Chapter 15 #2
“I like the sound of the sea.”
“You were coughing at five o’clock.”
She had not known he could hear her through the wall.
“I was not coughing. I cleared my throat.”
“For approximately four minutes.”
“You timed it?”
He turned a page. “I was awake.”
She sat in the chair opposite his and wrapped both hands around her cup. The room was warm. The fire crackled. She had not coughed, not truly; it had been a tickle, nothing more. But Mr. Darcy had noticed, and she was not certain what to think about that.
“Thank you,” she said.
“The day will warm soon, and you can open the window again then.”
“Perhaps I will.”
He nodded and returned to his paper. She heard him on the stairs a quarter of an hour later, and then, almost immediately after, a muffled thud and a word she was fairly certain a gentleman ought not to say.
The beam. She pressed her lips together and said nothing when he returned downstairs.
After the heat of the day had passed, she suggested they walk again.
“The beach?” he asked, as though there were a great many options available to them and he wished to choose correctly.
“Unless you had planned to walk in the garden, which I believe would take approximately one minute.”
They took the path through the garden gate and down the low slope to the sand.
The tide was out, the beach wide and sunny, and the breeze came off the water cool but not cold.
He offered his arm where the sand grew soft and deep.
She took it because the footing was uncertain. She told herself this firmly.
“You walk quickly,” she said, after they had rounded the point and the cottage had disappeared behind them.
“I walk at a normal pace.”
“We have canvassed this before. Your normal pace would leave most people gasping. You have very long legs, Mr. Darcy.”
He glanced down at her. “I have been told.”
“By whom?”
“My valet Franks. He finds them inconvenient when pressing my clothing.”
She laughed, surprised by the image of Franks waging war against an excess of leg in Mr. Darcy’s pantaloons. “Poor Franks.”
“He bears it with fortitude.”
They reached a stretch where the sand gave way to shells and dried seaweed. She stopped to pick up a flat stone, smooth and grey-green, and turned it in her fingers.
“My father collects stones,” she said. “Or he did, when we were children. He would take us walking and fill his pockets, and my mother would find them scattered about in their chambers and despair.”
Mr. Darcy was quiet for a moment. “My mother collected flowers. She pressed them in books. After she died, my father could not open a volume without finding one.”
It was the most he had told her about either of his parents. She kept her eyes on the shore and let the words hang between them.
“Did he keep them?”
Mr. Darcy paused. “No. He was not a man for that sort of thing. I believe Georgiana has a few.”
The wind picked up. Without a word, he shrugged out of his coat and draped it across her shoulders. It was absurdly large and warm from his body.
“I did not ask for that,” she said.
“You are cold.”
She hated to admit that she was cold, but she was the one who had insisted on honesty, and she had agreed to the rules. “I am always cold now. You cannot give me your coat every time I feel a chill.”
“I can, in fact. I have several.”
She attempted to push the sleeve back. It fell again immediately. She tried the other. The same.
He watched this for a moment, and then, without speaking, took the sleeve of his coat and folded the cuff back until her hand peeked through. Then he did the same for the other sleeve. His fingers were warm and deliberate, and he did not look at her face while he did it.
“There,” he said.
She looked down at herself, his coat tails hanging to her knees, the shoulders sagging, the rolled cuffs already beginning to slip. She must look absurd, but at this hour there was no one here to see.
“Thank you.”
He nodded once, turned towards the cottage, and offered his arm as though nothing remarkable had happened.
She took it. They walked back along the water, and neither of them mentioned it at all.
But while her husband's back was turned, Elizabeth buried her nose in the collar of his coat and breathed in the scent of him.
The following days revealed that Mr. Darcy, for all his elegance of person and reputation for discipline, did not like wearing a hat and was incapable of putting a book away. He left his hat on the hall table. She sat on his Cowper.
Meanwhile, her three shawls were always draped over the chairs, the banister, and the nook near the window, and he was forever folding and stacking them. He batted at the shawl she had hung from the beam. “Why is this here?”
“To remind you to duck,” she informed him, “or at least to soften the blow.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. Neither smiled, but neither needed to.
On their last evening, she could not sleep.
It had been an unexpectedly sweet interlude, learning more about one another while they hid from the world and pretended to be in love.
But she had a wary sense that the world, including the pair who had created these circumstances, was simply awaiting their reappearance.
The wind had turned in the night, coming hard off the sea, and the cottage creaked and settled around her.
She went downstairs. The little parlour looked bare without her shawls draped over the chairs and his books scattered about.
The fire had burned low but not out, someone had banked it carefully before retiring, though the embers gave off enough warmth to take the edge from the room.
She curled into her chair, pulled a blanket from the settee across her legs, and sat in the dark, listening to the sea.
She heard him on the stairs before she saw him. He moved quietly for a man of his size, but the cottage was small and the floorboards old. She had learned his step, longer than hers, heavier, slower at night.
He stopped in the doorway.
“I did not mean to wake you.”
“You did not. I heard you on the stairs.” He crossed to the fire and crouched to stir the embers and add coals.
The flames caught. For a moment the room brightened, and she saw his forearms where he had rolled his sleeves up, which made her think of wearing his coat.
She glanced over at him and noticed the way his shirt pulled across his shoulders as he worked the poker, and she gazed at the ceiling because she had been looking too long and the cottage was very small and very quiet and they were quite alone.
“Are you having trouble sleeping?” he asked, settling into the opposite chair. His knees were close to hers. The chairs had always been too close together in this room. She had grown accustomed to it, and now she did not want to grow unaccustomed.
“I was just thinking.”
“About London?”
“About this.” She gestured at the room, the scrubbed table, the two chairs by the fire, the window where the sea murmured behind the glass. “I did not expect to mind leaving.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Nor did I.”
“It is only a cottage.”
“True,” he agreed. But he did not say it with any conviction.
“A very small one,” she said. “Extremely.”
She wondered how long he could continue in this vein. “It has made privacy seem a rather distant ambition.”
“Which was rather the point.” At that, the corner of his mouth tugged upward. “And the beam has not been conducive to my dignity.”
The fire crackled. The wind pressed against the windows.
She pulled the blanket closer about her and studied her husband, thinking about how strange it was that she had woken in this cottage eight days ago not knowing how he took his coffee, and now she knew that he drank it without cream or sugar.
As she considered him, she found she had learned many other things as well.
He was knowledgeable about shells, walked into beams, rose each day before dawn, closed windows when she coughed.
She liked the sight of his fingers rolling up the sleeves on his coat.
She knew his mother had pressed wildflowers in books and his father had not been a man for keeping them.
She knew all of this and more, but she did not yet know what to do with any of it.
“Mr. Darcy.”
“Yes?”
“I think this week has been better than I had any reason to hope.”
He looked at her across the narrow space between their chairs, and the firelight caught his eyes, and she saw something in them that she was not ready to name but could not pretend she had not seen.
“Yes,” he said.
They sat for a while longer, not speaking, not needing to, while the fire burned and the waves crashed and the cottage held them in the last of its borrowed time. At some point her eyes grew heavy. She did not remember closing them.
Elizabeth woke in her own bed, in the grey light of early morning, with the blanket from downstairs tucked carefully around her and the fire in her grate freshly lit. She did not remember climbing the stairs.
He carried me.
She lay still and pressed her face into the pillow.
This was a most inconvenient discovery to make before breakfast. She did not know what to do with it any more than she knew what to do with him when he looked at her in the firelight or rolled his sleeves up to reveal his forearms so he could stir the coals.
But she held on to the confusing feelings it inspired in her, and she did not let it go.