Chapter 18 #2
“Oh, Elizabeth asked specifically that Mrs. Carroll not use it, because she knows my brother cannot bear it. She is very thoughtful that way.”
Darcy stood very still. He had not known about the béchamel, Mrs. Carroll, or the seven dishes, or any of it. Elizabeth had reorganised his kitchen and he had simply sat down each evening to better food without once asking why.
“And in the evenings,” Georgiana continued, with a sort of happy expansiveness, “she sits with Brother in the library. They read together every night. She has her own chair now.”
Darcy entered the morning room.
Bingley was comfortably seated, his eyes crinkled at the corners and his lips turned up into a small smile. He seemed to be enjoying Georgiana’s wellspring of information.
“Darcy!” Bingley sprang from his chair. “There you are. Your sister has been telling me about the improvements to your household. It seems Mrs. Darcy has been busy.”
“So I am discovering,” Darcy said.
His friend glanced behind Darcy towards the doorway. “Well, I must meet her. Where is she hiding?”
“Mrs. Darcy is out selecting some new music sheets for herself and Georgiana.” This was not remotely true.
Elizabeth was calling on a modiste, but Bingley’s sisters would be asking their brother for everything he knew about Elizabeth when he returned home, and Darcy did not wish for them to know it.
The lie had arrived fully formed before his better judgment could intervene, and now it was loose in the world.
Bingley was nodding as though it were the most natural thing imaginable, and now Darcy would need to remember what he had said and to tell Georgiana to maintain the fiction for him; judging from the look she was giving him, she wished to know why he had said what he had.
Possibly Elizabeth as well, who would certainly have opinions about being placed on an imaginary errand.
He did not understand how people could lie routinely. It was exhausting.
“It was very nice to visit with you, Mr. Bingley,” Georgiana said softly. She curtsied and removed from the room with a curious glance at Darcy.
Bingley bowed, then turned to him. “A pity I have missed her. You must bring her to Netherfield. I insist upon it.”
“I am afraid I must decline.” The words came out more curtly than he intended. “There are matters in London currently that require my attention.”
Bingley’s face fell. He was, as ever, incapable of concealing his feelings. “Matters? What sort of matters? Are you all well?”
“Perfectly well.”
“You do not look perfectly well.” His brows pinched together and he glanced at the door through which Georgiana had departed. “Is it the marriage?” he asked quietly. “Your sister has been effusive with her praises, particularly as she is generally so retiring, but Caroline said—”
“My marriage is excellent.” He heard the bluntness in his own voice and regretted it. Bingley had done nothing to deserve his ill temper. “Forgive me. There is a private matter I cannot discuss. I would come if I could.”
Bingley studied him with more perception than Darcy generally credited him with. “You know I will help if I am able.”
“I do know, and I thank you.” He offered his hand. “I am sorry I cannot accompany you.”
His friend stood. “Well, my friend, I will meet Mrs. Darcy, one way or another. Miss Darcy tells me she is a remarkable woman, but of course you would never marry her if she was not.”
He smiled softly. “She is challenging. Stubborn. Opinionated.”
Bingley tipped his head slightly to one side.
“She sounds like you,” he said approvingly.
“Excellent. You have been too comfortable for too long, a bit of challenge is just what you need.” He clapped Darcy on the shoulder, collected his hat, and was gone with the same breezy energy that had carried him in, leaving the morning room feeling oddly emptier for his absence.
Darcy stood at the window and watched his friend’s carriage pull away. He returned to his study, took up Fitz’s letter, and read it again.
That evening, Elizabeth came to the library as usual.
He watched her sit and open the Edgeworth, watched the firelight play across her features as she read.
She was entirely absorbed within a minute, her lips slightly parted, her brow occasionally creasing at something in the text.
He wondered what part she was reading. He wanted to ask, but he did not.
He could not concentrate. His own book lay open in his lap, but he had not turned a page in twenty minutes. His mind was in Somers Town, in a lodging house he had never seen, circling Mrs. Younge and the unnamed man and the question he could not answer: What do they want?
He felt Elizabeth’s gaze before he saw it. When he looked up, she was watching him with the quiet, assessing attention he was beginning to know well.
“You are not reading,” she said.
“I am.”
“You have been staring at the same page for a quarter of an hour. I have been timing you.”
He almost smiled. “You are criticising me again, Mrs. Darcy.”
“Observing.” She closed her book, keeping one finger between the pages. “Is something troubling you?”
Yes, he thought. Mrs. Younge has been found in London under a false name. Wickham is likely with her. I am afraid for you and for Georgiana, and I cannot tell you because we do not know enough about what might be happening yet, and I would not disturb your peace until we do.
“A business matter,” he said, though the words tasted bitter. “Nothing of consequence.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, and he saw she did not believe him. He could see it in the slight narrowing of her eyes, the way her chin lifted fractionally, the deliberate pause before she spoke.
“Very well,” she said. Then she returned to her book.
The silence that followed was different from the ones that had come before.
It was not hostile, but it was not easy either.
She had extended him grace, had chosen not to press, and Darcy understood that this grace had a cost. Rule the Second demanded the truth.
He was not lying, precisely, but the omission sat heavily upon him, and he suspected she knew it.
He owed her better than this. He would speak to Fitz tomorrow.
The clock ticked. The fire burned lower. Elizabeth turned a page.
After a time, she laughed, a quiet, involuntary sound that she tried to suppress and failed.
“What is it?” he asked.
She held up the Edgeworth. “The author has just argued that a properly educated woman will naturally defer to sound reasoning in her husband.” She pressed her lips together. “I think you should be warned that I have yet to feel the natural deference setting in.”
He considered this. “I shall alert the household.”
A genuine, unguarded smile that reached her eyes. It transformed her entire face and made him feel, for one reckless, unsteady moment, that everything they had endured might have been worth it for the simple privilege of sitting in a library with this woman while she smiled at him.
“We are married, Mr. Darcy.” Her voice was conversational, as though she were remarking upon the weather. She drew her shawl over her shoulders. “I think you ought to call me Elizabeth.”
He went very still.
It should not have felt momentous. He already thought of her as Elizabeth.
Georgiana and Mrs. Morgan called her Elizabeth.
Even Fitz had called her by her Christian name once or twice.
But none of them were her husband, and none of them had been offered the name as a bridge across a silence that had grown comfortable but too wide.
He considered his answer with more care than the question probably warranted. “Elizabeth,” he said.
He said it carefully, the syllables deliberate in his mouth, as though he were learning to pronounce a word in a language he did not yet speak fluently.
It felt intimate in a way he had not anticipated.
More intimate, somehow, than the vows they had exchanged in the church at Ramsgate with her father and Fitz watching and Mrs. Morgan and Georgiana tearing up and the vicar reading from a book and asking the bride how to spell Bennet.
He was not fond of his Christian name. He considered, briefly, offering William. It was shorter. Warmer.
“You may call me Fitzwilliam, if you like,” he said. He steadied himself, as he always did, for the flicker of amusement or the polite struggle to find something kind to say.
She studied him, not with amusement or the careful diplomacy he expected, but with a quiet, considered attention.
“It suits you,” she said.
She meant it. He could hear that she meant it, in the steadiness of her voice and the way she held his gaze without looking away.
She was not merely being kind. She had considered the name and considered the man and found that they matched, and something inside him, something that had been held tightly for longer than he cared to examine, quietly unclenched like the opening of a fist.
He rose. He was not sure why he rose—he had no reason to rise—but he was standing now and something had to be done about it. His eyes landed on her shawl and he crossed to the fire screen, adjusting it to block the draught from the window.
She said nothing. But her gaze followed him as he positioned the screen, and when he returned to his chair, she was looking at him with an expression he could not quite read.
“Thank you,” he said, and meant a great deal more by it than the words themselves could carry. He drank his tea, and she drank hers.
At last, she rose to retire. As she passed him on her way to the door, her hand came to rest for a moment over his own where it lay along the arm—neither of them were wearing gloves, and her touch was warm, bare, and entirely deliberate. Her fingers closed briefly, and then she was moving again.
The charge of it went through Darcy before he had fully understood what had happened, a shock so clean and so complete that he did not move, did not turn his head, did not breathe for what might have been a count of three.
His hand remained where she had left it, the warmth of her palm fading from the back of it by degrees, and he found that he could not quite trust himself to speak.
She paused in the doorway. “Goodnight, Fitzwilliam.”
He forced himself to take a breath and reply, though his voice was hoarse. “Goodnight, Elizabeth.”
She left, and he sat for a long time in the quiet library.
Tomorrow he would speak to Fitz. Tomorrow he would decide what to tell Elizabeth about Mrs. Younge, and the man in Somers Town, and the threat that had not gone away simply because he had willed it to.
Tomorrow he would be honest, because he could not stand to keep this from her any longer.
It had been difficult enough before she had given him her name and he had given her his. It was impossible now.
But tonight, he held the evening in his mind like something precious and let himself, just for a moment, look forward to the library hour tomorrow.
He did not admit this to himself. But she had left her book on the arm of the chair rather than reshelving it, and he was already considering which volume to leave at her setting in the morning.