One #2
What remained was duty. And Darcy understood duty the way a carthorse understood the harness: intimately, instinctively, and without any expectation of reward.
He looked at Anne. She was watching him now, her fingers frozen mid-shred. There was no hope in her expression, no plea. Just flat, quiet waiting. She had placed her life on a table and was waiting to see who would pick it up.
“Very well, Aunt,” he said, his voice steady. The rest of him was not, but his voice could be relied upon to perform its duties even when its owner had been gutted twice before noon. “We need to make it quick.”
Lady Catherine exhaled, then nodded.
Anne closed her eyes. When she opened them, her face had rearranged itself into the same pale, pleasant blankness she wore to every dinner, every tea, every Sunday service.
The mask was back. Whatever had been underneath it—fear, relief, grief for a man she would not name—was packed away and no one could reach it.
Darcy rose from the chair, his legs functioning as they were supposed to. Small mercies, he thought.
“I will need a moment, Aunt,” he said from the door. “It has been a rather full morning.”
Lady Catherine narrowed her eyes, uncertain whether he was being flippant.
He was. He had earned that much.
Collins arrived the following morning happy as a puppy summoned to its master’s table, which was his natural state in the presence of Lady Catherine.
“Mr Collins.” She addressed him without looking at him. “You will read the banns this Sunday for the marriage of my nephew, Mr Darcy, to my daughter, Miss de Bourgh.”
Collins’s mouth opened. His eyes bulged. For one magnificent, fleeting second, the man was rendered entirely speechless, a miracle Darcy had not previously believed possible outside of Scripture.
“My Lady! What a most—a most distinguished—a most felicitous—” He was attempting to say three compliments simultaneously and succeeding at none. “I am honoured beyond all expression to be the humble instrument of—”
“Yes, yes,” Lady Catherine cut him off, waving a hand dismissively. “This Sunday, Mr Collins. That will be all.”
It was not all, of course. Collins lingered, orbiting the edges of the conversation like a moth too dim to avoid the flame.
And it was in this lingering, this infuriating, purposeless hovering, that he mentioned, with the breezy indifference of someone who had never once read a room correctly in his life, that his guests had departed Hunsford that very morning.
“Miss Bennet and Miss Lucas, with Sir William. Returned to London. A great loss to the parish, naturally, though I flatter myself that the society at Rosings more than compensated for—”
“Thank you, Mr Collins.” Darcy’s voice was perfectly level. A marvel of engineering, he reflected. It betrayed nothing of the fact that the name had landed on him like a boot on a bruise.
She was gone. By the time the banns were read, she would be back in Hertfordshire, and she would hear of his marriage through Mrs Collins, and she would think.
.. what? That he had moved on with impressive speed.
That his attachment had been shallow enough to discard in a little more than a fortnight. That his proposal had meant nothing.
He said nothing further. Collins eventually exhausted his supply of obsequiousness and departed, leaving the room blessedly quiet.
The banns were read on three consecutive Sundays to a congregation of Hunsford villagers who had no idea they were witnessing the most efficient piece of damage control in the history of the Kentish gentry.
The wedding took place on Sunday, after the third reading of the banns.
The ceremony was brief. Anne wore white and looked as though she might faint.
Darcy wore his best coat and felt precisely nothing, which was an improvement on the alternative.
Collins officiated with barely suppressed delight.
He clearly believed he was presiding over the love match of the century.
Lady Catherine sat in the front pew, rigid as a monument, with the satisfaction that comes from averting total catastrophe through sheer force of will.
The ring slid onto Anne’s finger. She did not look at him. He did not look at her. They were pronounced man and wife, and the words settled over Darcy with the warmth and romance of a fishing trip.
They departed Kent the same afternoon.
The plan was a long wedding trip to Cornwall. A small, isolated cottage on the coast, rented under the name Dunmore—Mr and Mrs Dunmore, in delicate health, preferring seclusion. The story was thin but serviceable, and it was far enough from Kent that no one would think to search.
The household was sparse. A trusted maid, one of Lady Catherine’s, naturally, because she did not trust anyone she had not personally selected, vetted, and terrorised into loyalty.
A midwife from the nearest village, engaged in advance and paid handsomely for her skills and her silence, and a wet nurse on standby for after the birth.
And then there was the marriage itself, which was, Darcy supposed, the wrong word for it.
A marriage implied some degree of partnership, of shared purpose, of two people going through the same life with mutual intent.
What he and Anne had was an arrangement—two people occupying the same cottage with the mutual intent of surviving the experience without conversation.
They were not unkind to each other. That was the strange thing.
There was no hostility, no resentment, no cold silences heavy with accusation.
There was simply—nothing. Anne sat by the window with her hand on her belly and her eyes on the sea, and wherever her thoughts were, they were not in the room with him.
She was elsewhere, with a man whose name Darcy did not care to know.
He wrote letters. To Georgiana, cheerful, carefully edited accounts of his wedding trip that omitted everything of substance.
To his steward at Pemberley, instructions, decisions, the machinery of an estate that did not stop turning simply because its master had made a ruin of his personal life.
He did not write to Bingley. He could not.
Not with Jane Bennet’s quiet, bewildered face surfacing in his mind every time he picked up the quill, and the knowledge that he had separated them, and he had been wrong.
The letter that would have confessed it was in pieces in the bottom of his travelling case, where he kept it for reasons he refused to examine.
The weeks passed. Anne grew heavier. The cottage grew smaller. The sea did not care about any of it, and Darcy found this oddly comforting. He walked the cliffs most mornings, the wind tearing at his coat, and he thought about Elizabeth Bennet constantly.
The labour began on a Wednesday, which Darcy noted only because he had run out of other things to note.
He had counted the flagstones in the kitchen and the beams in the ceiling.
He had counted the number of times the midwife’s assistant had walked past him carrying linens, and the answer was eleven, which seemed excessive but was apparently standard.
He was not permitted in the room. He had not expected to be, nor had he wanted to be, but the exclusion left him with nothing to do except pace the narrow corridor outside and listen to sounds he was not equipped to interpret.
Anne’s breathing was shallow and laboured, punctuated by small, sharp cries that she was clearly trying to suppress, because she had spent her entire life suppressing things and was not about to stop now.
He rubbed his face with both hands. He paced to the window. He paced back. He leaned against the wall and stared at the plaster and thought about nothing, which required a surprising amount of effort.
Hours passed. The light shifted from grey to gold to grey again.
The maid brought him tea, which he held without drinking until it went cold, and then she brought him another, which he also held without drinking.
At some point he sat on the floor, his back against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, because his body had decided that dignity was no longer a priority.
The sounds changed.
He could not have said precisely when or how, only that the rhythm of the room behind the door shifted—the voices quickened, the midwife’s tone dropped from calm instruction to clipped and urgent. He heard a command and some movement. Then a silence that did not seem right.
Darcy was on his feet before he registered standing, his hand on the door. The maid appeared, and her face told him everything. His stomach dropped through the flagstones he had so carefully counted.
“She is asking for you, sir.”
The room smelled of blood and sweat. Anne was propped against the pillows, grey as the linen beneath her.
She looked diminished, as though the labour had taken not just her strength but her substance, leaving behind something translucent and temporary.
The midwife stood to one side, her hands folded, her expression carefully blank.
She had seen this before and knew how it ended.
Anne’s eyes found him. They were clear, sharp, even, and lucid.
“Darcy,” she rasped.
He sat on the edge of the bed. Her hand was cold when he took it, and so light it barely registered in his palm.
“Oliver Phipps,” she said. “He is a gardener at Rosings. He tends the roses in the east garden.” She paused, gathering strength. “He has blue eyes.”
Darcy stared at her. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, because what was there to say? He had married a woman for duty who had loved a gardener.
“He does not know,” Anne said. “About the child. I would not—” She stopped and drew a thin, rattling breath. “It does not matter now.”
Her grip on his hand tightened—a small, fierce pressure that cost her visible effort.
“You have been good to me, Darcy. Better than I deserved. Better than I had any right to expect.” Her eyes were bright, and he realised with a jolt that she was not crying—she was past crying.
She was simply saying what needed to be said while there was still time to say it.
“Do not abandon her. Whatever you feel about me, about Oliver, about any of it—she is innocent. Promise me.”
“I promise,” he said. His voice came out rough, scraped raw by something he had not expected to feel.
Not love—he had never loved Anne, and she had never loved him.
They had both been honest enough to leave that fiction alone.
It was respect, perhaps. She had been backed into a corner by her own body, her mother’s fury, and a gardener’s blue eyes, and she was facing the end of it with more dignity than Darcy had managed to summon all day.
“Thank you,” Anne said, and closed her eyes.
She did not open them again.
He sat with her hand in his for a long time after the midwife confirmed what he already knew. The room was very quiet. The candle on the bedside table guttered and spat, and outside, the sea threw itself against the cliffs with its usual indifference.
He should grieve. That was what a husband did.
He searched for it. He rummaged through the wreckage of himself for sorrow, and what he found instead was relief.
A vast, shameful, flooding relief that loosened his chest. She was gone, and the pretence was over.
He was free, and the guilt of that thought was so immediate and so total that it swallowed the relief.
It left him sitting on the edge of a dead woman’s bed, hating himself with a thoroughness that was, he had to admit, quite impressive.
He thought of Elizabeth. It was an involuntary reflex, and he despised himself for it—that even now, even here, his mind reached for her the way a hand reaches for a wound.
She was months and miles away, and she did not know any of this.
She would not have cared if she did, and still the thought of her was the first thing that surfaced when the silence closed in.
He pressed his palms against his eyes and breathed.
And then, from the cradle next to the fireplace came a sound—thin, furious, unmistakably alive—a cry.
Darcy lifted his head.
The babe.