6. A Breakfast of Questions #3
“But surely once you have kissed… I mean, that is how it happens, is it not? Hannah says, and in Mrs. Ratcliffe’s novels, once the heroine is married and the hero kisses her, and then later there is a baby, and I have always supposed—”
“Georgiana.” Darcy had set down his cup with a care that suggested he feared breaking something—the cup, the table, and possibly his own composure. “You will oblige me by not repeating whatever Hannah has told you about any of this.”
“But I only want to understand.”
“You understand quite enough.”
“I plainly do not, or you would not look as though you wished to climb out the window.”
Elizabeth, who could see perfectly well that Darcy longed to escape through the window, caught the glance he sent her.
She understood, with a clarity that stung, what lay beneath his embarrassment.
They had not kissed. Not at the wedding, not in the carriage, not once.
The clergyman had not prompted it, and Darcy had not ventured it, and now Georgiana had declared before the assembled company that kissing was the necessary prelude to all that followed.
Darcy—she saw it in the set of his jaw, in the way he could not meet her eye—was reckoning up what he had failed to give her: the courtship she had not received, the wedding she had not chosen, and the kiss she had not been offered.
He was wrong about what troubled her, and she could not correct him without exposing the truth—that she had been kissed by someone else, and that the question of what a kiss could do haunted her more than any question Georgiana could devise.
“I believe,” Elizabeth said as a way of rescue, “that your brother and I are rather old-fashioned in our habits, Miss Darcy. We intend to conduct our marriage in the proper Derbyshire style, which I am told involves a great deal of reserve and very little public demonstration. You must be patient with us.”
“But you see, I cannot be patient because I wish for a niece to spoil.” Georgiana leaned forward, her color rising. “Because I have been counting, and you were married after Easter, and Easter to Twelfth Night is near enough nine months, and that is how babies are gotten, by kissing.”
This was the fear that pressed most upon Elizabeth: if Darcy had not yet kissed her, and the days continued their silent march, what if her child arrived before Twelfth Night? Darcy, meanwhile, had gone entirely rigid, his knife and fork arrested in his hands.
Georgiana looked between them, her bright face clouding by degrees as the silence extended past anything she had anticipated.
“Have I said something dreadful?”
“Not at all,” Elizabeth replied, and the words came out smoothly enough. “Your brother and I were married on a Thursday, and in Hertfordshire, at the least, Easter does not occur on a Thursday.”
“It does not in Derbyshire either.” Georgiana gasped at her error, turning red. “But you will tell me, sister? When there is something to tell? I should like to count the days.”
“And the hours, with your diligence noted.” Elizabeth squeezed out a smile. “Rest assured, you shall be the first.”
She darted a glance at her husband, who appeared to be precisely dividing his egg.
“I shall hold you to that.” Georgiana smiled and reached for another slice of bread, chattering about the modiste who was coming on Friday and whether Elizabeth preferred muslin or silk for morning gowns, and more to Elizabeth’s interests, the dimensions of the Pemberley library.
The crisis passed, or appeared to pass, and the breakfast table resumed its ordinary business of toast and butter and daylight.
But as soon as Darcy took his rather stiff leave, claiming estate business, Georgiana resumed her dreams for her future niece: the songs she would teach, the dresses she would sew, and the pony she would demand Fitzwilliam procure before the child could walk.
Elizabeth longed to remind the girl of Little Tom, upstairs in his nursery at this very moment, real and breathing and in need of precisely the sort of extravagant affection Georgiana lavished on the imaginary infant.
But Tom bore the shadow of his birth, and Georgiana’s bright chatter had, without intention, drawn the line that he was not quite a proper Darcy baby.
Elizabeth thought of the small, rigid body arching from her touch, the cry that pleaded for what could not be given, and felt a tenderness so sharp it lodged beneath her breastbone.
He was here, motherless, hers by agreement if not by blood, and she would go to him soon, sit with him, and try once more.
But even as she thought it, the other thought pressed in—the one she could not outrun, the one Georgiana’s guileless counting had stirred from the place she kept it shuttered.
If a baby came. If a baby was already coming, not from Darcy’s kiss, which had never happened, but from a kiss that had in a London alley, with a voice like warm honey and a promise of marriage she had been fool enough to believe—then she would have to sit across from this bright, adoring girl and say something, and she did not know what, because she did not know the answer.
And she had no one to ask.