Chapter Four
CHAPTER FOUR
ELIZABETH’S WEDDING NIGHT had been conducted in a room at Netherfield. She and her sister Jane had been married in a double wedding that day, and it only made sense that Elizabeth and her new husband would retire to wherever it was that her husband was staying. She would cleave to him now, go wherever he went and all of that sort of thing.
But the truth was, they were both guests, and they both were careful to be very quiet. It was all conducted in the dark and nearly wordlessly, his divesting her of her virtue, that was. He’d been gentle, careful, and most of the words that had been uttered had been him saying things like, “Are you all right?” and “Tell me if this is uncomfortable.”
She had not found it uncomfortable, so that was saying something.
But she had to admit that she’d come away from the experience a bit puzzled about what all the fuss was about. It had not been bad, she supposed, not unpleasant, but she had also found it, well, sort of invasive and a bit boring. There had been a long stretch of it when she’d been staring at the ceiling and her husband had been working away in her, puffing and doing whatever it was that he was doing, obviously exerting a great deal of effort, and she’d felt only that she sort of would like him to finish up what he was doing so that they could both get some rest.
The next morning, they hadn’t much discussed it.
They’d gotten into a carriage for the long trip to Pemberley after that, which necessitated many nights in an inn. The first night, he inquired if she was quite exhausted and she had responded the traveling was tiring, and he did not come to her. The second night, there was a lack of rooms in the inn, and he said they could share a bed, and she said, “Of course, we are married.”
And then, they had spoken of it, because it had been obvious he wished to do it again.
“All right,” she had said, wanting to be agreeable about it.
He had said, “Did you like it, though? Did it please you?”
She had said, “Of course,” very brightly.
He had been silent in the darkness next to her for a long time, a very long time. But then he’d said, gruffly, “Oh, never mind it,” and she had thought he meant never mind the marital relations.
But, no, he’d done that again. He was quicker about it that time, though.
It was a month of this, his visiting her bed weekly to climb between her thighs, slide into her, and quickly work himself up to spilling in her, before it all changed.
That night, when he came to her, he had a candle with him, and it illuminated his face as he stood at the foot of her bed and began to speak to her without looking at her, his expression dolorous, his voice halting.
She sat up in her bed, pulling the covers with her, and listened.
At first, she was quite confused.
He spoke for some time, at great length, about how he had endeavored to be pleasing to her, though he knew that she had not found him pleasing, not pleasing at all, not in the beginning. He dwelt too long on the proposal at Rosings, how vehemently she had refused him, and she felt the need to break in and say that she thought they were past all this, and if he resented her rejection, even now, after they were married—
“Oh, no,” he said. “You mistake me, my dearest. It is not any resentment at all. I simply do not wish to be a burden to you, not any sort of burden. And I find myself at a loss of how to proceed with a woman like yourself. You are not overfond of our coupling, and I know this.”
“You mean…” Coupling, hmm? That was a different word for it. “Our marital… activity?”
He only sighed. “Elizabeth, I do not know if it is because you are a certain sort of woman or if it is because of something else, and I should like to do some experimentation, but I am frightened to do so.”
“I am fond of it,” she said in that same too-bright voice she’d used before. “I know it is my duty to submit to it—”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I don’t like that at all.”
“What do you mean?” She hugged herself. “I had a very dreadful conversation with my mother about it the night before we were married, and she was very clear about it being a duty and that submission was paramount.”
“That is precisely what I don’t like, though,” he said. “You have seen me as some self-important man, full of hubris, expecting to have my own way in every circumstance, and this… here, I cannot abide it.”
“You cannot abide it?” She was wounded. “ You’re not fond of it, are you?”
“What, not fond of prodding a silent and still woman who is staring into the ceiling as if she wishes I would just get it over with? How could that be?” He was bitter, sarcastic.
She wanted to cry. “I’ll do better.”
“No!” He sighed heavily. “I’m going about this badly. Heavens, I feel I must go about everything wrongly when it comes to you.”
She hunched up her shoulders and tried very hard not to cry.
“Elizabeth, you are doing nothing wrong,” he said, irritated. “The fault lies with me.”
She only shook her head.
“You have no experience with such things. You came to me entirely untouched. I don’t even know if you’ve ever pleasured yourself.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, dear.”
“What?” He shifted on his feet. “Have you?”
She could not say anything. She had never spoken to anyone about that . She was extremely ashamed of that .
“I don’t have much experience either if you wish to know the truth. It’s been since I was younger than twenty, and mostly because of women that Richard would attract, because I certainly couldn’t attract anyone on my own.”
“Oh,” she said, not liking this admission at all. Of course, she’d known he would not have come to her bed having never known a woman, but she didn’t like hearing about it, she found. “How many?”
“Only two,” he said.
That didn’t make her feel any better at all. “What were they like? I suppose they weren’t still and silent,” she said, her voice lilting.
He groaned. “Oh, Lord, what have I done? Don’t be jealous, my darling.” He dragged a hand over his face. “But of course you’re jealous. If I knew you’d experimented with some other man, it would twist inside my gut somewhere. I want us to belong to each other, and I wish…” He turned away. “I’m leaving. I have done this all wrong. I do not wish to make this any worse. Good night. My apologies.” He walked out of the room.
She thought about going after him, but she was too worried and confused to do so. Instead, she ended up crying, hugging her pillow and feeling dreadful—both because she loved Mr. Darcy too much to bear the idea of ever having shared him and because she hadn’t pleased him, and he was ever so pleasing to her, ever so pleasing. She loved him to distraction.
The next day, he wasn’t at breakfast.
She didn’t see him until mid-morning, when he came into the sitting room where she was reading in the morning light.
He shut the door behind him and latched it and came for her, a look on his face like nothing she’d ever seen before.
As he was coming toward her, he was speaking, his voice low and urgent. “I should like to try something, Elizabeth. I was loath to do it last night for I was afraid you would dislike it, but whatever I did or said last night, it went badly, and you disliked that . So, I have decided to simply do it. You are my wife, after all. I am entitled to such things.”
“What things?” She didn’t know why, but something had unfurled low in her belly when he said what he said. She had to admit she liked it when he said she was his.
He went down on his knees in front of her. “Just relax, Lizzy.” He had never called her that before, but she liked it as well.
She waited, breathless, wondering what was going to happen on his knees.
He lifted her skirts and put his head under the fabric.
“Mr. Darcy,” she said, and she meant it to sound disapproving and sharp, but it came out faint and sort of coy.
“I shall stop, of course, if you are really against it,” he said as his head moved in between her thighs. He pressed his mouth into the flesh of her inner thigh.
She gasped. That felt rather divine.
“But I would ask you to bear it as long as you can, simply to see if you do enjoy it,” he said in a low, rumbling voice. “And know, my very lovely wife, that I have been wanting to do this for some time.”
Was he going to…?
He did.
He put his mouth on her there .
His mouth was warm and shockingly wet and he seemed very eager to apply it to this part of her body.
She shuddered, biting down on her bottom lip, trying to control her breathing. She had never even heard of such a thing. It was positively horrible, it must be. It was too sinful to speak of, she was sure.
He licked until she opened to him and he found the center of her pleasure. He licked that too. He licked and he gently suckled it, and he put his tongue into her, and she say couldn’t which of these things she liked the best, but she liked all of them.
He said things into her body while he was licking it too, and the things made it better for some reason.
“I love the taste of you, Lizzy,” he breathed. And, “Yes, very good, just like that, open your legs a bit wider for me?” And, “Aren’t you just the most cooperative and sweetest of wives, giving your husband such access?” And, “I could suck on your clitoris for hours, I think.”
She didn’t even know what a clitoris was, but she didn’t think she’d mind if he sucked it for hours.
It was very nice.
It was like when she touched herself but better, sweeter, more prolonged, and more exciting. She was fairly sure it was more sinful, also, even though touching oneself must be quite sinful as well. But this, his mouth , it must be a very bad sin.
It build in her like the rush of music, first just a lone piano-forte, but then joined by voices and violins and finally trumpets and coronets and the crash of cymbals as she crested against her husband’s clever, warm, wet tongue.
He felt that, her little spasms, and he sighed into her. “Good, good, Lizzy, such a good wife. That’s just what I wanted from you.” He rained gentle kisses all over her sex and her inner thighs.
She tugged her skirts up to see it, her husband on his knees with his face between her legs. Something about the sight of it made her feel taut and strange and good. She touched him, touched the back of his head, ran her fingers through his hair.
He looked up at her, smiling up at her, pleased. “Well, then. Was that so bad?”
“Oh, no, not bad at all,” she said. Then she considered. “That is, it felt good, but I think it might be bad, sinful and wrong and everything else.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps it is sinful. But I don’t wish you to worry about it. You are mine now, and I am your husband, the head of the marriage, just as Christ is the head of the church. If there is a sin, it is mine, not yours. You are being good and pure and right to submit to me.”
She bit down on her lower lip. “I am?” she said breathlessly.
“As you said last night, you are meant to submit to your husband?”
She nodded.
“Good,” he said. “I shall wish to do this every time we are together, then, as a prelude to tupping you. Do you have any objections?”
“No,” she whispered. How could she?
“I might like to do it like this, sometimes,” he said. “In the midst of the day, I should like to come into a room, shut the door, and lick you.”
She felt something zing its way through the midst of her body. “I don’t think I would mind that at all.”
“Good,” he said, and then he got up and sat down next to her. He kissed her mouth, and he tasted… oh, dear, she didn’t know why that made something zing through her again.
When he came to her that night, he did do it again. She was ever so sensitive after having been teased and suckled and licked earlier that day. Her climax came for her like a crash of sweet thunder.
And then… when her husband’s member was inside her, it was different.
It was all very different.
He wished to kiss her while he was inside her, and she could taste herself on his tongue and, they kissed and kissed, their bodies moving together, and she had a sensation, something intense and wondrous, of a joining between them, a connection that sealed them together, as if this was a communion, something nearly sacred.
She was not sure how the act could be both things—so sinful and yet so sacred at once.
But it was.
Her husband was a bundle of opposites.
He was quite buttoned-up much of the time. He wasn’t one to show emotion or passion most of the time. But there was some bottomless well to him when he was stripped of his clothes, something deep and dark and exciting.
He was shy at first, trying to ask her for things, all manner of things. “You won’t wish to do this,” he would say, his voice muffled as he covered his face with both hands.
“You must let me judge that,” she would say, smiling at him. “What is it my very wicked husband wishes to do with his submissive wife?”
And over time, he grew to trust her. He would not blush bright red when he asked things of her and he began to realize she was just as aroused as he was by these things.
They were a good pair, she thought, something that seemed even more obvious to her when she sometimes ended up in various sorts of conversations with other women, which would happen sometimes, when women were alone together. They would put their heads together and speak breathlessly to each other, and everyone would giggle, and from these sorts of conversations, Elizabeth learned that her readiness for such activity might not be entirely common.
She learned that many of the things her husband liked to do with her—using his mouth on her, asking her to use his mouth on him, restraining her wrists or ankles, and taking her arse as well as her cunny (indeed using that word for it, calling it any word at all)—were things that men tended to do with strumpets. Sometimes, they might try to cajole their wives into it, but if the women in her circles were any indication, their husbands were immediately rebuffed.
“Oh, yes,” Louisa Hurst once said disdainfully, “I told him there was no reason to do anything that was not in the service of getting a child, for that is the purpose of the activity, is it not?”
Everyone agreed, and other women in the circle said they had similarly rebuked their husbands.
Jane had only shaken her head, blushing, and said that her husband had never attempted any of these activities. “I don’t think Charles even knows of such things,” she had said.
And Elizabeth had sensed that it would be best not to admit that she had readily joined in with all her husband’s requests or that she enjoyed them or that she would welcome his further explorations. She sensed that she must keep silent on this, so she simply said nothing, and when anyone said that Mr. Darcy must not be that way, she had neither confirmed nor denied, allowing them to think as they pleased.
But this made Elizabeth wonder about it all.
Perhaps other women did like it and did participate, but the censure of women like Mrs. Hurst made everyone decide to conceal it out of shame.
Of course it went without saying that these women would never reveal to their husbands that they were talking to each other, revealing intimate details, for their husbands would not like that.
She wondered if men talked to each other about these things also.
If so, they might all be privy to all manner of intimate details about each other, and all simply pretending not to know. She found this idea rather amusing, she had to say.
However, she’d rather not be confronted with other men in her life knowing about her, in the end. If she really were more accommodating than all of her female friends, and Darcy was telling that to the other husbands, she didn’t think she’d like it if they spoke about her in that way.
But, then, when she asked her husband once, he told her that men did not talk about these things, or at least, if they did, they did not speak of it with him.
“I think I make other people nervous,” he said. “Especially about those sorts of things. And I am, of course, nervous, because I think people will find out what it is I like to do and will be rightly horrified.”
“I don’t tell anyone,” she assured him.
“If you need to compare notes, my darling, I would not deny you that female companionship,” her husband said.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “Besides, I don’t think anyone would quite understand what it is we have.”
“I agree,” he said.
And as the years slipped by and she did not conceive, it was a sort of consolation, she supposed, that their lives in this way were so varied and active and arousing.
She wanted a child. She must have a child, after all. It was what she was for . Men got married to women because they wanted children.
But if she could not know what it was to love her own dear tiny babe, at least she had this love, with her husband, this deep and strong connection, forged in their shared experimentation and mutual pleasure.