XXX
The Absence
He pressed his fist to his mouth.
God forgive me.
Not the words he would have chosen if he were choosing.
They came from somewhere below choosing, somewhere below the part of him that schooled his face and held his voice in line and knew how to be George Carlisle when required.
They came from the part of him that had stood in a church at twenty-two with his hand on his father's coffin and known for the first time that some things could not be fixed.
He did not know whether he had said them aloud.
She had come around the table in the dark and put her hand on his shoulder.
He had not asked for that. He had never asked for any of it — the evenings, the arguments, the way she held his face in her palms and told him what she told him — and she had given it anyway, on terms he had set, in the dark he had arranged, with the name he had given her which was not his name.
She had taken stock of everything she had been given and found it enough to choose from, and she had chosen him.
And God help him, he had let her. The rest of it was him — all his doing, from the moment he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. He could have stopped at any time, but he had wanted, and by Heaven, he had taken.
She would argue with him on that. She would claim that the choosing had been real and hers and that it had been freely made. But it had been made without the one piece of information that would have changed the balance of it.
He had known that. He had known it at the table, and he had known it when she said I cannot live on nothing and he had known it every moment after that, and he had not stopped.
He made it to the mural chamber. The lamp was cold. He did not light it.
Elizabeth.
Not the woman he had married, not the Baroness of Auchengray, not the voice across the supper table that he had been rationing himself to for three months.
Elizabeth Bennet, the girl from Hertfordshire who had walked three miles in the mud to tend her sister. Elizabeth Bennet, who had danced with him at Netherfield and made him lose the last of his sodded reason when she looked up at him with those eyes so full of spark and life.
She had offered herself not to Fitzwilliam Darcy, but to George Carlisle. She had gone to a whisper in the dark, put her hands on him, said yes — believing she was saying yes to some scarred Scottish baron she had agreed to marry.
That man did not exist. The man who had taken what she offered was someone she had met at a ball in Hertfordshire and who had once dismissed her as not handsome enough to tempt him.
She could not have known whose heart she had broken open; he had made certain of it, from the first evening to the last, and the care he had taken with the concealment was the measure of what he had done to her.
He had arranged things so that she could not choose freely, had told himself it was to protect her, and sitting in the cold dark of the mural chamber tonight, he could not make that argument stand.
He had wanted her love. Not her willingness. Not a wife's duty, or a grateful woman's gratitude, or the compliance of someone with nowhere else to go.
He had wanted Elizabeth Bennet to know him and choose him regardless, the way she chose everything — with her full attention and her sharp mind and nothing withheld. She had done exactly that. But what she had chosen was a fiction.
She had taken him as he was given, without the face, without the name, without the violent rearrangement that recognition would bring with it.
In the dark, he had not been required to watch her remember Meryton or Rosings or Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley.
He had been permitted, for one hour, to just be wanted before being identified.
He did not regret giving himself to her there, even as he sat alone in the cold dark and despised himself for the terms under which it had been given.
The worst of it was that he knew, suddenly and entirely, how much danger he was in of doing it again. She would touch his face, tell him he had not wronged her, and he would fall all over again.
Then the other thought arrived. The one he had not let himself reach yet.
He had not been careful. In the press of everything — the desperation of it, the months of restraint breaking all at once — he had not thought about the consequence.
She might fall with child. One… fracture… was enough, and… egad, he had fractured.
He had spent the evening reading Webb’s letter, knowing for the first time that there might be no way back — no name restored, no Pemberley, no life to return to — and then he had gone downstairs and, in his grief and want, had made everything immeasurably worse.
If she were with child, the child would be born to George Carlisle.
George Carlisle, who did not exist. A name on a Scottish barony that had no standing in English law, attached to a man the Home Office would find out as a fraud.
He could not acknowledge the child as Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Fitzwilliam Darcy was dead. He had no name to give a child.
If she were carrying his child, she would carry it in exactly those conditions — alone, without even the small comfort of knowing if her son looked like his father.
He pressed his hands over his face.
He might not know for weeks. That uncertainty was its own form of punishment, and he had earned it. It entered the mural chamber with him the way the cold entered through the walls — present and entirely indifferent to what he deserved.
The supper came at the usual hour. The tray, the door, the dark. She sat at the table and waited. The knock did not come.
She ate because not eating would have been self-pity, and she was not entitled to self-pity.
The food was perfectly good. She tasted none of it.
The candle and flint were at her right hand, where they had always been.
There was no one to mind tonight if she struck a light, and she did not strike one.
To strike it would have been to concede the evening, and she was not yet ready to concede it.
Falstaff put his head in her lap. She scratched his ears and stared at the wall she could not see.
She told herself, going to bed, that there was a reason having nothing to do with her. He was unwell. A letter had required his attention. The house, a tenant matter, any one of the dozen things she was not allowed to know about. She would understand in the morning.
In the morning, she did not understand anything better.
The second evening, she did not assemble an explanation. She ate, read, and went to bed. She lay in the dark and tried to think clearly, but instead thought in circles. The circles all led to Thursday. To what she had done on Thursday and what he had said when it was over.
I despise myself for what I have done to you.
Not, I am sorry this happened. Not, I wish things were otherwise. Not even I should not have touched you. He had not spoken like a man horrified by the fact itself, but his own part in it. As if she had compelled him to do something he would not otherwise have done.
She had worked at the words for two days, and they did not improve.
He had gathered his coat almost at once.
She had thought he was going to say something that would make the room intelligible again.
He did not. He went out into the corridor and left her in the bed where she had just given away the one thing she had been taught a woman did not give lightly, to a husband whose face she had never seen and whose very name she did not possess with certainty.
She had gone to him. She had been the one. He had been suffering — she had heard it, she had known it — and she had risen from her chair, gone around the table, put her hands on him. He had not asked. If anything, he had tried to pull away.
She had held on. That was the part she could not escape now. She had not been reaching only for the marriage bed. She had been reaching for him — for warmth, for comfort, for the assurance that she was not to be kept always at a careful distance while calling herself his wife.
Her body had done what her pride could not bear to name. It had seized upon the only closeness he seemed able to give, and she had offered what a wife could offer.
She had believed that in the moment. It had been — God help her, it had been the truest thing she had done since July.
She had not forced him. He was twice her size and had spent months demonstrating restraint she could not match. But she had urged, insisted, answered with her hands pulling his body into hers when he gave her the final chance to draw back.
She had meant it. That was the shameful part. She had wanted him and had made herself plain, and now she had two evenings of silence from a man who appeared to find the memory intolerable.
What sort of woman gave her virtue in the dark to a man she had never seen, who had not asked for it, and then lay astonished when he left ashamed?
On the third evening, she simply took a heel of bread back to her bed, so she would not have to sit at the table where two people were supposed to eat. Falstaff arranged himself across her feet. She sat in the dark and faced where the sea was.
She had enjoyed it. That was the part she could not make peace with.
She had not merely endured it. She had cradled him, caressed his face, arched into him.
She had said his name. Small helpless things had come out of her mouth that she would not repeat aloud in a lit room for any sum.
She had not been afraid, and she had not wanted it to stop.
What a woman was supposed to feel in the marriage bed was duty and perhaps a distant warmth of affection and the reasonable hope that it would be brief.