Chapter Twelve #2
“Oh,” said Lady Matlock, scribbling yet again. “Well, I suppose you couldn’t afford one. And there are a number of daughters, I understand, and you are not even the eldest, though you’ve been married first, and—”
“All right, enough,” I said.
Lady Matlock ignored me. “And I understand, I have heard, that you girls in this family are just traipsing about the countryside, walking this way and that, going into abandoned houses with men like my nephew here and breaking your ankles.”
Elizabeth furrowed her brow. “No, no, I only walked alone because my sister was sick. But truly, we all walk together much of the time, without any chaperone, and I hardly think there’s anything so scandalous in a walk.”
“No, you do not think anything is scandalous, and that is very clear,” said Lady Matlock.
“I said,” I repeated, “enough.”
My aunt turned to me. “Yes, fine, Darcy. I suppose I know the important elements in the end. Here is what we shall do. I shall look over the answers and give it all a bit of thought, and discuss a few things with Georgiana, and then Mrs. Darcy will come to tea at my house on the morrow.”
“Tea?” said Elizabeth. “Just me?”
“Just you,” said my aunt. She shut her notebook and stood up. “Well, then. Have a pleasant day, both of you.”
She left the room.
Elizabeth continued to fidget with her collar.
“You won’t go,” I muttered.
Elizabeth glanced up at me, a grateful look on her face.
“I won’t subject you to that,” I said. “I can’t believe she barged in here like that. Well, no, I can well believe it. It is exactly like her, it is only that I am appalled at the way she behaved, the way she spoke to you, and you won’t go.”
“All right,” she said.
“We must think of a proper excuse, however,” I said. “Perhaps your ankle simply won’t allow it.”
“Oh,” she said. “So, I am not going, but we are going to lie to your aunt about why?”
“Well, it’s not really a lie, Elizabeth, it’s only that this is the way things are done. One doesn’t go about telling the truth all the time. It’s not polite.”
She raised her eyebrows at me.
“You know what I mean,” I said.
“I do not know that I do,” she said, tilting her head to one side. She picked up a scone, broke a bit off, dipped it in honey herself and put it in her mouth. She chewed.
“Obviously, you can be truthful about certain things,” I said.
“But other things, things that might make the other person feel as if you are rejecting them or things that might offend them, you lie about. It’s a delicate balance, and I don’t know if I ever quite thought of it this way before.
A lot of it is sort of by force of habit, I suppose, but—”
“Fitzwilliam.”
I met her gaze.
“I have to go,” she said.
“No, you don’t wish to,” I said.
“If I were to beg off this invitation, it would only put it off,” she said, “and the longer I put it off, the worse it would get. I knew what I was getting into when I married you. I can handle this.”
I scratched the side of my neck, and I found I did not entirely like that answer. “Well, what are you going to say to them?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I mean, if you are going to… have tea with my sister and my aunt, and I am not going to be there, I suppose I am wondering—”
“Worrying,” she interrupted. “You are worrying about what I am going to say.” She glared at me.
Yes, I supposed I was. I picked up a scone myself. “Look, we’ll practice. I’ll get you ready for it.”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “You do not think I can handle myself at tea? You think I have never been to tea in my life or something of that nature? I was not raised in a barn, Fitzwilliam. I know the rules of tea.”
I broke the scone up into pieces and set the pieces down on the plate. “Yes, I know that. I am not saying that you’re uncultured or ill bred or something, I only mean that you…”
“That what?”
“Well, you have a tendency to simply say things, I suppose, and I should help you to…” I cleared my throat. “At the end of it there, when you said that there was nothing scandalous about walking—”
“There is not!” She drew herself up. “And, honestly, I had the patience of a saint to only say that, and not to have said anything else, and to have waited so long to have said it at all. And you, you simply sat there and let her say all those things to me.”
“I stopped her,” I said. “Eventually.”
She sighed, shaking her head. “What am I saying? It’s quite clear that social situations are not exactly your forte.”
“Well, they aren’t really yours either,” I muttered.
She barked out a laugh. “Right. Of course.”
I broke the pieces of scone into even smaller pieces, annoyed with myself. “I did not mean it that way.”
“What way did you mean it?”
“We are both… we are… we have a tendency, you and I, to try to cut to the heart of matters, I suppose, and we appreciate it about each other, but I don’t think society, in general, appreciates that.
It’s sort of like the polite lying bit. I am not good at it either, really, but you have to try to pretend, to do what they ask of you, or else… ”
“Yes,” she said. “That is what you think. That you must do what is asked of you. You made that quite plain before we got married. And I knew this, and I said yes anyway because you looked at me with those stupidly dark eyes of yours, and said that you wanted me, and my insides rearranged themselves and then… this… now…”
I broke apart the scones even more. They were nothing but crumbs.
She fiddled with her collar. “Take me back to bed?”
My lips parted and I stopped breaking up the scones. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
She lifted a shoulder and bit down on her lower lip. I gazed at that, at her teeth sinking into that lip of hers. I groaned.
I got up, strode across the room, and locked the door to the sitting room.
When I got back to her, I pushed her collar over her shoulder, baring it. I put my mouth to her skin.
I had the modiste come in the very next day, and that was gratifying. Elizabeth’s eyes got so big when she saw all the bolts of fabric, and when I told the woman how many dresses I wanted made for her, she was agog.
Later, that night, when I held her in my arms, she whispered, running her hands over my chest, that she’d never had so many dresses at once, that she didn’t even know what to do with so many dresses.
I knew it was not an overindulgence. It was just the amount of dresses that a woman needed, at least a woman who would be associating with the circles that I was associating with.
I actually was worried that I had not asked for enough dresses.
I had only paid scant attention to such things hitherto, but I had been involved in the expense for Georgiana, so I had some knowledge of it, at least I thought.
But I found myself wishing to just buy her as many dresses as possible. I liked making her react that way. I liked her shy gratefulness, her breathless disbelief that she was being treated thus. If I could make her smile like that, I could die happy from the way it made me feel.
I was in love with her.
I said it, often, and she said it, too.
We said it when we were in each other’s arms, at night, and we had been spending each and every night together since we’d been married.
We said it at breakfast, and we said it when we were reading together in the afternoons, and we said it when I helped her because her ankle was paining her too much to put weight on it, and we said it at tea.
In many ways, it was all idyllic between us.
I had never been this happy in my life.
I had never even imagined such happiness.
It wasn’t only that she was beautiful or that she fit nicely against me in the darkness or any of that.
I could not quite say what it was. I wished to say we had some kind of beautiful marriage of wits or something, like the two leads in a play bantering back and forth, but the truth was that we rarely talked of anything too taxing, and that most of what passed between us was tinged, currently, with this warmth that bled out from our love for each other.
Maybe it was all because of whatever was happening in bed.
I had very little experience with all of that, in truth, and I had certainly never had a woman in my bed like this, every night, a woman who smiled at me and bit down on her lower lip and tilted up her chin to be kissed, who melted into me and breathed, “Fitzwilliam,” against my jaw, who clutched me and who was so beautiful and so soft and so small and so very, very sweet.
Maybe, when that is happening, you are inclined to feel love for someone. And maybe, that was all it was.
I didn’t wish that to be true. I wished this to be something spiritual, something real, something that went all the way to the depths of the both of us, something permanent.
But whenever I brought up the tea with my aunt, it shattered this illusion that everything between us was so rosy and perfect.
She was not interested in the “practice” I had suggested. When I brought it up again, she was entirely offended.
I tried to explain that it was not that I thought that she did not know what to say or that she had not been properly instructed in how to have a conversation. Instead, it was only that I thought that she would lose her temper or say something sharp or be a bit too sarcastic.
“Well, then,” she said, “I don’t think practice is going to cure that.”
“It could,” I said. “It could help you see where the trouble spots are, and then you could practice how to avoid them.”
Her nostrils flared. “I am such an embarrassment to you, am I?”
“No,” I said, adamant. “No, indeed.”
But then later, when I brought it up again, I had thought it through a bit more, and I had to try to explain that to her, but it only made it worse.
“You knew how it was going to be with us at the beginning,” I said to her. “You taunted me with the short engagement. You said that I liked you because you were scandalous. You knew.”
“So, you admit that you’re ashamed of me.”
“That is not what I said.”
“You didn’t use the word ‘ashamed’ but it is what you meant,” she snapped.
“You know that I am in love with you,” I said. “You know that you are everything I ever wanted in a woman.”
“You love me when we are alone,” she said.
“I love you all the time,” I said. “But other people, they might… not understand you. I know they won’t, because they don’t understand me. And we have to do things as they like it, you see.”
“I do see,” she said. “I see that I have come out of my mother’s household, where she never approved of me—”
“Well, I hardly think your mother’s approval is worth anything,” I said.
She drew back, stung.
I blew out a huff of air.
“And now, I have a husband who does not approve of me,” she said. “Perhaps I am not capable of achieving approval.”