he had learned her pulse beat quickest when he put his mouth there; to the long heavy braid down her back, loose enough now to come apart in his hands, the slow undoing of which had become one of the chief pleasures of his nights.
And it went lower, to the changes their child had left in her — the new fullness of her breasts, the softer curve of her belly where their son had grown — every alteration he had watched come about across the long months, and that made her, if it were possible, more beautiful to him than she had been the first time he had looked upon her body in the light of day.
He wanted all of it, and he meant to take his time over every part of her, until she forgot there had ever been a morning she doubted he was looking at her properly.
He would follow the look with his hands, and then his mouth, in the same order his eye had taken her, and he would not be hurried out of one inch of her.
That she was his to want like this at all, warm and unafraid beside him with the door shut and nothing left in the world that had a claim on either of them, was a thing he had given up letting himself imagine somewhere on a cold ship a long time ago — and here it was, handed back to him entire.
Then he leaned across her and put the candle out.
She wriggled in some surprise against his shoulder. “Love? I hope I do not—”
He kissed her into silence. “Do not even think of saying it. I have never seen anything more glorious than you, now or ever, and I will ask to see you and see you again for as long as I live.”
She chuckled a little. “How do you mean to do that without the light?”
“I have had the light. The light has had its turn.”
“Then what —”
“Hush, my love. Let me find you in the dark.”
He did.
He found the line of her at her side by touch, the way he had been finding her at Auchengray, by feel and by warmth and by the small requests she made in the dark when she felt his hand begin to know where it was.
His mouth went to her shoulder, where the chemise had slipped, and from her shoulder along the collarbone to the soft hollow at its base.
He pushed the chemise out of the way and found her stomach — flat once more, by the strange ordinary magic of nine weeks, but softer than it had been a year ago, no longer the slighter version of herself he had first known.
He pressed his mouth there and felt her breath catch.
He found the curve of her hip, fuller than it had been at Auchengray, and the warm hollow at the inside of her thigh, and the small place at her centre where she had used to lose her composure under his hand when he had been patient enough to find it.
He was patient now. He had nowhere else to be for the rest of the night.
He came back up to her by stages. He found the underside of her breast, and the line of her ribs beneath it, and the soft place at the side of her waist where his hands liked to settle.
He found her mouth. He found, when he kissed her, that she had been waiting for him to come back up the length of her with little patience and growing desire.
She laughed against his mouth.
“You have been thorough.”
“I had a great deal to attend to.”
He had loved looking at her. He would love it tomorrow morning and every morning after.
But this — this was the thing he had not been able to give up, in five months at Auchengray, even after he had been given the right to know her in any light he chose.
This was the thing he had returned to in his cell at the Tower at every hour he had been alone with himself and had been permitted nothing else.
This was Elizabeth, against him in the dark, with no light in the room to come between his attention and her body.
He had never, in any room of any house in the world, been so close to her as he was in the dark.
He bent his face into the side of her hair and breathed in.
She was here. She had been here from the moment he had first known her. She was here now, and she would be here in the morning, and she would be here every morning after.
She drew him down to her in the dark. Her hands found his face, and her mouth found his, and she guided him into her with her usual impatience.
The held shape of her around him drew a sound out of him that he did not trouble to govern — low, broken, against the side of her hair.
He held still a moment, buried in her, while she shifted beneath him to take him deeper, and her breath went ragged against his jaw.
Only when the wanting had built nearly past bearing did he begin to move.
He moved slowly. There was nowhere in the world he had to be before morning, and he meant to spend the whole of the night here if she would let him.
She met him stroke for stroke, her hips rising to his, her hands travelling the length of his back, pressing him to her, asking him without a word for more than slow.
He denied her, on purpose, for the pleasure of the frustrated sound it drew out of her, and held the slow rhythm until the groan came low at the back of her throat and her nails bit into his shoulders.
Only then did he give her what she had been reaching for.
Her breath broke. She said his name once, low and ragged against his mouth, and could not say it again; he drank the sounds she made instead and gave her every stroke she reached for, faster now, and deeper, until she drew tight as a held breath beneath him and then came apart all at once, shuddering, around him, her cry breaking open against his throat.
He could no more have held back than stopped his own heart, and he went after her at once, driven past the last of his care.
The power of it came up in one long uneven breath against the side of her hair; his arms shook, and he did not, at first, know that they shook.
He spilled into her with her name broken in his open mouth.
Her hand rose to the back of his neck to hold him there, and it was her hand, sure and unshaking against him, that told him his own had stopped being sure some seconds before.
He bent his face into her hair and stayed there, still inside her, his breath ragged and the whole trusting weight of him gone down against her.
She held him. She put her mouth against his ear in the dark, and she whispered to him what he had whispered to her on a hundred nights when she had been the one shaking under his hands.
“I have you, my love. I have you.”