Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The colonel had stayed long enough to eat, which Elizabeth suspected was the primary reason he had stayed at all, and had then departed for Bow Street, where Mr. Wickham and Mrs. Younge would be held in separate cells until they could be sent their separate ways.
The magistrate had approved their plans; the cases would not be brought to court.
The small supper had been Mrs. Carroll’s doing—cold meats, bread, a lovely burgundy appearing without even being requested, as things in this house had a way of doing. Elizabeth had been hungrier than she realised.
Now the supper things had been cleared and she had come upstairs with Fitzwilliam, by unspoken agreement, to the sitting room between their chambers.
He had not yet spoken.
She had noticed him trying. He had looked at the fire. He had looked at his hands. He had very nearly begun to say something twice and twice had thought better of it.
She did not help him. She had learned, over these months, that rescuing Fitzwilliam Darcy from his own silences generally produced an unsatisfying result.
At length he said, “You are very good.”
Elizabeth considered gently pointing out that “You are very good” was really an assessment more suited to a well-trained spaniel than to a declaration of any kind.
She did not, because her husband, while an excellent speaker in all other ways, needed time to compose his thoughts when something truly mattered to him.
“Am I?” she asked, trying to be encouraging.
“That is not—” He stopped and took a breath to begin again.
“I have been attempting to find a suitable way to say something, and I find that I cannot compose anything that does not feel dishonest in its arrangement. So I will say it without arrangement and ask you to bear with me if it comes out badly ordered.”
He was very formal for a man who removed his hat the very instant that he could. The memory of him at the cottage made her smile. “I will bear with you,” Elizabeth said.
He looked at her then, and she was glad she had not made a jest.
“I have been watching you,” he said, “since Ramsgate. I was watching you before I understood that I was. The way you spoke to Georgiana that first week, when she was frightened and pretending not to be. The way you can read a room when you enter it. The way you laughed when Lady Drummond said something very foolish and made it sound as though you had laughed at something charming so she never knew the difference.”
Elizabeth said nothing. She did not wish for him to stop.
“The morning Georgiana taught you to play the duet and you played it badly on purpose to make her feel useful, which you did so well that I was almost not certain you had meant it.” He stopped.
Elizabeth had believed that little fiction successful. He truly had been observing her.
“When you spoke to Wickham tonight, not knowing whether I was there, and you said . . .” He stopped again. “That you would do it all again.”
“I would,” Elizabeth said.
“I know.” He nodded then lifted the back of his hand and stroked her cheek.
Her breath caught at the feel of his skin on hers.
“That is rather the point,” he continued. “You said it in front of the whole household, and in front of him. He was already caught. There was nothing to be gained by it.”
“It satisfied me to tell him that he had not won,” she whispered. “That he had led me to my happiness rather than destroying it.”
“I do not excel,” he said, “at this kind of speech. I am aware of that. I know that what I have just produced is a list of specific observations in no particular order, which is not what I intended and is probably not what you had hoped for . . .”
“It is exactly what I had hoped for,” Elizabeth said.
He looked at her.
“A polished speech,” she said, “would have told me that you had rehearsed it. This tells me that you feel it.”
A long silence passed.
“I want to keep you,” he said, and then winced.
But Elizabeth rather liked the plainness of it.
It was not “I love you,” spoken grandly and delivered at just the proper moment, nor a declaration in any of the forms she might have imagined back in Ramsgate, before she knew that the form was never the point with him.
Just quiet and unembellished and earnest, which was more honest than anything elegant could have been. I want to keep you.
She understood, quite suddenly, that she was going to have to be entirely honest in return.
Not the cautious, partial honesty she had employed so far, the “mostly,” the list of his faults, but the full kind, the kind that required setting down every last measure of self-protection and laying herself bare before him.
Elizabeth had held some part of herself apart throughout these months.
She had been warm and engaged and genuinely pleased by him in ways that surprised her.
But she had never given herself wholly away.
She had told herself that this was prudent, that in a marriage that came about the way theirs had, she could not afford the sort of vulnerability that intimacy required.
She thought of all the walls he had built to protect those he loved—around Georgiana, around the grief he still carried from his parents’ deaths, around herself.
She had done the same. But all that had accomplished was to create separation, to damage the way they communicated with one another, and to leave them both, in their own ways, alone.
The bravest thing they could do—the thing they must do—was to let those walls fall.
“I do not want to go back,” she said at last, “to the way it was at the beginning. The rules, the careful distances.” She paused. “I know now that I was measuring out exactly the amount of happiness that I permitted myself to expect.”
He was very still.
“It is not enough,” she said. “And I should like more, if you are offering it.”
He let out a breath that ended in an incredulous laugh. “If I am offering it? Yes. I am.”
She sat. He sat beside her. Closer, this time, than they had before.
Elizabeth had felt this once before, on the morning after her illness had been overcome. On that day the air had tasted different, the light came into the room in a new way, and her body understood before her mind had that the worst was over and good things lay ahead.
For a while they spoke of smaller things, the colonel’s evident satisfaction with his own ingenuity, Georgiana’s speech and the extraordinary self-possession it had required from a girl of fifteen, Tracy’s umbrella, and the two pounds of keys that had not been deployed but would have been.
“Do you know,” Elizabeth said, “I believe Mrs. Aldworth was genuinely sorry not to have had the opportunity.”
“She has waited years to use those keys as a weapon,” Darcy said. “The occasion would have been significant.”
“A wasted opportunity.”
He looked at her with something very like delight, and Elizabeth knew she would not easily tire of being looked at in that way.
“The rules,” he said, after a little while.
“The rules?” Elizabeth asked.
He nodded. “Some of them were sensible.”
“Most of them were.” She watched the flames dance in the hearth. “Rule the second has served us well. We have told each other the truth tonight, although it was uncomfortable.”
“I believe that was the stipulation.” He smiled at her. “Rule the third,” he said. “No pretence in private.”
“Also honoured, though I imagine there were times you wished it had not been.” Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. “I have found that you are, at times, quite remarkably kind.”
“Do not let it be generally known.”
“Your reputation for severity is safe with me.”
“Rule the fourth,” he said then, with a slight shift in his tone that made her look at him more closely.
“Yours,” she said, remembering. Caring is not the same as controlling.
“I did not always observe it.”
“No.” She hesitated. “But when I said as much, you heard me.”
“That is a very modest standard.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Not to me.” She let that sit between them for a moment. She had not meant to say it so plainly, but neither did she wish to take it back.
“When the letter came today,” she said, “you asked what I wished done. Before you had formed any plan of your own.”
He met her gaze. “I shall not always remember to do it,” he said.
“I know.” Her voice was quiet. “But I trust you. You will hear me when I remind you. That is enough.” She paused.
Now was not a time to maintain their current status. Now was the time to move forward. She took a deep breath, and said, “Rule the first has perhaps run its course.”
He was so still she could not tell whether he was still breathing. Elizabeth had learned most of his silences, and this was the deliberating silence, the one that preceded a very precisely worded response, and that looked, from the outside, like a man who had been struck over the head.
“Time was what I needed,” she said, giving him time to collect himself. “You were right to give it to me, for I could not have trusted a man who swept it aside. But I made the rule when I was frightened, and I am not frightened any longer.”
The room was warm, dim, and quiet, and she was acutely aware of how close he was sitting. He had been waiting since they had married, and it could not have been easy. It occurred to her that his waiting had been an act of faith.
He lifted his arm, a question rather than a claim. “May I?”
She leaned into him. He put his arm around her, and she was moved by the care he took, the deliberate, unhurried nature of a man who was not going to mistake permission for license, not even now.
They sat that way, her leaning against him, his arm around her, as the fire burned lower and the clock somewhere in the house measured out the small hours.
Elizabeth understood that she had been wrong, back at the beginning, about what this marriage would be.
It was not a negotiated peace between two strangers who had found themselves inconveniently bound to each other.
It was not a comfortable, or at best, a civil, occasionally pleasant partnership.
She was not certain yet, what it would be—but she had hopes that it could be, would be, something glorious.
She waited for him to speak, and still, he did not.
She waited for him to move, and he did not do that either.
And then, slowly, she understood. He had said “I want to keep you.” He had put his arm around her, and sat with her, and still he would not move, because the rule had been hers.
He needed to know without any doubt that she was choosing this. That she was choosing him.
He had spent months not using the considerable advantages of his position to take what he might reasonably have expected as his right.
Fitzwilliam would sit on this settee until morning if she required it, because the only version of this he wanted was the one where she gave herself freely.
Her heart nearly burst with love for this man.
She had not appreciated him half so well as she ought.
Elizabeth rose and crossed to her door. She turned the handle, walked into her chamber, and left the door open behind her.
She did not look back. She did not need to, for she had said what she meant, she trusted that he had heard it, and she was done with half-measures.
Behind her the sitting room was quiet for a moment, long enough that she had time to wonder if she had misjudged, long enough for the smallest flicker of doubt.
And then she heard him standing.
She had come to London knowing almost nothing about the life she was stepping into.
She had come armed with wit and a good opinion of herself and the useful conviction that she would succeed somehow, whatever success required.
She had been right about most of it. She had been wrong, or rather incomplete, about the rest.
She had not expected to admire her husband.
She had not expected the way he listened, the gift his attention was when he chose to give it, his droll, delightful humour.
She had not expected a man who had never said anything less than polished in his life except when he was speaking with or about her because somehow, he felt she deserved his least elegant truths.
“Elizabeth?”
Fitzwilliam was standing in the doorway, his hands resting lightly on either side of the frame. He had not yet moved further into the room. He was, she realised, giving her one final opportunity to change her mind.
She did not change her mind. She held out her hands and he stepped over the threshold to take them. He smiled, and Elizabeth thought that having been trapped into marriage with Fitzwilliam Darcy suited her very well.