Borrowed Time
XLVIII
She had spent four months listening for him in the dark. She spent the days after the candle looking at him in the light, and what she had been unable to admit to herself while she could not see him, she could admit easily now that she could.
She wanted him more than she had wanted him before.
She had imagined that seeing him would settle some of it — that desire was a thing the imagination supplied where the eye could not, and that having the man in front of her — having Fitzwilliam Darcy, a man she had once sworn never to even dance with — would resolve down into something quieter, more domestic, more proportionate to a wife who had been married since July and had her husband whole.
It had not gone that way. She found her eye on him as it had been on no one in her life.
The line of his back at the desk in the morning — Hertfordshire would have read it as stiffness; she now read it as concentration, with the bearing he had taught himself for difficult work — and the work was always going to be difficult, and there was no use complaining of it.
She would come into the library and stop in the doorway and find herself for some seconds unable to move forward, because the back of his head over the papers was its own piece of evidence that he was alive and in her house, and the evidence did not yet exhaust itself with repetition.
Oh, and his hands. She had known his hands in the dark for four months.
She had not known the shape of them in light — the long fingers, the small scar at the base of the left thumb she had never asked about, the unhurried grace of them on a pen or a book or the back of the dog.
She found her eye on his hands a great deal.
At supper, cutting bread, at the desk arranging papers, in the library closing a book gently against his thigh before he stood, and her attention on them was a kind of pleasure she had not known she was capable of, and did not see any reason to do without.
She had known he was a man Mrs MacLeod approved of.
She had not, until she could see it for herself, taken in the daily grain of it — that he never came into the kitchen without asking and never left it without something said in thanks, that he addressed Mrs MacLeod with the deference owed to a woman who had been keeping this house running since before he came and would be keeping it running long after.
She had known he was kind. She had not seen until now what the kindness looked like in the small daily transactions.
She came along the corridor one afternoon and found him with Angus by the window, the two of them looking at something out towards the south wall.
Angus was talking, and Darcy was listening, and his bearing said he was being instructed by an expert, and she stood at the corridor’s far end and looked on for a stretch before either of them saw her.
She had not, in Hertfordshire, ever seen Fitzwilliam Darcy take instruction from anyone.
He saw her then, and turned, and his face changed — not by much, not in any way Angus would have remarked, but enough that she saw it, and she went on along the corridor to her own business with the small warmth of having been the cause of it tucked into her chest like something she was going to take out and look at later.
She found that she wanted him at hours she had not known one was permitted to want one’s husband.
The daylight had altered nothing about the wanting and a great deal about her capacity to say so.
She had told him, on the third afternoon, that he was to come upstairs with her, and he had given her the gaze of one being asked something he had not expected to be asked at that hour, and had set down his pen, and had come upstairs with her.
Neither of them had been the same about it since. The dark had imposed its own propriety on what could be asked for; the light imposed none, and she discovered she had fewer scruples about asking than she had supposed. He had not commented on the change. He had also not been slow to answer it.
What it did to her to have his eyes on her in the light was a thing she would have to take some time to come to terms with. He had a manner of looking at her, when she had told him to look, that made her aware of being seen entire.
By the week before Christmas, she had learned the sound of him moving through the house in a way that had nothing to do with the hidden passage or the dark.
His step on the main stair was different from his step in the corridor — heavier, unhurried, the step of someone with no reason to be quiet.
He always stood a second in the doorway of whatever room she was in before he came through it, not hesitating, taking stock, and she had stopped marking it consciously, as she had stopped marking the sea.
She had also learned to listen for horses on the road.
The first time she had stopped breathing, it had been the village boy with the post. The second time, it had been a tenant come to ask about a fence.
The third time, it had been nothing at all — a sound carried up off the headland that she had mistaken for a hoof.
He had been in the room with her on the third occasion, had seen her face, looked away, and she had been grateful to him for not asking, because she would have wept if he had, and she did not wish to weep about it where he could see.
She did not know how long she had him. The doubt had begun to do something to the texture of every ordinary hour.
She had begun, without meaning to, the kind of private accounting one does when one knows the count is finite — taking him in at the desk, at the table, in the chair by the fire with the book closed against his thigh; storing it, in some part of herself that would still have it when the rest of her was somewhere else.
He came down one evening earlier than she had expected him and found her at the window of the long room, the dusk on the headland, and her hand against the glass and her face broken in something she had not had time to put right.
He stood in the doorway and did not speak.
After some moments, he came across the room and put his hand against the small of her back, and she leaned against him without turning, and they stood at the window together until the light was gone off the sea entirely.
He was at the table one evening when she came in, earlier than usual, and he was writing something and did not hear her enter.
She stood in the doorway and took him in — the angle of his head, the pen moving, the line of his jaw in the candlelight — and behind it was July, the first night, standing in the dark with her hands loose at her sides while a stranger’s whisper came from two feet away, and the distance between that night and this one was four months and a lifetime.
She put her fingers to her mouth and choked back a little sob — a sob for herself, walking into that moment so blind with terror, and for what he must have felt, aching to reassure her and not daring to give too much comfort.
His head came up at the sound of her gasp. “You are early.”
“You were not expecting me to be quiet about it.”
“I was not,” he agreed, and moved the papers to make room for her at the table.