5. A New Wife Explores #2
“Nevertheless,” Elizabeth countered with gentle persistence, “I would much rather make his acquaintance in his own familiar surroundings than have him fetched down like some pony led around for my inspection. My intention is to be of some use to him rather than merely to observe him. If he has only just woken from his nap, then I imagine he might be in a rather more cheerful mood than if we wait until the evening.”
Darcy’s jaw set, and Elizabeth saw at once that she had blundered.
“I did not mean…” she began. “Forgive me, the family is in mourning and…”
“The boy is not wearing black. He is too young for such observances, besides which his mother was not a Darcy.”
“Of course, you are quite right. Though I imagine your brother’s departure for India can have made the grief no easier—”
“What else has my sister told you?” The displeasure was evident in the bend of Darcy’s brow and his guarded tone of voice.
Elizabeth was brought up short. She had not thought a careless word could land so heavily, and cast back over the cheerful chatter for whatever she had trodden upon without seeing it.
“Why, very little of the boy himself,” she said honestly.
“Miss Darcy spoke of him with great fondness, but mostly she spoke of you, and the beauty of the park, a pianoforte she is impatient for me to hear, and a dozen other things in a single breath, as girls of sixteen are wont to do. I came away knowing she loves her nephew and very little else about him. I had hoped to remedy the want myself.”
His stern expression eased by a degree, though it did not unbend altogether.
“Little Tom does not do well with changes to his schedule,” he said, offering his arm. “You are not to be injured if he gives you nothing.”
“I do not expect him to recognize me or to offer me any particular welcome,” Elizabeth replied as she took his arm and allowed him to lead her down the corridor toward the end of a long, sunlit passage, where they were met by a sudden, piercing sound—a child’s howling rage that rose and fell in violent waves, a single word screamed over and again with desperate intensity: “Mamma.” A brief pause to draw breath, ragged and shaking. Then again: “Mamma. Mamma.”
Elizabeth’s heart went out to the child.
She met Darcy’s gaze, understanding dawning.
She had heard children crying, fretting, and even throwing the worst rages.
Lydia could shake the rafters, and her mother’s outbursts rivaled a braying donkey.
But she had never in her days heard grief of this order come out of so small a person, a grief with no remedy in it, asking and asking for the one thing that would not come.
“He calls for her still,” Elizabeth said, her voice lowered. “Oh, Darcy, how will I comfort him?”
“He does not understand that she will not return, and there is no way under heaven to explain it to him that does not break a man’s heart to attempt.
So we do not attempt it. We wait, and we hold him, and we let him wear out his grief as best he may.
” He looked toward the door at the passage’s end, and then back into her eyes.
“You may still turn back if you would rather not face this. No one would think the less of you.”
“A child who cries like that is not a thing one turns one’s back upon. I am willing to try.”
Darcy opened the door to the sight of the two-year-old lying flat on his back, his small hands balled into fists, his tiny feet kicking. His face was scarlet, wet with tears and sweat, and he screamed in apparent agony while a nursemaid stood over him, wringing her hands and cooing helplessly.
She tried offering him a sweet, and he only shook his head, batting it away.
Darcy went down upon one knee before him and spoke low, in a voice Elizabeth had not yet heard him own, gentle past anything she would have credited of him; and the boy screamed louder, shaking his head.
He offered a toy, a rag horse, and the boy flung it across the room.
Elizabeth had seen Lydia throw similar tempests where she refused to be calmed by toys, treats, or even kind words.
“I believe I know what might help,” she told Darcy, spreading her skirts and lowering herself to the ground. “He needs a firm pair of arms to hold him steady until the storm passes. I’ve often calmed Lydia when she’s been in such a passion.”
She gathered the hot, heaving little body against her chest, pinned the flailing arms gently down, and pressed her cheek to the damp dark curls, murmuring the low wordless sound that had quieted Lydia through countless outbursts.
For the space of a breath, she thought she had him.
The scream caught, hitched, dropped half a register—and she felt the small spine begin to give.
But the peace held only an instant before he arched away from her with a strength that nearly threw her back on her heels.
His entire body transformed into a rigid refusal, and the shrieks tore out of him higher and wilder than before, the cry of a creature seized by the very thing he most wished gone.
Elizabeth tried to ease him round, to settle him otherwise against her, but as she did so, he turned his head and set his small teeth into the flesh of her thumb, biting down with the whole of his furious, frustrated strength.