Chapter 12 #8
Godfrey met them at the front door, enquiring with a well-trained blind eye to their early return whether they should like supper to be served directly.
“I have no appetite,” Elizabeth said. Leaving Darcy to answer for himself, she took her leave and stormed upstairs to her bedchamber.
She was unsurprised when her door clicked open again moments after she slammed it closed.
She finished peeling off her gloves, dropped them onto her dressing table and turned to face her husband, all defiance.
“Elizabeth, are you unwell?”
It was not how she expected him to begin. “Unwell?”
“Yes, unwell,” he snapped. “You have claimed a headache and no appetite. These are common symptoms of illness, are they not?”
“I daresay. They are also common symptoms of serious vexation.”
His evident surprise exasperated her no end, provoking her to give poor Baker short shrift when she arrived, expecting to help her mistress undress.
“How could it possibly come as a surprise that I am vexed?” she demanded of him once the maid had been unceremoniously dismissed.
“Did you expect me to enjoy your incivility this evening?”
He frowned and looked aside, his jaw clenched. Elizabeth crossed her arms and awaited his answer, declaring with her silence that she required one.
“I was not aware my distraction was obvious,” he said at length.
“It is not as though you made any endeavour to conceal it! You have sulked the entire evening!”
“I have not sulked.”
“Call it what you will,” she replied, beginning to tug pins from her hair and toss them forcibly onto her dressing table, “but you barely spoke two words together the whole night, you ignored my aunt and uncle, and you flinched every time I so much as touched you! I call that sulking.”
“I apologise if I was not as attentive as you would have liked, madam, but my mind has been less agreeably engaged.”
“You have suffered no more than I—less, I should say! Most of the rumours were about me, after all, and I have not hurled my rattle from the crib for the whole of London to see!”
“What rumours?”
No two words could have more effectively doused her anger. She lowered her hands and stared at him. “What do you mean what rumours?”
“I mean precisely what I said! I have no idea to what you are referring.”
“I am referring to all the hostile attention we received this evening.”
He only stared at her, nonplussed, prompting her to press, “Are you telling me you were not aware of any of it?”
“I am sorry to say it escaped my notice,” he replied, frowning. “What was said?”
“Nothing of substance—but much of it.”
His countenance darkened. “It grieves me to hear this.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, do not become vexed about it now,” Elizabeth cried, returning to taking down her hair with still greater impatience than before. “There is even less advantage in allowing it to distress you after the fact!”
He looked affronted. “Let us both hope I am improved enough in character that the whisperings of a few imbeciles with pretentions to consequence can no longer distress me. I am grieved that you were distressed by it and that I was too distracted to act as I ought to have done.”
“I was not distressed by it! I have told you many times I care nothing for the world’s opinion of my marriage.”
“Then might I enquire why the devil you are upbraiding me, woman?”
“Because I thought you were distressed by it—unreasonably so. You certainly made it seem that way with your insufferable brooding. You ignored us all—all evening!”
He stepped towards her abruptly. “Is not discovering that my wife has been intimate with another before me enough to consume my thoughts to the exclusion of all else?”
Elizabeth recoiled, unable to do aught but stare at him, no less bemused than incredulous. Her astonishment kept her silent too long.
“You do not deny it?” His anger did not entirely mask the note of panic in his voice.
“I am unsure of what precisely you are accusing me, sir. With whom am I supposed to have been intimate?”
Her words, or tone, or perhaps both gave him pause. Doubt flickered across his features, and he did not sound at all sure of himself as he answered. “Mr Craythorne.”
Her mouth fell open. Yet, even as her affront rallied itself to be unleashed in its fullest force, she recalled his strained observation that Mr Craythorne had seemed excessively pleased to see her.
The insult of his absurd assumption notwithstanding, the burgeoning suspicion that her dear, sensible husband, paradigm of reason and man full grown, was suffering a jealous pique worthy of a stripling boy, tempered her indignation with more than a pinch of amusement.
“I understood you did not care for rumours?”
“Would that it were rumour and not your own aunt’s testimony.”
“My aunt? What had she to say on the matter?”
“That it was thanks to Mr Craythorne you knew far more about the marriage bed than a maiden ought to before she found herself in one!”
Elizabeth bit her lips together. In his defence, that did sound hideously damning. “Why on earth did she say that to you?”
“She said it to your uncle,” he mumbled, “while I was speaking to Mr Thatcher.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“It is not my habit to eavesdrop,” he said angrily, “but I heard Gardiner enquire of your aunt why you blushed so violently upon seeing Mr Craythorne, and since I wondered the same, I made a point of listening to her answer!”
Oh, dear Lord, how she loved him—her dear, foolish, jealous husband, so wild with envy that reason had quite deserted him.
Nevertheless, in a long line of strong contenders, this was possibly the most offensive of all the charges he had ever laid at her door, and she would have him admit the injustice of it before absolving him.
“And from that answer, you took it that I had…what? Laid with another man out of wedlock? And this you thought me capable of concealing from you?”
After a moment’s silence, Darcy let out a harsh breath and lowered his head to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Had I felt less, I might have given it more thought, Elizabeth.”
“Or indeed any.”
He looked up at her then frowned, possibly at the grin she could no longer conceal and stiffened indignantly. “I beg you would trifle with me no longer. Tell me Mrs Gardiner’s meaning!”
With a quiet sigh, Elizabeth raised her hands to feel for the few remaining pins in her hair—as much to shield herself from her imminent mortification as to finish the much-interrupted task.
“Mr Craythorne took a fancy to me some time ago when he lived near Meryton. He approached me in the garden one day and attempted to charm me with some pretty words—at least, I presume they were pretty. I have never been able to recall them, for it was not his speech that formed the memorable part of his address. His prevailing claim to affection was more inelegantly displayed in the distension of his breeches.”
Darcy’s appalled expression made her laugh a little.
She set the last pin down and turned to face him fully.
“I cannot say what his intentions were, for my aunt intervened almost immediately. But I later insisted she explain what I had seen. And after some persistence on my part, she consented to tell me far more about the marriage bed than a maiden ought to know.”
Darcy stared at her for a moment then closed his eyes and shook his head. “My God, forgive me. I am a damned fool.”
Elizabeth well knew how he would now berate himself for accusing her thus, yet she could not be overly angry.
In addition to the compliment of his possessiveness, reason had by then arrived to remind her of all the ways in which he had cared for her this evening that anger had prevented her admitting at the time—his concern for her fictitious headache, his having arranged for a hot brick to be placed in the footwell of the carriage home, his care for her wellbeing when she refused supper, his regret for not comforting her in the face of society’s derision—all of it done whilst struggling under a most heinous misapprehension.
“Yes, you are. But you know how I love to laugh at folly.” Unfastening her necklace, she turned to lay it carefully on her dressing table. “How fortunate for you that I am not so unreasonable about your previous lovers.”
It was a passing remark, ingenuously made, and she did not comprehend its impact until she turned back and observed his horrified countenance.
“How did you—” He clamped his lips closed and ran a hand over his face.
She pulled a wry face and set about removing a stocking. “I may have come to your bed a maiden, but I did not come to it a simpleton.”
“Elizabeth, I…it is not—”
“Fitzwilliam,” she interrupted, holding a hand up to stay a conversation neither of them wished to have. “I harbour no resentment for the life you lived before you met me, but I have absolutely no wish to dwell on it. I ought not to have teased you.”
She bent to remove her other stocking. By the time she was done, Darcy was by her side, tenderly turning her towards him.
“You are the most remarkable woman I have ever known. I do not deserve your clemency after my behaviour this evening.”
“It has not been your finest few hours as a husband, but there were a few redeeming performances. You have not done as badly as you think.”
He was so very serious, his eyes black in the candlelight. “I love you.”
She slid her arms about his neck and pulled herself up to lightly kiss the scar on his cheek. “I know. That is why you are forgiven.”
He rested his forehead against hers and wrapped his arms around her, whispering his heartfelt thanks. “Though I would have you cease walking alone in gardens,” he added. “You are entirely too prone to being propositioned in them.”
“Fear not. I only accept propositions in churchyards.”
He smiled the understated smile she loved so well.
“And bedrooms.”
He stopped smiling and upon having his propositions agreed to, bestowed upon her such attentions as went a considerable way to earning him the clemency he claimed not to deserve.