Chapter 14 Found and Claimed
FOUND AND CLAIMED
They dressed in silence, and the silence was its own kind of intimacy.
Elizabeth gathered her shift from the floor and pulled it over her head, and the wool settled against skin that still carried the memory of his mouth.
Her stays were stiff from the hours spent drying in the warmth of the blankets.
The fire had burned itself out long ago, the last of the broken chair reduced to fine white ash, and the room was cooling fast. She turned her back to him and held the stays in place, and his fingers found the laces without being asked, threading them through the eyelets with a care that made her throat tighten.
“You are remarkably competent at this,” she said.
“I do not intend to become proficient at removing any other woman's stays,” he said, his voice close to her ear. “Only yours. For the rest of my life. I plan to practice until I am exceptional.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. He was smiling. That smile she had only seen in this cottage, the one that softened the severe angles of his face and made him look like a man who had been waiting years for someone to make him laugh.
“Exceptional,” she repeated.
“I am a dedicated student, Mrs. Dar— Miss Bennet.”
The near-slip hung between them and the presumption of it should have appalled her. Instead it sent a bolt of heat through her stomach that no dead fire could account for.
She turned to face him, and the laugh died in her throat because he was standing there in his breeches and nothing else, his shirt still on the floor, and the sight of his bare chest in the pale morning light was enough to make her reconsider every principled thing she had said about waiting for a bed of their own.
Mr. Darcy watched her look. He did not reach for his shirt.
“You are doing that on purpose,” she said.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Put your shirt on, Mr. Darcy, before I abandon every resolution I made ten minutes ago.”
“Fitzwilliam.”
“What?”
“I thought we had agreed to given names, Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth choked back an exasperated bark of laughter. “Fitzwilliam. Put your shirt on. Now.”
“As my Elizabeth commands.” Mr. Darcy pulled the shirt over his head, and even that was unfair, the way his arms lifted and the muscles of his stomach contracted, and she turned away with what she hoped was dignity and began wrestling with her gown.
Two days of snow and sweat and the dying heat of a room that now held nothing but ash had reduced it to a wrinkled, stiff thing that bore little resemblance to the walking gown she had put on at Longbourn.
She managed the fastenings she could reach and left the rest, draping his coat over her shoulders for warmth. It smelled of him. She did not mind.
He was knotting his cravat when they heard the distant sound of voices, muffled and distant, and the steady crunch of boots on frozen ground. More than one person. More than two.
Elizabeth went to the window. Elizabeth looked through the glass, which fogged with condensation and crusted with ice at the edges.
The fog that had blanketed the countryside since yesterday lifted overnight, and the morning beyond was brilliant, with a pale, hard sky and fields blinding white under a winter sun that possessed no warmth but much beauty.
She could make out dark figures moving across the landscape, four or five of them, spread in a rough line, picking their way through drifts that came past their knees. They were searching. She could see it in the pattern of their movement, the way they paused at every wall and hedgerow.
They were sweeping the lower fields in a broad line, working their way across the terrain. They had not yet seen the cottage. In another few minutes they might pass it entirely.
Elizabeth turned from the window. Darcy was watching her, his cravat half-knotted, and she could see that he had heard the voices too.
“My father,” she said. “And Bingley. And Mr. Collins, unfortunately.”
“Then this is the moment.”
“Yes.” She stared at him. “Are you ready for what happens when we walk out that door? There will be no undoing it.”
Something shifted in his face. The soft, unguarded man of the past hour did not disappear, but something harder settled alongside him. Not replacing the tenderness. Armoring it.
“Are you?” he returned, holding out his hand. Smiling, Elizabeth took it.
Elizabeth blinked against the glare and watched the search party register their presence. With a shout and wave, Elizabeth called them to her.
The groom who had found Atlas was already at the stable door, but it was Bingley who saw them first. He had changed course the moment the shout went up and was floundering through the snow toward the cottage with more enthusiasm than grace, his amiable face tight with worry.
“Darcy! Miss Bennet!” The relief in his voice was so plain it was almost comical.
“Thank God. Thank God. We have been searching since yesterday. Miss Bennet has been beside herself. Jane, I mean. We came out at first light when the storm broke, but the cottage was empty and there were tracks leading away into the hills, and we feared the worst.”
He stopped. Took in the scene more carefully. Elizabeth in Darcy's coat. Their joined hands. Her loose hair. The color that rose in his cheeks had nothing to do with the cold.
“Ah,” he said.
Mr. Bennet had reached them. He was breathing hard as his eyes found Elizabeth's face. “Lizzy! Good,” he said, and his voice was not entirely steady. He reached for her, one hand gripping her shoulder. His fingers tightened. “You are alive. Thank goodness.”.
“I am sorry for the worry, Papa.”
“The worry.” His gaze, now recovered, moved to Mr. Darcy. To their joined hands. To the coat around her shoulders. “Yes. I imagine there has been a good deal of worry to go around.”
Mr. Darcy released Elizabeth's hand and stepped toward her father. When he spoke, his voice was low enough that only the three of them could hear.
“Mr. Bennet. I wish to marry your daughter. This is unusual, for certain. I intend to make my addresses properly. But I want you to know my intentions now, before we return.”
Mr. Bennet studied him for a long moment. Then he glanced at Elizabeth.
“And you, Lizzy?”
“I choose him, Papa. Freely.”
Whatever he might have said next was obliterated by Mr. Collins, who arrived red-faced and panting, his boots ruined beyond recovery.
“Most irregular,” he began, his voice carrying across the snow with the penetrating clarity of a man who had been practicing his disapproval for the entire walk.
“Most irregular indeed. I must say, Cousin Elizabeth, that your behavior has been shocking. To be discovered in such compromising circumstances with a gentleman to whom you have no formal connection whatsoever. I shudder to think what Lady Catherine de Bourgh will say. Her ladyship has very particular views on the conduct of young women, and I assure you that this sort of —”
“Sir.” One word from Mr. Darcy. Collins's mouth remained open, but no sound came out, which was the most useful position it had occupied since his arrival at Longbourn.
Collins rallied. “I must protest! I had made my intentions toward Cousin Elizabeth clear, and this situation — the honorable course would be —”
Mr. Darcy turned to look at him. Just looked. The full weight of Pemberley and ten thousand a year settled into that single glance, and Collins wilted like a hothouse flower in a frost. He took a half step backward, then another, until he was partially concealed behind one of the footmen.
Mr. Bennet, who had watched this exchange with the expression of a man being offered unexpected entertainment, returned his attention to his daughter.
“He trembles when he is angry,” Mr. Bennet observed, glancing at Darcy's hands. “And yet he did not raise his voice.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “He would not.”
Her father was quiet for a moment. Then: “We shall discuss terms when we are all warm and dry.”
“Mr. Collins,” he added, without turning. “I would consider it a personal kindness if you were to remain silent until we reach Longbourn.”
Collins's mouth closed with an audible click.
Bingley stepped forward. “There is a cart waiting on the road.” He hesitated, glancing at Darcy, and something passed across his open, honest face.
Something quieter than his usual cheer. He looked at Darcy standing in the snow, having claimed Elizabeth before her father with neither shame nor apology, and Elizabeth saw the moment the thought landed.
She saw him look away. Toward the road. Toward Netherfield, where Jane was waiting.
The look lasted only a moment. She filed it away and said nothing.
Mr. Darcy's hand found hers again as the party moved off.
His thumb traced a slow circle against her palm.
He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles, and the gesture was so tender and so public that Collins made a strangled sound from behind the groom and Mr. Bennet raised an eyebrow, and Elizabeth did not care about any of it.
She looked back at the cottage one last time.
The glass conservatory caught the morning sun and blazed with light, and she thought of the painter who had worked there a century ago and the husband who had built it for love and the two people who had sheltered inside it when the storm came, and found that they were not the same people who walked out.
Snow crunched beneath their boots, and the sky was impossibly blue. The world was waiting for them, and for the first time in her life, Elizabeth Bennet was not afraid of what it held.