Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER TWELVE
RICHARD WAS JUST getting dressed when he heard Darcy knocking. He thought, at first, the knock was at his door, so he opened it up. Then he saw that Darcy was knocking at his wife’s door.
“Please, open the door, my darling?” he was saying. “We were right in the middle of talking.”
Richard assumed that she’d gone in the middle of the night when he woke up alone. He’d felt guilty for not having woken her himself but grateful she’d managed to leave on her own.
Then Darcy looked up and saw him.
And he knew that she had not left on her own, after all.
He wasn’t sure what to do.
Darcy blinked at him and then hurried down the hallway to him. Darcy put one hand on Richard’s chest and pushed him backwards into his room. He shut the door behind them both.
“Look,” Richard said as soon as the door was shut, “nothing happened. It was only that she fell asleep here. I was holding her while she sobbed and I meant to stay awake, but I didn’t manage it. Even if she and I were together alone, we did not do anything. It was not a violation of our agreement, you understand?”
“Her bleeding came,” said Darcy.
“Oh,” said Richard in a different voice. He was relieved. It must have shown on his face.
“Damn you, Richard,” muttered Darcy. “You don’t wish this at all, do you?”
Richard groaned, running a hand through his hair. “Oh, apologies. I’m ever so sorry.”
Then, it was quiet.
The silence seemed to grow thicker with each passing moment.
Darcy glared at him.
Richard couldn’t bear it.
Eventually, Darcy threw up his hands and left the room.
Richard wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He went over to Elizabeth’s room and knocked on the door.
“Leave me be, Will!” she cried from within. She sounded distraught.
“It’s, erm, it’s me,” he said.
The door opened an inch and there was her face. Her nose was red. Her eyes were a bit red, too.
“Have you been weeping again, Lizzy?” he breathed.
“I don’t think you and I should… alone,” she said. “He’s not pleased, you see.”
“Right,” he said.
She shut the door in his face.
Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known this was a terrible idea since the beginning, of course. He had known, and he’d done it anyway.
Damnation.
He went into the dining room. Darcy was there, drinking tea.
He got himself some tea and some toast and some sausage. He ate and he didn’t look at Darcy, and he tried not to panic, but he was panicking. This was the end of this, then. He would never be with them ever again. He’d never touch either of them.
But it would be worse than that. They wouldn’t be able to bear being in the same room as each other, he didn’t think. So, he’d never come back to Pemberley. Their friendship would end as well.
And it would have been one thing if he could have at least gotten a child on her, for the sake of all that was holy, but somehow he hadn’t even been able to get that done, and why not? He certainly had spent in her often enough.
She must be barren.
Well…
“Let’s go on a walk,” said Darcy suddenly.
He looked over at his cousin. “A walk?”
“Yes, after breakfast, you and me,” said Darcy.
“All right,” he said.
Darcy stared into his tea cup.
Richard turned back to his breakfast.
Before they walked, but after they had both finished eating, Darcy went up to talk to his wife through the door of her bedchamber. She told him she was having cramps and a headache and she would rather spend the day in bed. “Just leave me be, I think, Will,” she said tearily. “I should like to be alone.”
“All right,” Darcy said.
Ten minutes later, Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam were walking next to each other by the river. Neither of them were saying anything.
“This is partly why I did it, anyway,” Darcy muttered. “Can you imagine, Richard? You love her, too. Can you imagine this, every month of your life, and being rather certain it’s your fault? How could one not wish to rectify it?”
Richard wasn’t sure what to say.
“You know, I don’t want her to have your child either,” Darcy said, kicking a stone into the river.
“Of course you don’t,” Richard said. “You want her to have yours.”
“Ideally,” said Darcy. “But I can’t…”
“It’s probably her,” said Richard.
Darcy sighed heavily.
More silence.
“You know, I seem to remember something from my anatomy class about how it is that there’s only a certain amount of time during a woman’s cycle when she’s fertile,” said Darcy. “It’s similar to breeding livestock, isn’t it? You can’t get calves on cows who aren’t in heat. I mean, cows won’t let a bull mount them if they aren’t receptive, so I suppose it’s easier to determine than between us, but you know what I mean. I’m not sure… I don’t know if the timing was right.”
“Really?” said Richard.
“Perhaps I didn’t care because I wished… I wanted… Well, I have so many dark and desperate desires and I have inflicted them on everyone, and now we are all destroyed and—”
“You think if we try again, if we got the timing right, then—”
“You don’t wish her to have your child, though, do you?” Darcy stopped walking and gave him a pointed look.
Richard stopped walking, too. His chest felt tight. He didn’t know what to say.
“I just thought… for her, Richard, you might put all this aside, because she wants it so desperately, even though she pretends she does not. But you can see she does, for she takes it so hard when her bleeding comes and she blames herself, and I’m almost entirely sure it’s my fault—”
“Why are you so sure?”
“An injury. Lord, you likely remember when I was thrown from that horse and I landed—”
“Oh, yes,” said Richard. “That’d do it, probably.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, gazing off into the distance.
Mr. Darcy started walking again.
“I suppose that must be hard,” said Richard.
“What? Feeling damaged and pointless and as if you cannot achieve whatever it is that is expected of you?” Darcy shrugged. “I’m rather used to it, in fact. I’ve always been entirely wrong at everything no matter how hard I strive to be right.”
“Entirely wrong? What are you saying? You are better than everyone at everything and everyone despises you for it!”
“No,” said Darcy, shaking his head. “They despise me because I’m not good enough. Because there’s something flawed within me, something obviously flawed, and I try to hide it by doing everything I possibly can right, but I always fail, and—”
“No,” he broke in, putting a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “No, no one thinks that about you. But I suppose I see that you believe it. It makes everything make quite a bit of sense when it comes to you, actually.”
Darcy looked up at him, and there was real vulnerability in his expression. “Just trying to hide it, I suppose, make up for the thing that’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” said Richard.
Darcy sighed. He shook Richard’s hand off his shoulder and walked faster.
“You’re not simply speaking about your sexual desires?”
“That’s a symptom,” said Darcy, walking even faster.
“Of what?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” Darcy said, irritated. “If I could figure what was wrong with me, I’d fix it. The impotence, it’s part of it.”
“You’re not impotent,” said Richard, catching up. “That’s when you can’t, you know, perform.”
“Is it?” said Darcy.
“You’re just… sterile,” said the colonel.
“This is ever so comforting, this conversation,” said Darcy dully. “Do remind me if I need a bit of cheering up to come straight to you.”
The colonel winced. “Apologies, Will, truly.”
They walked together in silence for a few moments.
The colonel looked at the river, then up at the sky, then at the other man in profile. “I, erm, perhaps I didn’t think about it from your perspective. It must be difficult, thinking of her bearing another man’s child.”
“I’d give anything for Lizzy and I to make a child together ourselves, obviously,” he said, and his voice was still dull, but it was a different sort of dullness. “Anything at all. I would love to see what it would be, a mix of the two of us, her and me, our love making a whole new little person.” His step faltered. “I know her having your child is never going to be the same as that.”
“Yes, but it could be, if we—”
“No, it won’t.” Darcy was firm. He sighed. He stopped walking again. He flung himself down on the river bank.
Richard paused, looking down at him.
Darcy picked up a rock and hurled it off into the water. “It won’t be anything the same.”
“I’ll do it,” said Richard. “I’m here. We already started. I’m just being selfish about it.” He sat down on the bank, too.
Darcy didn’t look at him as he hurled out another rock. “I might not have thought about what it would be like for you. I asked you to abandon your own flesh and blood and to pretend as if you weren’t the babe’s father. I think that might be asking a bit too much. But I don’t know how to rectify it, I must say. I would like to say that you could simply stay. You could be the father to the child in everything but name. I’d just move you in at Pemberley, you know?”
Richard turned to stare at him, and he couldn’t breathe. Had Darcy just said that?
“Of course it’s not… it’s not enough.” Darcy shrugged at him.
“You would let me, though,” he said.
“Let you? Richard, it would be your babe,” said Darcy.
“Yes, but if you’re thinking that I would ever take Lizzy from you, you have to know that I couldn’t. So, you don’t need to offer this to me out of fear of losing her to me, because—”
“No, I know that,” said Darcy. “We’re beyond that now, aren’t we?”
“Are we beyond it?” The colonel furrowed his brow. “Lizzy said you weren’t pleased that she slept in my bed.”
Darcy groaned, picking up another rock. He turned it this way and that. “I suppose that’s true. I wasn’t pleased. It frightened me.”
“We aren’t beyond it.”
“Well, we could be, perhaps?” Darcy threw the rock.
“Move me in,” murmured the colonel. “Let me be there while she’s increasing? Let me hold the child right after it’s born? This is what you’re offering?”
“With all my heart,” said Darcy with a nod. “But it won’t be enough. I can never give you enough. The child will grow, and we shall teach him to call me papa, not you. He will have my name, not yours. It will not be enough, and I cannot give you enough, and you will still go and marry some other woman and get a child on her and why shouldn’t you do exactly that?”
“I don’t wish to, though,” Richard said immediately. “I’d much rather stay with you, with both of you.”
Darcy’s lips parted. He turned to look at the other man, shaking his head. “You don’t mean it.”
“Would I lie to you?”
Darcy closed the distance between them and kissed him, his mouth fierce and insistent against Richard’s. Richard clutched him close and they kissed and kissed and it was like a storm coming for them, whipping through their bodies, a storm that made Richard’s heart pound and his breath grow short.
And then Darcy yanked himself away. “Christ! We’re not supposed to engage in that sort of thing without her.”
“Right.” Richard got to his feet again.
Darcy looked up at him, fingers to his lips, lips that Richard had been kissing moments ago.
Richard felt as if his entire body was about to explode.
“It couldn’t work,” said Darcy.
“What are we talking of?” said Richard, and his voice wasn’t strong.
“You would not be satisfied,” said Darcy. “The child, it would not be yours, and I think it would wear upon you, that knowledge, that you had never—”
“Well, does it wear on you?”
“What?”
“We’d be the same, would we not?” Richard raised his eyebrows. “You would have a child in name, but not in truth, and I would have a child in truth, but not in name. We could… together…”
“You think so?” said Darcy, hopeful.
“I don’t see why not. Could we… more than one child? If I stayed with you? If I lived with you?”
“Yes,” said Darcy with a little smile. “I think so. If Lizzy wanted, obviously, but we could be a family, then.” He got up. “Could we?”
“We shouldn’t speak of it without her,” said Richard. “She might feel differently.”
“True, quite true,” said Darcy, but his smile was growing wider. “You really want it, too? Really?”
“Would I have agreed to this otherwise?”
Darcy let out a laugh. “All right, all right, I suppose that does make sense.”
ELIZABETH OPENED THE door to glare at the two men. “Go away, both of you. I’m in no mood for this. You may go off and do what you will with each other. Bugger each other for all I care.” At this moment, she was quite serious.
It had been a very long day, and she was tired, and she felt hopeless.
“Lizzy, we’ve had an idea,” said Darcy, “and we wish to talk to you about it. I think it will please you.”
An idea? About what? She was barren, and it was obvious, and she had known this, had truly known it for some time. She’d even accepted it until her husband had given her this stupid, stupid bit of hope, which she had clung to, shamefully, that another man could get her with child, but obviously, she was just broken .
“If you tell me that we shall adopt some foundling from God-knows-who and raise it as our own, I shall slam the door in your face,” she said. She had actually advanced the idea of this before, but he had had put this idea in her head, her own child, made with some other man’s seed besides his. He had wanted to watch some other man tup her for some time, she thought. This had never been about a babe. It had been about her husband’s perverse desires, which she had shamefully been excited by, and she should have put a stop to it long, long ago.
“N-no,” said Darcy, furrowing his brow. “No, I think it’s quite likely that next month, Richard will have you with child.”
She let out a gasp of disgust and tried to shut the door. “I think he tried quite enough times, Will!”
Darcy wedged his way into the door, blocking her. “Lizzy, please, he wishes to be with us.”
“Oh,” she said, no inflection in her voice.
“That doesn’t please you?”
“That’s what you wish to talk about right now, Will?” Her voice cracked. “That?”
Darcy furrowed his brow. “You said you were seeking comfort from him, sobbing in his arms, because you didn’t wish to lose him—”
“You have always wanted him for yourself,” she said, and she could not look at Richard as she said this, because she already felt ashamed, and she wasn’t even sure if she meant it. It was only that she was hurting, she was broken, and her husband only wanted to talk about whether or not he got to keep stroking the colonel’s prick! “So, of course you wish to talk about having him, having him permanently, but you don’t wish to mourn the fact that I am barren, that I shall never have a child—”
“We simply do not know that,” he cut in.
“What more proof do we need?” She tried again to slam the door.
“Lizzy,” spoke up Richard, “we think the timing, perhaps? You know about how cows won’t allow themselves to be mounted by bulls or how cats go into that mode of screeching and whining and—”
“No, I am not a cow!” She was horrified as she glared at him both.
“They don’t really teach women about this, do they?” said Richard to Darcy.
“They do not, and it’s a travesty,” said Darcy. “Of all the people who should know, it should be women. Why, midwives must know, don’t you think?”
“Listen to me,” said Elizabeth, her voice fierce. “You two do whatever with each other. I no longer care. You are free to explore anything you wish. I release you from the lines we drew before. Be with each other. Have at it!”
“Lizzy, please,” said Darcy.
“No, I know it’s all it’s ever been about. You never even wanted a babe.” She turned to the colonel. “And neither did you.”
This time, when she tried to shut the door, her husband didn’t stop her.
She bowed her head, resting the crown of her head against the door, and she thought to herself the most horrid of thoughts, which was that she hadn’t wanted a babe either.
She had given up on having a babe so long ago that she had truly thought it impossible.
She had agreed to this, whatever it was, out of sexual arousal, and she knew it.
But…
When the colonel had put his hand on her belly like that, she had suddenly wanted to be with child badly. And then it had been ripped away from her so quickly that it had left her breathless. And now, it was as if she was mourning the death of something that had never even existed, and the men didn’t even care.
No one understood.
Tears streamed down her face, but they were silent.