Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sometime after the last footman had been dismissed and before the servants had quite finished reassembling the house, Darcy escorted Elizabeth to the library.
Elizabeth sat on the settee, but he remained standing. “The fire needs tending,” she said a little woodenly.
“It does,” he said, and occupied himself with the poker rather longer than the task required while waiting for her to speak. He had no doubt that she would.
Elizabeth folded and unfolded her hands once in her lap. “Well,” she said. “That was tiresome.”
He turned, still crouched before the hearth, and looked at her.
She was pale with fatigue, though her voice remained steady. Not shaken exactly. But the evening had exacted something. He disliked seeing the evidence of it. He disliked still more that he had contributed to it by nearly falling for Wickham’s ploy. Again.
“That is one word for it,” he said.
“It is the one I have selected in a spirit of moderation.”
He chuckled.
“I am happy with you,” Elizabeth said.
He put the poker down and lifted his eyes to hers. The firelight was doing something to the colour of her hair that he had learned, over these months, not to look at directly if he wished to keep track of what was being said. “Are you?”
“Mostly,” she answered.
He looked at Elizabeth, and she held his gaze with an expression of perfect composure, though he detected a glint of mischief in her eyes.
She twisted her lips into a mischievous half-smile, the one that meant she was being honest at some cost to herself.
He was aware, not for the first time, that his wife was a very handsome woman and that the library was a very quiet room.
“That is quite a compliment,” he replied. “Nearly as good as ‘adequate’ or ‘formidable.’”
Her cheeks pinked. “Do not interrupt. I am attempting to be candid, and you are making it difficult by looking at me like that.”
His smile grew wider. “I was not aware I was looking at you in any particular manner.”
“You look,” she said, “as smug as a man whose horse has just won the Derby.”
“If that ever occurred, I would be smug indeed.”
Elizabeth shifted slightly against the cushions.
“I am happy with you,” she said again, more quietly.
“I am also irritated with you a good deal of the time. I remain sorry to have lost the autumn with Jane. I would have enjoyed dancing with you at Mr. Bingley’s ball.
I do not care for having decisions made without me, as you are aware.
And I think your tendency to take six burdens upon yourself when two would do is an absurd and trying habit. ”
He nodded. “I begin to see why you said ‘mostly.’”
“But,” she continued, “I am pleased with how things have turned out. More pleased than I expected to be. And since honesty is always the best way forward, I know very well that I am not an easy person to live with either.”
He opened his mouth, but she kept speaking.
“You may spare me the chivalrous lie,” she told him. “I am fully aware that I talk a great deal, am impatient, occasionally vain, and disposed to form rapid opinions, though I have lately learned that it is possible to soften them.”
He would never have said those things to her. She was not wrong, but he would never be foolish enough to say them. Besides, she had forgiven him, so he found he was so happy that he did not much mind. She had many fine qualities that quite overshadowed her faults.
“You are an angel,” he said gravely.
She huffed. “Now you are merely amusing yourself at my expense.”
He was. Something in him loosened enough for a breath that was almost laughter. “I would not dare.”
“And yet,” she said, “here we are. Difficult in all the ways that make us a good match for one another.”
She had the most honest face Darcy had ever looked at.
Not transparent—she was far too clever for that—but when she felt something, it was there to be seen by anyone who had learned to read her.
He had spent several months learning, and she had just let him see all of it at once.
He gazed at her in the firelight. And because there was no longer any need to speak around it, because the house was quiet, the danger was over, and she deserved to know, he said, “I am happy too.”
Being with her in the library now, he understood why he had chosen to bring his wife here rather than their chambers.
It was because this was the room to which they retreated when neither knew what to say but wanted to try.
It was the place where they had begun to know one another beyond the rules they had set before the marriage.
It was an important room, and not just because it was how they had discovered they each had a fondness for reading.
There was something he wanted to say, but he had no adequate way to say it. Every arrangement he attempted dissolved before he could grasp it. Perhaps . . .
He rose, crossed to her, and offered his hand.
She looked up at him. There was a fraction of a second—he watched it happen—where she did not yet understand. And then she did.
Elizabeth took his hand.
There was no music. He had not thought that far ahead, and it did not seem to matter. He drew her gently to her feet, and they found something between them that was not quite a figure, a movement together without a tune, only the quiet of the room, the fire burning low, and her hand in his.
He led, as he always had, as he knew how to do, the kind of order he understood.
And then something changed. He was not certain, afterwards, at what precise moment he had stopped, only that he had begun to attend to her instead, to follow rather than direct, and that the adjustment had cost him nothing.
Less than nothing. There was something in the relinquishing of it that he had not expected, a kind of relief.
A loosening of something he had not known he was still holding.
And then neither of them was leading.
They had found something else, some third thing, shared and unplanned, and Darcy thought, this.
This was what he wanted. Her, close, the quiet understanding that here was a person he trusted entirely with the weight of everything, who had today proven beyond any remaining doubt that his trust was not misplaced, that her strength was true.
Darcy was acutely aware that his wife was very close. He could smell her jasmine scent, feel the warmth of her body, hear again the way she had said I would do it all again, and he wanted, needed, considerably more than this dance.
He did not attempt to act upon his desire, for he had taken her choice of who to marry from her. This choice must remain hers. He would wait. He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that the waiting did not trouble him the way it once had.
They stopped moving, and Elizabeth pulled back just a little, to gaze up at him with something like wonder.
And then the door opened.
Fitz strolled in with an air of self-satisfaction. “Right,” he said, dropping into the nearest chair. “Shall I congratulate myself before or after the report?” He then looked at them and blinked.
Such a large house, and yet they could never find any privacy.
“Oh, during, if you are able,” Elizabeth said cheerfully as she pulled away entirely. It was a touch too bright, but Darcy could not blame her for that.
Fitz barked out a laugh, no doubt to cover his embarrassment. “I am always able.”
Darcy took a breath and brought his mind back to the matter at hand. “Wickham?”
“Not prosecution, an arrangement. He wants to leave the country? Excellent. We shall send him to India. He will go in a servant’s capacity attached to a few officers, friends of mine, something exactly suited to his talents.
” He looked between them with open enjoyment.
“Bad pay, worse climate, but excellent moral instruction.”
“For how long?” Darcy inquired. He did not want the man back in England.
“Until he pays back all his debts, including the cost of the items he intended to steal and his own transportation.”
Elizabeth’s brows rose. “He accepted this willingly?”
“He accepted it when I pointed out that it is that or the hangman. His attempt against Georgiana would transport him on its own, and burglary is a capital offence. Courts, however, are slow and loud and quite indiscriminate about the damage they do along the way.” The pause that followed was one of evident self-satisfaction.
“The army has quieter methods. I have friends in the Company who are always in search of servants to accompany them to India. He will go out attached to their service, not ours, which keeps it tidy. No courts, no public record, no newspapers.” He paused.
“He did ask whether there was a third option.”
“Was there?” Darcy asked, curious despite himself.
“There was not.”
That, Darcy thought, was exactly right.
“And Mrs. Younge?” Elizabeth asked.
The colonel’s expression became positively cheerful.
“Mrs. Younge has made a very advantageous arrangement. To my mind, one of my finest compositions. She has skimmed enough from Darcy’s funds during the entirety of her employement that repayment on an ordinary companion’s salary would require something in the neighbourhood of two decades, and perhaps a miracle.
She may therefore do one of two things. She may be transported for theft.
Or she may enter Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s employment, where the debt will be suspended unless she leaves or is dismissed. ”
Darcy narrowed his eyes at his cousin. “Does Lady Catherine know she is in want of a companion?”
“My aunt is always in want of someone over whom she may exercise her benevolence.” The colonel spread his hands.
“Mrs. Younge was so fond of Kent that she may now return there to enjoy room, board, and the daily correction of every thought she has ever had. If she departs, the debt is reinstated. Lady Catherine will naturally inform us. I have already sent off the express.”