XXVIII
The Pemberley That Did Not Happen
She had kissed him back.
Not once — twice. The second time she had pulled him towards her, her hands in his coat. She had not been frightened. She had wanted him.
George Carlisle. A whisper in the dark. A man she had never seen, whose name was borrowed from a dead barony and a family that was not entirely his own.
She had wanted him, and the wanting was the best and worst thing that had happened since he had stood on a ship in the North Sea watching England disappear.
He set the heels of his hands against his eyes and sat in the dark behind them.
What he wanted — what he had wanted, what he would have done if Sterling had not spent those years building a frame patient enough to withstand a Home Office investigation and make a dead man of Fitzwilliam Darcy — was very clear this morning.
It had always been clear. Now it had so much pain in it that his insides felt like water, and his heart was beating somewhere outside his chest.
What he wanted, this morning, was to wake up at Pemberley with his wife.
The morning after a marriage neither of them had been required to hide or accept from desperation.
The light off the lake. Her hair down, the muslin gown slipping off her shoulder.
The smell of the library when the fires had been burning since September.
Georgiana, coming in to interrupt them and being delighted she had finally been allowed to.
He had wanted that for nearly a year. He had carried the image of it through Hertfordshire and Kent, through the road out of Hunsford and the ship out of Dover and six months of stone walls in this place, and he carried it now with her face fixed in it.
It had not gone away when he had given up the right to it. It had only become more exact.
He put her in the window seat where his mother had sat, a book she had opinions about in her hands, the October morning through the glass. Falstaff on the floor. He stood in the doorway of the room in his mind and saw her there.
Home. That was the word he kept returning to and could not use without the rest of it — home, Pemberley, his name, the life he had been going to have. He had wanted to put her in it and watch her make it hers and argue with her about everything for forty years.
The candle on the table had burned to a stub. He had not seen the room go dark around it.
His face was wet. He did not know when that had happened.
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. He raised his eyes to the wall.
Nothing had changed. Pemberley was still lost to him.
He had been so far gone that he had not pulled back the way he should have.
He had stood there in the dark holding her face after, and eventually he had made himself let go.
He had done nothing to deserve her affection.
She had taken George Carlisle in her arms in the dark.
A fiction. She had never been given the chance to choose Fitzwilliam Darcy in the light, which was what he had wanted for her and what she was owed.
If she had been indifferent, it would have been bad enough.
That she wanted him — that she had pulled him back, that she had said give me something else but not nothing — that was the thing he was going to have to carry.
He pulled Webb’s letter towards him and read it through again.
He had already answered it. The reply was in Aberdeen, on its way to London, and there was nothing in the original he had not addressed.
He read it through anyway, looking for the thing he had missed, the angle he had not tried.
He did not find one. He had the clerk, and he did not have the clerk, and until he had the clerk, there was nothing to do but wait, which he had been doing since April, and which he was less able to do this morning than he had been yesterday.
She was in the library with Rasselas open on her knee.
The October light was flat and grey through the window.
She had been three pages into the same chapter since yesterday.
She was not reading. She was thinking about him, which was a habit she had apparently acquired somewhere in the last weeks without deciding to.
She closed the book.
She had been turning over a new theory. It had started the night of the kiss — she did not call it that directly, but it was there, the fact of it.
She had kissed him back, and for a moment there, he had been entirely lost. Entirely hers, wanting her and clinging to her as if she were the only breath of life he had known in months.
So much for her theory that he did not like women.
Then he had apologised and left. The behaviour of one in retreat.
She had assumed guilt — the wrongness of nearly seducing her when his argument failed to divert her.
But there was another possibility she had not considered until she was lying awake two nights ago, and it sat at the edge of the other theories with the quiet persistence of something that had not yet been dismissed.
Some men could not.
She had heard it spoken of, obliquely, the way such things were spoken of between women who knew each other well enough.
A marriage that remained in name only because the husband was…
incapable was the word that had been used, with a delicacy that made the word itself a kind of door.
She did not know all the particulars of it.
She knew enough to know it was not rare and not chosen, and not a judgement on the wife.
She gave this thought. It would explain the separation, the careful refusal to ask, the way he had been tending to her ease rather than his own for nearly three months. It did not explain the darkness and the whisper.
And it did not truly explain the kiss, which had not been the kiss of one who “could not” — or it did not seem that way. She was not so naive that she could not sense that raw, animal tension that had quickened his body in that moment.
She found, examining this theory, that while it did not answer for the whole of it, she did not find it repellent.
She found it sad. She found herself constructing a version of him — this sharp, exacting, private man who had arranged a marriage in the dark and made her a library and named her exactly and kissed her against all apparent intention — in which he had been carrying this as well.
All of it at once. She found herself willing to carry it with him, which was a new thing to know about herself.
She also found herself quite certain, sitting in the library with Falstaff drooling on her boot, that she wanted him.
Not the arrangement, not the house, not the estate documents, and the letters she wrote on his behalf and the careful evenings in the dark — him.
The quickness of him, the argument, the attention.
Whatever had made him send Falstaff the next morning when she asked.
Whatever had made him say something better as though her situation was a thing he found genuinely intolerable, and whatever had made him secretly send for her father’s Rasselas.
She wanted the person that those choices pointed to, and she was increasingly convinced that person was in the room with her every evening, and she was only getting half of him, and the half she was not getting was the half she wanted most.
Whether he would ever offer it was the question she could not answer.
Falstaff stirred and shook himself and looked up at her with the pale, serious eyes he used when he thought it might be approaching dinnertime. She had started letting Falstaff in before supper.
It had happened by degrees. First, she had stopped putting him out when the knock came, reasoning that he was asleep and would not be a disturbance, and he had not been.
He sprawled across the hearthrug with his legs extended at angles that seemed structurally improbable, and had twice snored with sufficient volume that she had held her breath waiting for some acknowledgement from across the table.
None had come. Her husband was either more tolerant than she had expected, or his hearing was less acute than hers, which she doubted.
So, Falstaff stayed. He arrived at the hearthrug at a quarter past six each evening and went to sleep with the air of a dog who had found the one arrangement of the world that made complete sense.
Elizabeth found this unreasonably cheering.
She had made one decision about one room, and a dog had ratified it immediately.
That was, at present, the clearest domestic authority she possessed.
“Not yet,” she told him.
He accepted this with dignity and put his head back down.
She opened the book to the page she had not read and began again.