Chapter 11 The Night Garden
Elizabeth could not sleep.
The bed at Pemberley was absurdly comfortable -- goose down and lavender-scented linen and curtains heavy enough to block the world -- and she could not sleep, because the world she wanted was not outside the curtains but down the corridor, in his own room, probably lying awake in his own absurdly comfortable bed, and the knowledge of this was making rest impossible.
Three days at Pemberley had taught her things about Fitzwilliam Darcy that no letter could convey.
She had learned that he took his coffee black and his eggs soft and his morning silence seriously, that he read correspondence standing up as though sitting might weaken his resolve, that he was gentle with his sister and patient with his staff and entirely incapable of leaving a crooked picture frame uncorrected.
She had learned that he walked the grounds every morning before breakfast, regardless of weather, and that he checked on his horse himself rather than leaving it to the grooms, and that when he thought no one was looking, he stood at the windows of the gallery and watched the lake with an expression that was not quite melancholy and not quite peace, but something in between.
She had learned that living in proximity to a man she loved and desired and could not yet have was a form of exquisite torture that no one had thought to warn her about.
The house was silent. The clock in the hallway had struck midnight an hour ago.
Elizabeth slipped out of bed, pulled a wrapper over her nightgown, and padded barefoot through corridors she was still learning to navigate.
The house was warm -- Pemberley's fires were maintained with a generosity that spoke of deep pockets and deeper concern for comfort -- and the stone floors were cool but not cold beneath her feet.
She found the garden door unlocked. The night outside was clear, the earlier snow melted, the air cold enough to sting but not bitter.
A nearly full moon hung above the park, turning the grounds to silver and shadow, and the formal garden behind the house lay in a geometry of hedges and paths and stone, beautiful and still.
She walked among the roses. They were bare this late in the year, thorny stalks stripped of color, but the structure of the garden was elegant even in its winter bones.
A stone bench sat beneath an arbor of dormant jasmine, and she settled onto it and tilted her face to the sky and breathed the sharp, clean air and tried to quiet the wanting that had taken up permanent residence in her body.
She heard his step on the gravel. She did not turn. She smiled.
"You are stalking me, Mr. Darcy."
"I am taking a constitutional. At one in the morning. In December. A perfectly normal activity."
"Perfectly."
He materialized from the shadows, and the sight of him in the moonlight did things to her equilibrium that should have been illegal.
He was in shirtsleeves and breeches, his feet in boots hastily pulled on, his coat absent, his hair disheveled in a way that suggested either restless sleep or no sleep at all.
Without the armor of his coat and cravat, he looked younger, rawer, more human.
"You could not sleep either," she said.
"I have not slept properly since the night we met." He sat beside her on the bench. The stone was narrow, and his thigh pressed against hers. "You have made sleep an impossibility."
"How flattering. I have replaced rest itself."
"You have replaced everything." He said it simply, without performance, and the honesty of it settled over her like a blanket.
They sat in silence for a moment. The garden was extraordinarily quiet, the kind of silence that exists only in the country, far from roads and towns, where the only sounds are night birds and wind and the distant murmur of water.
The lake gleamed beyond the park. The house rose behind them, dark except for the single lamp Elizabeth had left burning in her window.
"I have been thinking," she said, "about fear."
"An encouraging midnight topic."
"You told me in the garden at Longbourn that you were afraid. You said the things most worth having are the things that frighten us most."
"You said that, actually."
"Did I? It sounds like something I would say.
" She looked at him. In the moonlight, his face was all sharp planes and soft shadows, and his eyes were fixed on her with an intensity that made her pulse accelerate.
"I have been afraid for most of this engagement.
Afraid of you, of what I felt, of what it meant to want something I had not chosen. But I am not afraid anymore."
"No?"
"No. I am -- resolved." She turned toward him on the bench. "Fitzwilliam, I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it without your gentleman's honor interrupting."
"That is a concerning preamble."
"I do not want to wait."
The words sat between them. The moonlight did not flinch.
"Elizabeth --"
"I love you. I have told you this. You love me.
You have demonstrated this in ways that would require a separate letter to enumerate.
We are engaged to be married. We will be married in six weeks, at which point we will stand in a church and promise ourselves to each other in the eyes of God, and then we will come home and close a door, and everything that has been building between us since that library will be -- permitted. "
"Yes."
"I do not want to wait six weeks."
His breath left him. She heard it go, a sharp exhale that crystallized in the cold air between them.
"I want you," she said. "Not in six weeks.
Not on our wedding night. Now. Tonight. In this garden, under this sky, with no one watching and no one knowing and nothing between us but the decision to be together.
I want you, Fitzwilliam. I have wanted you since the library, and the wanting has grown until it occupies every room in my body, and I am done pretending otherwise. "
He was very still. She could see the war in his face: honor against desire, propriety against need, the gentleman against the man.
"If we do this," he said, and his voice was rough, "there is no undoing it."
"I know."
"The world would call you -- if anyone knew --"
"The world already thinks I trapped you in a library. Let them think what they will. I am not asking the world. I am asking you."
"Elizabeth." He reached for her face, his hands cradling her jaw, tilting her face up to the moonlight.
His thumbs traced her cheekbones. She could feel the tremor in his fingers, the same tremor she had felt in the library at Netherfield, the tremor of a man holding himself back by force of will. "Are you certain?"
"I have never been more certain of anything in my life."
He kissed her.
It began softly, his mouth gentle on hers, and she leaned into the tenderness of it, her hands finding his chest, his shirt-covered warmth in the cold night air.
Then his hands slid from her face to her hair, pulling the loose braid apart, and she felt his fingers in the heavy mass of it, and the gentleness deepened into something else: something deliberate, something hungry, something that had been banked for weeks and was now, finally, being allowed to burn.
She pulled at his shirt, freeing it from his breeches, and slid her hands underneath.
The skin of his stomach was warm and taut, the muscles tensing involuntarily under her touch, and when her fingers climbed his ribs he groaned into her mouth and pulled her closer, lifting her from the bench onto his lap in a single fluid movement that she had not expected and that made her gasp.
She was straddling him. On a stone bench. In the Pemberley garden. The absurdity of it competed with the intensity for a moment, and she laughed against his lips, a breathless, incredulous sound.
"What?" he murmured.
"This is not how I imagined this happening."
"You imagined this?"
"Do not be smug."
"I am not smug. I am -- gratified." His mouth found her neck, tracing the path he had memorized that first night, and she tilted her head back and let the sensation cascade through her.
His hands were at the ties of her wrapper, undoing them with a patience that bordered on cruelty, the fabric parting to reveal the thin cotton of her nightgown beneath.
She shivered. Not from cold. His hands spanned her waist through the cotton, and she could feel every finger, every press of his palm, and the contact was both too much and not enough.
"You are shaking," he said.
"I am cold."
"Liar." He kissed her jaw. "You lie very badly, Elizabeth. It is one of your most endearing qualities."
"I have many endearing qualities. You have listed them in writing."
"I will list them again. In person. At length.
" His hands slid to her hips, then to her thighs, finding the hem of her nightgown.
The fabric bunched as his fingers traveled upward, and the first touch of his hand on her bare thigh made them both freeze, the intimacy of skin on skin after so many layers a shock that radiated outward.
"Wait," she said. Not to stop. To slow. "I want to remember this."
He stilled. His hands remained where they were, warm on her skin, and he looked up at her with an expression that she would carry with her for the rest of her life: reverence.
Not the kind reserved for saints or paintings, but the reverence of a man who understood, in his body and his bones, that what was happening between them was sacred.
"I will remember every moment," he said. "I have been remembering you since the day we met."
She kissed him. Slowly. Mapping his mouth with hers. Her fingers unfastened the buttons of his shirt, one by one, and she spread her hands across his bare chest and felt his heart hammering beneath her palm, that familiar percussion, that proof of life and wanting and him.