5. A New Wife Explores #3
Elizabeth jerked her hand from the toddler’s bite, the pain white hot and shocking. She did not cry out, only drew a sharp breath through her teeth as blood seeped from the broken skin. Small, black dots floated in front of her eyes, but she steadied herself, willing herself not to faint.
Darcy took the boy, still kicking and howling, and raised him to his broad shoulders.
“I have you,” he murmured to the sobbing mess of a child whose screams collapsed into wet hiccupping.
“Hush now. I have you.” And over the small dark head, his eyes went straight to her hand, and the red running down to the wrist, and his voice changed entirely.
“Mrs. Darcy, you are bleeding. Hartley, take him.”
The nurse took the still-hiccuping child and returned to the chair next to the cradle.
Elizabeth regarded her thumb, where a neat crescent of small toothmarks marked her with a trail of blood seeping toward her sleeve.
“Well,” she said. “I have been acquainted with the little gentleman above a minute, and already he has rendered his whole opinion of me, and put his signature to it. I cannot fault him for want of candor.”
“You are not to make light of it.” Darcy had her hand in both of his before she knew he had crossed the room, turning it to the window’s light.
He pressed his monogrammed handkerchief, one of fine linen, gently above the wound to stay the bleeding.
The linen bloomed red at the corner, and his mouth set in a line.
“Hartley has enough to manage,” he said, half to himself, with a glance toward the window where the nurse rocked the hiccuping child.
“Come. This wants seeing to properly, and not in the middle of a battlefield.” He kept her hand folded in his, the handkerchief bound tight beneath his fingers, and drew her from the nursery, along the passage, down the stairs—not, as she half-expected, toward her own chambers, but rather toward his.
Darcy’s bedchamber proved to be a darker, plainer room than Lady Anne’s bright and airy apartments, decorated in deep greens and accented with old leather—a masculine space where everything had a set purpose, and nothing was kept for show.
He saw her seated in the chair by the window with a care that would have done for an invalid twice her age, and crossed to the bell, ringing twice in quick succession, well before the first could be answered.
“It is a thumb, Mr. Darcy,” she said, “and not a mortal blow. I have done worse to myself over an apple, and lived to tell several people about it.”
“Nevertheless, it is a bite, and bites have been known to turn poisonous if neglected.” He knelt beside the chair, lifting the handkerchief to inspect the wound.
His brow furrowed at what he found. “You went white as Dover up there. I saw you, and do not tell me it is nothing, as I am in no humor to hear it.”
A maid answered the bell, and Darcy requested a basin, clean linen, and salve.
As she waited, Elizabeth considered her thumb. “I’m beginning to think that Little Tom, having tasted my blood, finally subsided into sobs. I am happy to have been of service as my first act of motherhood.”
This remark earned her the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth—a small sign of approval she was beginning to hunt with increasing eagerness whenever they were together.
“And I will say this for you, Mr. Darcy. You warned me in plain terms, and you have not once said, ‘I told you so.’ A lesser man would have made a feast of it.”
“I have never seen the appeal in those particular words,” he replied, not lifting his eyes from her thumb. “I had rather you were not hurt at all than be proven right about it.”
The young maid arrived breathless with the basin and the pot of salve, and Elizabeth let her husband wash the small wound and bind it with a strip of linen.
The maid stood by holding the basin, and when Elizabeth happened to glance at her she saw the girl gazing at the two of them with her whole soft heart in her face—the stern master bowed over his bride’s hurt hand and the bride too moved to speak—and the girl gave a small involuntary sound, half a sigh and half a hum, the sound a body makes at the sight of a thing too sweet to be borne in silence.
Then, recollecting herself, she turned her flushed face firmly toward the wall.
So this was how the great romance would be reported below stairs by nightfall, matching what Georgiana had so breathlessly informed her—that she was a secret love the master had carried close and had at last been permitted to claim.
“You take a great deal of trouble,” she said after the maid departed, “over a wife purchased at a bargain price. I understood the terms to be plainer: a roof, a name, and the care of your nephew. Nothing in our agreement obliged you to kneel on your floor and fret over my hand as though it signified.”
His hands went still upon the linen, and his gaze lifted from her thumb to meet hers directly. “There was a great deal in it that we did not specify in the arrangement.”