Chapter 6
DARCY
On the morning of my wedding, I woke before dawn.
I had barely slept. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw Elizabeth walking down the church aisle. Sometimes she smiled. Sometimes her face remained solemn. In a bolder dream, she entered my chamber clad only in her unbound hair and spoke my name like a prayer.
I rose before that last image could destroy what little self-control I had left.
Bingley joined me for breakfast at Netherfield. He seemed more nervous than I was, though all he had to do was sign the register.
“You’re not eating anything,” he observed.
“Neither are you.”
“I’m thinking of asking for Jane’s hand soon.”
“Miss Bennet.”
“Not for much longer, I hope.”
I set down my cup.
“Are you certain of her feelings?”
He looked at me with comic surprise.
“After everything that’s happened, that’s the question you choose to ask me?”
“It’s important.”
“Yes. I’m certain.”
“Has she told you so?”
“Not in those words. But she blushes when I approach, she seeks my company, she remembers everything I tell her, and she wept when I explained why I had left.”
I turned toward the window.
Elizabeth sometimes blushed. She accepted my company. She remembered my words. She had taken my arm when there was no need, had offered me smiles she gave no one else, and had trembled at my touch.
She was not Jane.
She expressed nothing the way Jane did.
“Why?” Bingley asked.
“Nothing.”
“Darcy.”
“I’m getting married in two hours. I’m allowed to be unreasonable.”
He smiled and raised his cup.
“To your swift recovery.”
The church at Longbourn was small. I had always found it insignificant. That morning, it contained the entire world.
Georgiana stood beside me, pale with emotion.
She had met Elizabeth two weeks earlier and had grown attached to her with a swiftness that dispelled one of my last concerns.
Elizabeth had neither pressed her to speak nor treated her as a fragile child.
She had sat near the pianoforte, turned her pages, and asked her opinion with a simplicity that restored some of Georgiana’s confidence.
Lady Catherine had not come.
Anne had sent a discreet and kind note. Fitzwilliam, standing behind Georgiana, murmured that our aunt’s absence greatly improved the atmosphere of the church.
I did not respond.
The door opened.
Elizabeth entered on her father’s arm.
I stopped breathing.
She wore a pale silk gown adorned with small embroidered flowers, elegant and refined. A matching lace bonnet, trimmed with white flowers, framed her hair. Georgiana had given her the pearls that gleamed at her ears.
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
She raised her eyes to mine.
I searched for her smile.
It did not come.
Her face was calm, too pale. She walked with a steady step, but her hand seemed to grip Mr Bennet’s arm tightly.
I thought she was moved. A young woman was leaving her family, her home, and her name.
She was also promising, before God and all present, an intimacy that propriety had forbidden her to know almost anything about until now.
This last thought stirred an immediate desire in me, instantly followed by shame. I had not yet spoken my vows, and already I was imagining unfastening the ties of her gown.
When the minister asked who gave this woman to this man, Mr Bennet placed her hand in mine.
It was ice-cold.
“Take care of her,” he murmured. “She always believes she can bear more than she can.”
I closed my fingers around Elizabeth’s.
“I will protect her with my life.”
Her father looked at me for a long moment, then withdrew.
The minister continued.
I heard the sacred words through the beating of my heart. To love, comfort, honor, and keep. To forsake all others. Each promise seemed too weak to express what I was prepared to give her.
When my turn came, my voice did not tremble.
I took her as my wife with absolute certainty.
Elizabeth spoke her vows more softly. She did not falter. She did not draw back. Yet when she promised to love, cherish, and obey me, her fingers quivered in mine.
A flicker of worry passed through me.
I reminded myself she had always dreaded being governed. That word alone explained her unease, I decided. It said nothing of her affection.
I dismissed the doubt.
The ring slipped onto her finger.
She became Mrs Darcy.
My wife.
Outside the church, the spring light blinded us. The bells rang. Mrs Bennet wept loudly. Lydia waved her handkerchief with such enthusiasm that she struck Mr Collins's hat. Elizabeth laughed at last.
I breathed again.
She had merely been nervous.
At the wedding breakfast, I stayed as close to her as I could.
The guests kept pulling us apart. Everyone wanted to congratulate me, remark on Pemberley, or recall some encounter I had no memory of.
Elizabeth seemed more animated with others than she had been at the church.
She responded with wit, embraced her sisters, and bore her mother's effusions.
But she did not seek me out.
I noticed the absence of her glances because I had spent months sensing every one.
When I approached, she smiled. When I moved away, her face settled.
The doubt, once admitted, became impossible to silence.
I saw her leave the room with Jane. They climbed the stairs, no doubt to arrange her hair before our departure. I had no reason to follow them. I ought to speak to Bingley, thank Mr Bennet, confirm the luggage had gone.
Yet I found myself in the upper hallway.
The door to the Bennet sisters' former chamber stood ajar. I was about to announce my presence when Jane's voice reached me.
“He looks at you with such love that it almost pains me on his behalf.”
I stopped.
Elizabeth's silence lasted too long.
“Don't say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know.”
“And today? Has your heart changed?”
My body froze.
Her answer came so softly that I moved closer despite myself.
“It is changing. I esteem him. I desire him—perhaps more than I should admit. But I cannot pretend to have given him what he believes he possesses.”
The corridor seemed to narrow.
“You must tell him,” Jane murmured.
“I told him my opinion was not fixed.”
“You spoke to him of his faults, Lizzy. He may have thought you doubted his conduct, not that you did not love him.”
The silence that followed told me Jane had struck the truth.
“I thought he would understand,” Elizabeth breathed. “Then he wrote to Bingley, protected Georgiana, listened to my requests… Each day, it grew harder to tell him his love had begun alone.”
“More difficult, or more dangerous?”
“Both.”
I should not have stayed.
I could not leave.
“You feared he would withdraw his offer,” Jane said.
“Yes.”
The word struck me with terrible clarity.
“Because of Pemberley?”
“Because of him. Because of the security as well—I will not be so noble as to deny it. I accepted his name, his fortune, and the protection they offer my family. I accepted the man as well. I simply do not yet know if what I feel has become love.”
All the signs rearranged themselves with perfect cruelty.
She had never declared her love to me. She had done something more effective to deceive a man so certain of being loved: she had let me assign whatever meaning suited me to each of her hesitations.
No.
The truth was more humiliating.
She had spoken to me of her doubts. I had decided they concerned only what I could repair. I had mistaken her desire for affection, her consent for a promise of the heart, and every willing gesture for confirmation.
But she had known what I believed.
She had been afraid to set me right.
“You should have told him before this morning,” Jane continued.
“I know.”
“And now?”
“In a few hours, I'll be alone with him in London. What would you have me say? Forgive me, sir, I accepted your name, your fortune, and your protection, but I never spoke the words you chose to hear?”
I stepped back before the floorboards could betray my presence.
The wound was immediate. A briefer, more dangerous anger tried to rise in its wake.
Yet it crossed neither my lips nor my face.
I had spent my life concealing from the world anything that could be used against my family.
I discovered that this discipline could also protect the woman who had just married me.
I found a small empty room at the end of the corridor and closed the door without a sound.
My name. My fortune. My protection.
Elizabeth's words mingled with Lady Catherine's with perfect cruelty. For a few seconds, I saw only the man vain enough to believe his love was as certain as his income.
Then the rest of her confession returned.
Because of him.
She had feared losing me as well. She esteemed me. She desired me. Her heart was changing—only more slowly than my impatience had assumed.
And she had warned me.
She had said her opinion was not fixed. She had named my faults. She had asked for time to discover the man behind the pride. I had listened to each of these reservations before deciding they must surely surround a feeling already born.
I had not been deceived with the cunning my humiliation first wanted to attribute to her.
I had deceived myself.
This truth did not erase the silence she had chosen afterward. She had understood what I hoped for. She had been afraid to correct me. The thought wounded me enough that my hands tightened on the back of a chair.
But I would not ask her to answer for that fear in the middle of her wedding breakfast, mere steps from her family.
I remained alone until my breathing steadied. When I rejoined the ground floor, no one could have guessed that the world had just changed a second time.
Bingley was waiting for me near the vestibule.
“The carriages are ready,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes.”
He studied me, perhaps surprised by the brevity of my response, but Elizabeth appeared at the top of the stairs before he could press further.
She wore a dark green traveling dress. Her bonnet framed a face still pale with fatigue and emotion. When she saw me, her smile wavered, as though uncertain of its welcome.
I crossed the vestibule and offered her my hand.
“Are you ready, Mrs. Darcy?”
Warmth returned to her eyes.
“I believe I am.”
I bowed over her fingers with the same care as if I had heard nothing.
She would not know I had stood behind that door.
Not today.
Perhaps never.
We took leave of her family. Mrs. Bennet wept, Lydia demanded an immediate invitation to Pemberley, and Mr. Bennet reminded me with a silent look of the promise made in his library. I received it all with calm.
In the carriage, Elizabeth settled across from me. Longbourn disappeared behind the trees.
“Fitzwilliam?”
It was the first time she had used my Christian name.
I had dreamed of hearing it from her lips. The pain did not diminish its sweetness.
“Yes?”
“You are very quiet.”
“The day has been considerable.”
She gave a slight smile.
“That is a very Darcian way of describing a wedding.”
“I shall endeavor to find a better one before London.”
She relaxed against the seat. We spoke afterward of the journey, of Georgiana, of the places where we would stop. My voice did not tremble. I denied her neither a glance nor an answer.
I kept to myself only the certainty I had acquired in the corridor at Longbourn.
I had obtained her hand.
I had not yet won her heart.