Chapter Twenty-three
MR. DARCY SPENT far too much of the next three weeks in her bedchamber, not that he minded it.
They spoke of moving her into the main house, and they both decided there was no reason not to do it. And then they got distracted, often by kissing, sometimes by other things. She had grown rather fond of unbuttoning his trousers and going after him there, in fact.
Once she did put her mouth on him, and he hadn’t perhaps enjoyed it as much as he could have because of the anxiety of what should be done.
He must warn her. He must not spill in her mouth.
That was impossible. Wretched. She was going to be his wife.
She was his shining and perfect Elizabeth, and she did not swallow his—
Except she did.
She had said that he was too good to her, but it was very clearly the other way around, and he would not hear it said otherwise.
He sometimes spent long periods of time putting his mouth to her skin.
He liked to kiss the protrusion of her belly, sometimes for what felt like hours.
He would alternate between kissing her between her thighs and kissing in circles round her belly button, sometimes, he would have a hand between her legs while he kissed her belly, sometimes the other way round, and she had ceased to ask questions about it, and she did not seem to mind it, and he didn’t explain it to her, but he had to admit, somewhere in the recesses of his brain, that it aroused him.
All the elements of it aroused him.
Her being with child lit him up. The little swell of her there made her seem fecund and radiant and ever so very attractive.
The idea that she was with child made him feel a strange sort of warmth in his belly, something that would travel south and go right to the root of him.
He did not know why. He only knew that it was so.
That a woman with child, that this woman with child, was desirable to him.
But he also liked, and this he did not quite know what to do with, that it was not his.
This was sort of strange, he thought, and he did not tell her.
He thought she might find it odd—he found it odd.
But partly, perhaps, it confirmed that she was desirable, did it not, if another man had wanted her enough to breed her?
That was foolish, he supposed, but it was perhaps simply a compliment to his own taste, and that was why he liked it.
He had to admit other aspects of it, though, they also went straight to the root of him.
Thinking of Wickham having her first and his taking her from Wickham—even though Wickham had never really had her—that was gratifying.
Whatever the strange power struggle of it was, something ancient, something like stags tangling their antlers over a woman, it stirred him.
He had won her. She was his now. And he’d won the babe too, and now her little swollen belly was part of the prize of her, and it made him wretchedly and embarrassingly hard for her.
There was another element to it, one right at the bottom, one he would never admit aloud to her, or even really to himself, perhaps, but…
Here it was:
He had so much on his shoulders, so much that was expected of him, and she…
she had always been this thing he could not have because she was not proper, not the right sort of woman, and he had wanted her anyway, and now, she was just, well, that babe in her, that other man’s babe, it made her entirely the wrong sort of woman.
There was something transgressive in that, something pleasant, something undeniably arousing.
So, he didn’t know. Perhaps it was all shameful, but perhaps this sort of behavior, it was tied so tightly with shame and the release of shame and the safety one could find with someone, a person who accepted the other person’s shameful desires, that it could never truly be avoided.
He sometimes wished he was the sort of man who did not think these things through at all but simply accepted them. For all of the conclusions to his internal queries seemed to be things he could not rightly ever share aloud with another soul.
He was a man of propriety, he supposed. He’d always wanted her because she allowed him not to be a man of propriety in certain ways.
But the reasons he desired her and the reasons he was steadfastly devoted to her were not the same.
Arousal only lit the match, the flame had to burn from the fuel of love and mutual respect, and he thought they had that in spades, more than many other couples did.
If the path to it had to be wrought in vaguely shameful things he was embarrassed to think of, well, it had all been worth it.
He was the happiest of men.
They married in the depths of December, a week before Christmas, and when he brought her home, it was not to the dower house, but to her own bedchamber in Pemberley.
By this time, everyone in the household had grown used to her, and if they had anything to say against her, they knew better than to do it where he could hear them, for he had made his positions on such things clear.
But it helped that Elizabeth was so entirely lovable, he thought. One could not but see her and wish to be near her, wish to hear her laugh and make her smile. There was no enmity between her and the servants, or if there was, they were hiding it. Either way, he was satisfied.
Elizabeth had written to tell her family of the marriage, and the responses that came back were stilted and formal in such a way that led them both to believe that Caroline Bingley had been doing her worst.
He knew she was hurt by it.
Sometimes, he had dreams. He dreamed that he rode all the way south and stalked Caroline like she was some kind of prey, like he was hunting her, and he shot her, and she lay there, bleeding out, looking at the sky—
He would wake up sweaty, out of breath, out of sorts.
It did not help, of course, that Mr. Wickham was not dead. He’d had a fever, and the fever seemed to have killed off whatever infection there was in his wound, and now he was making progress, up and about, apparently.
Darcy had seen him twice, and both times, Wickham had been stuttering and frightened, white-faced, saying only a litany of apologies, saying that he would never have touched Elizabeth if he had known she was connected to him, all manner of apologies.
Darcy thought the apologies were cheap. But he warned Wickham more than once that if he ever heard a whisper of his having harmed another woman in that way, that he would end him without another thought, and Wickham nodded and swore and begged and…
It still seemed wrong to him, that Wickham was alive, that Caroline was off poisoning everyone against their small and sweet babe.
Elizabeth’s belly grew, and the world grew colder, and time passed.
He found her larger belly even more enticing than when she had been barely increasing, but she was uncomfortable much of the time, begging him not to crowd her in bed, and so he would bring her pillows, as many pillows as she needed, create little nests of pillows for her in the bed and he would come in sometimes and simply watch her sleep.
He would feel such an intensity of his love for her, then, something that had seemed to have grown out of whatever desire he’d had for her, but was not that anymore.
He admired her. He worshiped her. He lived to please her.
He felt it sometimes, overwhelming and nearly frightening except for its sweetness, its perfection.
It made him feel too warm. It made his mouth dry. It made him want to weep.
He spent much of the rest of his time trying to make things up to Georgiana, but this was not entirely easy, considering they had no notion how badly the Darcy name had been tarnished.
If he was being whispered about all the time, the man who had married a woman not good enough for him, a woman carrying some other man’s child, well, this might not bode well for Georgiana’s own prospects.
If she wished to marry and move on and find a good life for herself, she might find that difficult.
So, he was often trying to appease her, do things that she might like, allow her to choose the dinner menus, allow her to decide if they wished to go walking or to stay in, buy her ribbons and fripperies, send off for the sheet music of anything she wished to learn to play, bring home stacks of novels from the bookshop for her to look over.
Georgiana told him that she had forgiven him, that he did not have to continue in this fashion, but he ignored her and continued anyway.
And then it was late February, and Elizabeth’s labors started and continued for two entire days and nights.
At one point, he was allowed into the room to speak to her, but as it continued on, he was kept out, and he paced and drank and worried, asking everyone he could stop if they did not think this was far too long, if something might have gone wrong, and everyone telling him that first babes often took their time and that he must not worry over it.
And at the end of the two days, when they put the tiny baby girl in his arms, he had to admit he felt a twinge of relief at that and he hated himself for it, for it would not matter, and he would break the entail, and he did not care about it, and this was his child, she was.
They named her Patience, for she had taken her time in coming into the world, and she looked like a perfect copy of her mother, just exactly like Elizabeth, with that mouth, copied and tiny, and she was perfect, the most beautiful little girl in the history of time, he thought, though he might have been biased, he supposed.
But he quite fell in love with her.
Her mother was so exhausted in the wake of it—two days of laboring, of walking, of weathering the contractions of her womb as it tried to expel little Patience—that he got to hold the small girl for a disproportionate amount of the time.
If he put her down, she woke and cried, so he did not put her down.
She liked it if he walked with her, so he spent the first five days of her life walking with her nearly constantly, walking her all over Pemberley, telling her all manner of stories about every hallway and room.
“This, little Patience, is the room where I broke a vase when I was but seven years old and my mother liked it very much and got quite red in the face and scolded me for some time,” he would say.
Or, “You will like this room when you are older, Patience, because it is the dining room, and you will enjoy all of the delicious food we eat here.”
When Patience’s mother was awake, the baby girl wanted nothing except her mother’s arms, nothing except to be snuggled in against Elizabeth’s warmth, and he spent time wrapped around them both.
Elizabeth would yawn and say that she would be up and about soon and he would tell her that she would stay abed for some time more yet.
“You are always asking too much of yourself, my Lizzy,” he would say, addressing his wife but speaking in a sing-song-y voice directly to their little daughter. “You have just brought an entire person into the world, and you must rest. You need rest.”
Elizabeth would laugh. “You are always looking for excuses to keep me in bed, Fitz.”
He would chuckle. “Not in front of Patience, really, my love.” And he would kiss her, and she would ask who was being inappropriate now.
Anyway, it was the best late winter and early spring of his life.
He had never been so happy. His heart had never been so full.