Chapter 19 #3
When Mrs. Hadley departed, Elizabeth sat alone in the morning room and pressed her hands flat against her knees until they stopped trembling.
The gossip about their marriage was not going away. The whisper at Lady Drummond’s dinner. Mrs. Hadley’s bolder questions.
She needed to tell Fitzwilliam.
“Has Mr. Darcy returned?” she asked Tracy.
“The curtains, madam?” Tracy replied, at volume. “Indeed, they are rather faded. I have mentioned it to Mrs. Aldworth on several occasions.”
“Mr. Darcy,” Elizabeth repeated, more clearly. “Has he returned home?”
“His horse is very fine, yes, madam.” The butler gave no sign that such a strange question perturbed him.
She took a breath, stood directly before Tracy, and spoke again. “Is. He. Here.”
Tracy considered as though weighing a matter of state. “He is in his study, madam.”
“Thank you, Tracy.”
“You are most welcome, madam. Shall I have the curtains seen to?”
Elizabeth blinked, then surrendered. “Yes, thank you.”
Fitzwilliam was home. She needed to tell him that whatever he was carrying was not his to carry alone. She was a part of this story too, and she meant to have her part.
But when she turned to walk to the study, it was Georgiana who appeared, bright-eyed and flushed from practising, taking Elizabeth by the hand and pulling her to the garden where the last autumn roses were still clinging to the wall and the air smelled of woodsmoke and damp earth.
“Come and see,” Georgiana said. “The gardener has found the most extraordinary beetle.”
She went. She went because she could not tell the girl why she needed to interrupt Fitzwilliam’s morning. Georgiana’s hand was warm in hers, the garden was beautiful, and the beetle was, in fact, extraordinary—iridescent green, the size of a shilling, sitting on a rose leaf.
Jane was the one who was always in the garden at home. She would have known the beetle’s name and something about its habits.
Georgiana was still crouched over the rose leaf, when Elizabeth straightened.
She felt a pain in her heart. She missed all her family, but Jane in particular.
Jane, who should have been beside her for all of this.
The Drummond dinner, the morning room, Mrs. Hadley’s poisoned solicitude. Her husband’s reticence.
Georgiana looked up. “Do you think it minds being looked at?”
“I think it is entirely indifferent to us,” Elizabeth said, forcing herself back to the present. “Which I find rather enviable.”
She would write to Jane tonight. A proper letter, not the careful, edited version she had been sending. Something that sounded like herself.
Elizabeth felt pulled in three directions: her sisters at Longbourn, her new sister in London, and the husband who needed her to ask the question he could not bring himself to broach. She felt a nagging certainty that she was somehow failing them all.
She would have insisted. She wanted to insist, to sit across from him in the library and say, plainly, Tell me what is wrong.
She had tried that once already, and he had brushed it away.
She wanted him to come to her with whatever this problem was.
But he was hesitant, and she would have to be patient.
A few days later she came down to breakfast and found a book at her place beside the teacup.
This was not unusual. Her husband had been leaving books for her since their first week in town.
Crabbe, Edgeworth, Johnson, each one carefully chosen, each one the sort of volume a serious-minded gentleman might consider improving.
She had read and enjoyed them all, though she had returned the Johnson simply because she already owned a copy.
But this was not Crabbe or Edgeworth or Johnson.
She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. Self-Control by Mary Brunton.
He had left her a novel. One that had only been published earlier in the year and was difficult to obtain.
Not merely a novel, but the sort he had every reason to consider frivolous, the sort her father would have teased her about and no one at Longbourn would have thought to leave for her.
Even if they had, Lydia would have insisted on reading it first.
She opened the cover. No note. No inscription. But the pages were cut.
Elizabeth sat down slowly and pressed the book flat against the table with both hands, as though it might escape if she did not hold it there.
She was aware that her heart was doing something fluttery, that the toast was getting cold, that Georgiana would be down in a matter of minutes to claim her for the morning, and that none of this mattered in the slightest because Fitzwilliam Darcy had left her a novel.
He appeared in the doorway. Coffee in hand. Wearing his morning coat. Hair combed but not quite tamed. He glanced at the table, at the book beneath her hands, at her face.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning.” She held up the book. “This is not Johnson.”
“No.”
“This is a novel.”
“I am aware.”
“A difficult-to-procure novel.”
“I have connexions.”
“So you used your connexions and then you sat down with a paper knife and cut every page.”
“It is not an arduous task.”
“You told me that you seldom even read novels.”
“I did not read this one. I merely prepared it.” He said as though it were a remark about the price of grain.
Elizabeth forgave him for formidable at once.
She rose before she had fully decided to. The Brunton was still in one hand, and she crossed the short distance to where he stood in the doorway, close enough that she had to tip her face up to look at him properly.
“Thank you,” she said.
Her free hand settled against the front of his waistcoat, and then, because he was warm and she could feel the quick beating of his hard beneath her palm, she leaned a little closer and tipped her head up.
The book was pressed between them. His coat smelled of sandalwood and fresh linen and, faintly, of the coffee he had been drinking, and for the space of several breaths she simply stood there with her hand against her husband’s chest and let herself feel how solid he was.
She did not, at first, understand what was happening. Then she did understand.
She did not pull away at once, but she grew aware of her hand flat against his waistcoat and her chin tipped up and the fact that she could feel his breath going slightly uneven.
His hands had not moved. One still held the coffee.
The other had come up at some point, though she had not felt it happen, and was hovering just behind her shoulder, not touching her, not quite not-touching her either, as though he had been on the verge of closing his arm around her and had stopped himself at the last possible instant.
She stepped back. “I —” she began.
“Do not apologise,” he said. His voice was low and not quite steady. “I beg you.”
Elizabeth nodded. She was grateful he had said so, for she did not wish to apologise.
She stepped back and his hand, the one that had been not-touching her, lowered slowly to his side.
“The book,” she said, lifting it slightly. Her voice was steadier than she had any right to expect. “I shall begin reading it today.”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “I thought you might. Well. I must—” He glanced about, and then was gone.
Elizabeth took her place back at the table and opened her novel.
The toast grew cold. Georgiana appeared, bright-eyed and full of plans for the day, and the morning swallowed them.
The Brunton disappeared into Elizabeth’s chamber, where she placed it on the bedside table beside Jane’s letters and her father’s stone from the beach at Ramsgate.
Elizabeth’s thoughts were all in a whirl.
He had called her extraordinary and then told her that her eyes were both inconvenient and arresting.
He had nearly kissed her, and then he had not kissed her, and then neither of them had spoken of it, and then he had gone to great trouble to find and prepare a book he would never read because he knew she would like it.
At Longbourn, she understood the rules. She was the clever one, the capable one, the one who did things.
She deflected her mother, steadied her father, shielded Jane, and attempted to instruct her younger sisters, though with dubious effect.
She held the household together through sheer force of wit and will, and in return nobody looked too closely at what Elizabeth herself might want or need because Elizabeth simply managed.
But this man, this impossible, quiet, inarticulate man who could not string a compliment together in company, who had rolled the cuffs of his coat for her on a beach, who had carried her up a flight of stairs without waking her, who had left her a novel at the breakfast table—this man was not a problem to be solved or a situation to be navigated.
He was present, fully present, and when they convened again in the library that evening, she watched him reading his book, frowning at a passage, occasionally turning a page with his long fingers.
She could not stop watching him and she did not know why.
Except that she did know why, and the knowing was the most terrifying thing that had happened to her since the bathhouse at Ramsgate.
She returned her eyes to her novel, reading the same paragraph for the eleventh time and absorbing nothing.