Chapter Nine #2
“No, I cannot,” she said, gesturing the swell of her belly.
He looked at it and swallowed visibly. He met her gaze and he was like a man lost at sea, looking at her with a sort of hopeless longing.
Oh, dear. Could he have some regard for her?
It hurt her that there was a shadow of it, of his wanting her, because she wanted him, and it hurt her the most that Mr. Wickham had stolen this from her, this impossibly happy ending that she would now never have.
She must, of course, never let him know this was Mr. Wickham’s child. She could not imagine how he would react to that, but it must disgust him beyond all reason, she thought. He would never look at her with longing if he knew.
MR. DARCY PACED after she left, thinking about it.
He thought positively scandalous and awful thoughts that he should never have thought.
All right, here it was: he had always wanted her.
Like that, he had wanted her. He had found her wildly appealing at that stupid ball, not at all ‘not handsome enough to tempt him’. There was a reason he had used the word tempt, after all, and it was because he felt incredibly tempted by that woman.
It was… he didn’t know why exactly.
She was rather tempting all round, a light and pleasing figure with the right swells to her hips and bosom, just exactly the sort that made his body lurch.
But she also had these lips. They were shaped in such a way as to make a man think awful things, and whenever she spoke, her entire face would take on such expressions, her mouth bending and lifting and he would become mesmerized by her lips, entirely mesmerized.
Then, of course, she arrived at Netherfield practically out of breath, color in her cheeks, her hair falling in strands into her knowing eyes, and her lips parted and… and…
Well, it was no reason to marry a woman, really.
Or perhaps it was the only reason to marry a woman. Maybe that was really the purpose of marriage if one wanted to be base and vulgar about it, to boil it all down to whatever its essence was.
But he had not wanted to marry her, of course, because she wasn’t the right sort of woman, not connected in the way his wife was supposed to be, and he had thought about other wretched options, given them far more thought than was entirely necessary, when he knew that she would never acquiesce to something like becoming his mistress.
At any rate, was he entirely surprised that some other man had set eyes on Miss Elizabeth Bennet, had gone entirely out of his head, and had ruined her without care or thought?
He was not.
There but for the grace of God went Fitzwilliam Darcy, after all.
Well, he would never have done this to her.
If he had gotten her with child, indeed, if he had besmirched her honor, he would have considered her his responsibility, and he would not have run off and left her to be bundled off to the north with the Bingley sisters to be half-starved and hidden away and… slapped?
What was going on over in that dower house with those women, after all?
He could not even contemplate that.
At any rate, while he might have some understanding for the man who had been swept away by Elizabeth Bennet and had not had the presence of mind to do anything other than take her virtue and leave her, he must ultimately condemn him.
However, it was sort of convenient that this man had done this, because now she was here.
Here, handily already divested of her virtue, and ripe for the taking.
Oh, that was beneath him.
Except what did it matter at this point? She was with child. She was shamed. She was practically already under his protection. She was at least under his roof. At this point, making her his mistress was an entirely different proposition than it had been.
She, of course, might not welcome it, he supposed.
She had said that if the Bingley sisters abandoned her and refused to claim her child that her family would be painted with a brush of her transgressions, and he supposed, from a certain perspective, she might not want the protection he could offer her.
But he’d claim the bastard child, and a child of his, properly educated, could have a life that would rival whatever it was Hurst was going to give the babe.
As for her family, well, yes, that might be a blow.
They might have to officially cut her, but that did not mean that, with time, they could not visit her and their children, just discreetly.
It would not be an easy life for her, perhaps, but it would be a better life for her than the one she had currently planned for herself.
However, he supposed he shouldn’t decide for her.
He would present all the options to her, lay them out, and she could think about it, she could choose.
That was what he must do.
And it would not do to go over there and announce that he knew she was up there, not when she had begged him to pretend he did not know she was in the house.
However, he owned the dower house. He certainly knew ways to sneak in and out of it.
When his grandmother had lived there, many years ago now, though she had been alive a few years after his own mother had passed on, he used to go over almost every afternoon for tea time.
His grandmother had special sweetbreads made up just for him, and she doted on him in the way that only grandmothers can, and he had then made it his mission to explore the entire dower house, and to know all its nooks and crannies.
He did not know where they were keeping her, of course, but it must be somewhere out of sight, so he supposed it would be the second floor.
As the dower house was meant to house an elderly lady, the largest bedchamber was on the main floor.
He suspected that Caroline had claimed that.
There was another bedchamber on the main floor as well, and it would be where Louisa was staying.
So, somewhere on the top floor, and not in the servants’ portion, that was where he would find Elizabeth.
It was only hours later that he went to seek her.