Five #2
The thought came as a confirmation of what he already suspected but avoided admitting.
He was in love with her. Still. Again. The years did not matter.
It was the same fist in his chest, squeezing, and the absolute certainty that he would stand in this corridor and listen to her sing nursery rhymes for the rest of his natural life if she would let him.
She would not let him, why would she? She had never wanted him. She was merely singing for a child, not for him. The fact that her voice could cross the distance between them and undo him so completely was not her problem. It was his.
The song ended and Anne clapped. “Again! Do the one about the blackbird.”
Elizabeth laughed and began again.
Darcy released the doorframe. His fingers ached where they had gripped the wood.
He was white-knuckled, he realised, though he did not remember tightening his hold.
He stepped back from the door. Carefully, quietly, the way one retreated from a room where something sacred was happening and he had not been invited.
He did not go to his study. He went downstairs, through the entrance hall, past Barton—who raised an eyebrow at the master’s unscheduled departure but said nothing—and out through the garden door.
The air was sharp. March had no warmth to offer, and the wind cut through his coat. He was grateful for it. He needed the cold. He needed something external, something physical, to match what was inside his chest, not cold at all but burning.
He stood at the far wall, where the garden met the mews, and pressed his palms flat against the brick. The stone was rough and damp beneath his hands. He breathed. In. Out. The mechanical process of drawing air into lungs that did not care to cooperate.
From the open window two floors above, faint but unmistakable, the melody drifted down. The blackbird song. Anne’s clear voice joining in on the chorus, slightly off-key, entirely joyful.
He closed his eyes, and did not return to the schoolroom that afternoon.
The next day brought rain, and with it the garden was lost.
Anne bore this injustice with the stoicism of a prisoner denied exercise.
She stood at the nursery window, her forehead pressed to the glass, Muffin clutched to her chest. She delivered a comprehensive critique of the weather that would have impressed the most seasoned meteorologist. The rain was wrong.
It was unnecessary. God should be written to about it.
Elizabeth, seated behind her with a book of fables open on the table, suggested that perhaps they might write the letter together after arithmetic.
Anne considered this. The prospect of combining two activities she disliked (arithmetic and patience) with one she enjoyed (complaining) proved sufficiently appealing.
She returned to the table and picked up her chalk.
Darcy observed this negotiation from the corridor and added it to his growing catalogue of evidence that Elizabeth Bennet was considerably more skilled at managing his daughter than he was.
She neither bribed nor threatened. She redirected, quietly, with a logic that met the child on her own terms. He had watched three governesses attempt to impose order on Anne through authority.
Elizabeth imposed nothing. She offered, and Anne chose, which made all the difference.
He retreated to his study. He had correspondence to attend to, but lately it had been thoroughly neglected.
The rain cleared by afternoon. From his desk, where he was pretending to read a report on the Pemberley tenancies, he heard them leave through the garden door. Anne’s voice carried up through the window, interrogating Elizabeth about the purpose of worms.
He remained at his desk for a full seven minutes, which was, he felt, a respectable showing. Then he went to the window.
They were on the gravel path that circled the garden.
Anne was three paces ahead, as she always was, propelled by the urgency to investigate every corner.
Her boots were muddy and her bonnet had slipped to a rakish angle.
She was crouching to examine a puddle like a natural philosopher on the brink of discovery.
Elizabeth followed at a measured pace, her hands clasped behind her back.
Her posture was straight, her stride unhurried.
She was watching the child with an attention that never wavered, her body angled slightly forward, ready.
If Anne stumbled, Elizabeth would be there.
If the puddle proved deeper than expected, Elizabeth would be there.
She carried this vigilance lightly, woven into the way she moved rather than worn on her face.
Darcy recognised it because he carried the same vigilance himself. It was how parents walked.
She was not Anne’s mother. He knew this. And yet.
Anne found something in the puddle. A leaf, perhaps, or a stone, or a creature of tremendous importance. She straightened and turned, holding her discovery aloft, and reached back for Elizabeth’s hand.
Elizabeth’s fingers closed around Anne’s small fist without hesitation, without thought, the way one breathed or blinked.
Automatically. Anne tugged her forward to inspect the treasure, and Elizabeth followed.
Their two heads bent together over the discovery, blonde curls against dark hair.
The image burned itself into his mind with a permanence he knew would outlast everything else about this day, this week, this year.
He stepped back from the window.
His study was quiet. The clock on the mantel measured out the seconds, unhurried and indifferent.
He glanced at the report on the Pemberley tenancies which lay on his desk, unread.
There were decisions to be made about drainage, about fences, about the thousand mundane concerns that kept an estate alive and a man occupied. He made none of them.
This was not desire. He had made his uneasy truce with desire. He understood it, could contain it, could lock it in the hours between brandy and sleep where it troubled no one but himself. Desire was a fire in a grate. It burned, but it had edges. It could be managed.
This had no edges.
This was Elizabeth kneeling in the mud to examine a worm with his daughter.
This was Anne reaching for her hand without a moment’s doubt that the hand would be there.
This was the three of them at the dinner table, Georgiana talking, Anne chattering, Elizabeth quiet but present, and the shape of it so close to a family that the gap between what it was and what he wanted it to be could not be measured in inches but in courage. He did not have enough.
He was her employer and she was his governess.
Between those two facts lay a canyon he could not cross without becoming the sort of man he had sworn never to be.
She had taken this position because she was desperate.
He had offered it because he was desperate, and neither desperation gave him the right to want more than she had agreed to give.
He poured a brandy but did not drink it. He turned the glass in his hand, watching the firelight through the amber.
She was here. He had brought her here. She slept every night in his house, behind a door he would never open. She would be here for years, because she had a family to feed and a contract to honour. She would breathe the same air with him. But not because she had chosen him.
She was here because she had no better option. He was the roof over her head and the name on the banknote. Nothing more. Not her choice.
He set the glass down, untouched. He pressed his hands to his eyes.
How was he supposed to survive? She was close enough to touch but she was not his. She could never be his. He dropped his hands to his sides and stared at the fire.
He did not know what to do. He suspected there was nothing to be done.
The hours passed and darkness fell, but Darcy was restless.
He took the brandy in his hand and crossed from the study to the adjacent library, not because he believed there was a book which would distract him, but only to move, to change the scenery.
It turned out exactly the same, and the quiet sanctuary offered no calm.
He paced. He had discarded his coat an hour ago and his waistcoat hung open, unbuttoned, a liberty he would never have permitted in daylight.
He ran his hand through his hair for the fourth or fifth time, dragging it from his forehead in a gesture that had ceased to be habit and became a compulsion.
The image would not leave. Not the garden, not the hands, nor the singing.
Those he could have borne. What he could not bear was the precise shade of pink on her lower lip when she had smiled at dinner, the way it had darkened as she pressed her mouth together to contain the laugh, the fraction of a second when her teeth had caught the edge of it and released.
He stopped pacing. He gripped the mantelpiece with his free hand and stared into the fire.
“Hell and damnation.”
His voice was rough in the silent room. He heard a small gasp and turned on his heel.
She was standing in the open doorway.
Elizabeth. In her nightgown—no. Not her nightgown, you imbecile, he thought.
She was still in her dress, but her hair was loosened from its pins, falling past her shoulders.
The corridor behind her was dark, and she was staring at him as though she had wandered into a menagerie and found an animal she had not expected to be uncaged.
Her gaze travelled from his face to his open waistcoat to his disordered hair to the glass in his hand. He watched her catalogue each detail, and he wanted to die on the spot.
“Mr Darcy.” She recovered first. “I came to search for a book. I did not realise you were—” She gestured vaguely at the room, at him, at the general state of affairs. “I apologise for the intrusion.”
She turned to leave.
He crossed the room in three strides and caught her wrist.
The contact went through him like lightning.
Her skin was warm beneath his fingers, her bones fine and narrow.
Her pulse hammered—rapid, strong, entirely at odds with the composure on her face.
He felt it against his fingertips, that frantic beat, and knew she felt his hand trembling. Neither of them moved.
“Stay.”
The word came out raw. He heard it and winced. He cleared his throat.
“Please, Miss Bennet.” Softer now, controlled, though the control cost him visibly.
“Stay. I shall not be in your way. I promised you access to the library, did I not?” He released her wrist and gestured with his hand at the shelves that lined the walls, floor to ceiling, leather and gilt and the accumulated wisdom of four generations of Darcys. “There. All yours.”
She stood very still. Her eyes dropped to her wrist—the one he had held, where his fingers had been, where his thumb had rested against her pulse.
“Thank you, Mr Darcy.”
She walked into the room without hurrying. She moved along the nearest shelf, her fingers trailing the spines, and selected a volume without apparent deliberation. She tucked it beneath her arm. She turned and gave him a nod—civil, contained, betraying nothing—and left the library on quiet feet.
The sound of her footsteps faded on the stairs.
Darcy stood where she had left him, his hand trembling.
Hell was real, it turned out, and he had just reached the gates of purgatory.