Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Darcy had mentioned the bookshop when he had taken his wife to Margate, and at last, he meant to fulfil the promise to take her.
“Perhaps we might take the carriage to the bookshop,” he said at breakfast, as though the notion had arrived unbidden rather than been rehearsed during his morning ride.
Elizabeth had looked at him over the rim of her teacup with an expression he was learning to recognise as amused suspicion. “The bookshop?”
There. He could hear he had intrigued her.
“Hatchards,” he answered with more confidence. “There is a volume I wished to seek.”
“Oh, which volume?”
He had not prepared for this question. “A treatise on land management.”
Her lips turned up into an impish smile. “How riveting.”
“I am told it is very thorough.”
“I have no doubt.” She set down her cup. “I should like that very much, Fitzwilliam. Just the two of us?”
Was that hope he heard? “Just the two of us.” Georgiana’s French master was due soon, and he meant to steal Elizabeth away before his sister was aware.
He had wanted this for a week. Not the bookshop—the bookshop was a means, not an end.
He wanted, needed the ease of her company without the weight of what he was concealing pressing against every word.
The other night in the library she had defended him without knowing what she was defending him from, had seen his guilt rising and immediately assuaged it.
She had spoken about Miss Brunton’s Laura with a fury that was clearly not about Miss Brunton’s Laura, and he had sat there knowing that the whispers she could not help but hear, were the very thing he was keeping from her, and the irony had been so bitter he could taste it.
He owed her the truth. He would give it to her. But she was going to hate him after, and first—selfishly, recklessly—he wanted one more good morning.
They had been in the carriage perhaps five minutes, long enough for London to close around them when she said, “It has been nearly two months since we arrived in London.”
He looked at her.
“The rules,” she said. “We are rather behind our time. We agreed to revisit them.”
He leaned back. “I recall.”
He reached into his breast pocket and produced a small, folded square of paper, which he set on his knee.
Elizabeth looked at the paper. She looked at him. “You have notes? That you carry about in your pocket?”
Of course he had notes. He was serious about their rules, for she required them to feel safe. “I suspected we would have this conversation eventually, and so I prepared.”
She absorbed this. “For the reassessment of our marriage rules.”
He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Writing things down helps me to clarify my thinking.”
She blinked at him, then nodded. “Very well. Rule the first was separate chambers.”
“Still in effect.” He wished it was not.
“Obviously.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Rule the second. Honesty, even when uncomfortable.”
He paused, his eyes alighting upon the words he had penned there, and did not read them. “Still in force.” He felt a little ill.
She nodded. “Rule the third. No pretence in private.”
They looked at each other. The carriage rocked gently.
“I find,” Darcy said slowly, “that I cannot recall the last time I felt the need for it.”
“Nor I.” She glanced at the window. “Rule the fourth. Caring is not controlling.”
He glanced at his notes.
“Fitzwilliam.”
“I have a notation,” he told her.
“About rule four?”
“It is brief.” He refolded the paper. “It says ‘improving.’ I have underlined it.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together very firmly. “You are improving,” she said, generously.
“Thank you,” he said. “Rule the fifth. ‘We resolve disagreements between ourselves.’ I believe we have had a good deal of practice with that.”
“We have.” She bit back a smile. “Rule the sixth. Georgiana is my sister too.”
“That one has taken care of itself.” This was an understatement of some magnitude.
She tipped her head in agreement. “Rule the seventh,” Elizabeth said. “Monthly reassessment.”
“Which we are currently conducting, though a little late.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
The carriage slowed as they turned into Piccadilly. Outside, the street was already busy, pedestrians threading between carts, a flower seller outside the church.
“Well,” Elizabeth said. “I find the rules are either unnecessary or holding, in the main.”
“As do I.” Darcy looked at the paper, looked at her, and then put the notes away.
When they arrived, he held the door of the shop for Elizabeth and then followed her in.
He stood close but where he could watch her face change the way it always did in the presence of books, a softening around the eyes, a slight lift at the corners of her mouth, the focused pleasure of a woman who has found herself at home.
Almost immediately, her gaze travelled upward to where the highest shelves disappeared into shadow, and then to the sliding ladder on its brass rail that might, in theory, convey a person to them. He understood the danger immediately.
He arched an eyebrow when she looked at him. She cast her eyes up to the ceiling, and then mercifully acquiesced. Or maybe she had not, for when she turned back to the lower shelves, her hand closed on a slim volume.
“This,” she said, pulling a slim volume from a lower shelf and presenting it to him in all innocence, “is essential reading.”
He took it. Turned it over. “A Treatise on the Management of Bees.” Appropriate, given that she was even now moving through the shop like a bee among blossoms, alighting on one volume only long enough to exclaim over it before moving to the next.
“Essential for whom?” he asked fondly as he watched her, one hand trailing along the spines, a gasp at a title she recognised, a small covetous sound at one she did not.
“For you, obviously. The maintenance of bees is a cornerstone of a healthy estate. I am surprised you have not already read it.”
He studied the frontispiece. The author appeared to be a clergyman from Shropshire who had strong opinions about the arrangement of skeps. “I keep no bees.”
“What a shame. I adore honey.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. Her expression was so perfectly composed, so exquisitely earnest, that he could not determine whether she was in jest or whether she had genuinely identified the absence of bees as a deficiency in her future home.
Knowing Elizabeth, it was entirely possible she meant both.
“I shall consider it,” he said, and tucked the book under his arm.
Her eyes widened. “You will?”
“You recommended it. I take your recommendations with the gravity they deserve.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth, closed it, and then pressed her lips together very firmly. He was almost certain she was trying not to laugh. He found that he wanted, quite badly, for her to lose the battle.
She did not. Elizabeth was capable in all things, including the suppression of involuntary amusement. Instead, she turned to the next shelf and produced another volume, this one considerably more battered.
“And this,” she said, reading the title, “is a Complete History of Drainage in the Low Countries. Indispensable if one wishes to understand the Dutch approach.”
“I have no Dutch properties.”
“Not yet.”
“Elizabeth,” he growled in a playful warning.
She was paging through the contents. “The chapter on sluice gates alone must be worth the price.” She held it out to him with both hands, as though offering a great prize. Very well, he would play the game. He took it, examined the cover, and placed it on top of the bee book with the same gravity.
“Any others?”
She bit the inside of her cheek. “There may be a volume on the diseases of sheep that I noticed near the door.”
“Lead the way.”
She made a small, suppressed squeak that very nearly made him laugh.
Then she led him through the shop with increasing audacity, pulling volumes from the shelves with recommendations that grew progressively more absurd.
A guide to the cultivation of turnips. A treatise on ecclesiastical architecture in the Midlands.
A slim pamphlet, half in Latin, that appeared to concern the medicinal properties of lichen.
He accepted each one with the solemnity of a man assembling a library of vital importance, and by the time they reached the back of the shop she had given up entirely and was laughing, quietly but properly laughing.
“You are impossible,” she said, breathless. “You were supposed to object.”
“I never object to sound advice.”
“Sound advice, do you call it? I recommended a pamphlet on lichen.”
“Lichen is a much-neglected subject. I am grateful for the education.”
She laughed again, and for a suspended, perfect moment they stood in the back of Hatchards with an armload of wildly diverse volumes between them, where nothing else in the world mattered except the fact that she was laughing and he had caused it.
He returned the other volumes to their places—she had to remind him where some of them had been found—and bought the bee book. The bookseller wrapped it in brown paper and tied it with string, and Darcy tucked it under his arm.
“You are going to read it,” she said as they stepped into the November sunlight.
“I have not decided.”
“You are going to read every page. You are going to develop opinions about bees.”
“I already have an opinion about bees. They are annoying but necessary.”
She suppressed another laugh by pressing her hand over her mouth, which did not work at all.
The sound that escaped was neither a laugh nor a snort, but occupied some unhappy middle territory that caused a passing woman some alarm.
Darcy nodded to her calmly, as though he had not just caused his wife to laugh aloud on a public street.
Elizabeth caught his eye and the shared effort of not laughing made the whole thing worse, which also made it better.