Christmas Morning
XLIX
She had not marked the last time the drapes had been drawn back — sometime in the last fortnight, neither of them remarking on it, the way neither of them had remarked on the second chair in the library. But they were open now, and she could look at him as long as she liked.
He was, she was prepared to admit, exceptionally good-looking.
This was irritating information, because it meant she had been wrong about that too, on top of everything else, and she had already been wrong about a considerable number of things this year, so she did not need to add to the list. But the evidence was directly in front of her — the dark hair curled against the pillow, the jaw she had traced in the dark more times than she could count, the lashes lying against his cheek in a way that she would not be describing to Jane under any circumstances — and the evidence was not ambiguous.
She propped herself on her elbow and studied him with the attention the situation deserved.
The jaw was extremely fine, she decided.
The brow was exactly as her fingers had mapped it — broad, clean, the faint line between the brows that appeared when he was working through something.
His hair was longer than it had been at Rosings, curling more richly now.
She reached out and touched it, very lightly, and he did not stir.
She touched it again, less lightly.
He made a sound that was not quite a word.
“You are awake.”
He turned over. “I am not,” he said, into the pillow.
“You are clearly awake. Your breathing changed.”
He did not answer at once. “My breathing did not change.”
She drew her finger along his jaw, following the line she knew by memory; the slight roughness of it was there under her finger, the end of a long day even at the beginning of one. “You have been awake for at least five minutes, and you have been pretending otherwise.”
“I have been awake for thirty seconds,” he said, with considerable dignity, “and I intend to be asleep again in thirty more.”
“It is Christmas.”
“Christmas does not require consciousness at—” He opened one eye. The light was in the room, and she could see the moment of his taking it in — the grey December morning, the open drapes, her face above his. The eye closed again. “—whatever hour this is.”
“A perfectly reasonable hour. I have been awake for some time.”
“I am aware. You have been poking at my face.”
“I have been studying your face. There is a distinction. I was not permitted to do so for four months, and I am making up for lost time.”
He turned his head on the pillow and opened both eyes, and she had him fully — the dark eyes in the December light — regarding her with the expression she had learned meant he was not going to argue the point and was not entirely displeased about it either.
“Well?”
“You are very good-looking,” she said. “It is extremely inconvenient.”
“I do not see how that would be.”
“It would have been much easier to dislike you if you had not been.” She traced the line of his brow with one finger, from centre to temple, and he went still under her hand. “I told myself you were not. At Netherfield. At Rosings. I was very firm about it.”
“I do not consider myself vain, but even I know that was a lamentable effort of self-delusion. My features are perfectly acceptable.”
“They are far more than ‘acceptable.’” Her finger moved to his cheekbone, then to the jaw. “I have been making decisions about you for a year and a half based on entirely insufficient data. I intend to remedy that.”
He had meant to reply.
That was the first absurdity. He had been spoken to. A reply was required. Some civil thing. Some husband-like thing. Some answer that did not involve staring at his wife as if civilization had only just been invented and he had grave doubts about whether it ought to continue.
Instead, he lay on the pillow and held her in his gaze, and found that speech had become inconvenient, too.
She was propped on one elbow, the first shards of sunrise through the window at her back, and her hair loose over one shoulder. Her finger moved once more over his brow.
“You are frowning.”
“I am thinking.”
“That is generally an alarming sign at this hour.”
“It is not yet a civilized hour.”
“It is Christmas.”
“You have advanced that argument already.”
“And I find it a strong one.” Her mouth altered. “Do you object to being looked at, Fitzwilliam?”
“I was not aware,” he said, “that I had any power to object successfully to anything you have resolved upon.”
“You had once.”
“I doubt it.”
“You are thinking of recent history. I am thinking of Netherfield, where you looked so severely at me across the drawing room that I was obliged to become frivolous in self-defence.”
He almost smiled. “‘Obliged’?”
“Quite obliged. A lady can hardly be expected to endure such lofty disapprobation in silence.”
“If you endured it at all, you disguised the suffering remarkably well.”
“Sir, I laughed at you for my own preservation.” She traced the line of his cheek with the tip of one finger. “Do not tell me now that you admired it. I should consider that extremely unfair.”
His eyes found her properly then — the dark eyes alive already, the expression that meant she had scented the truth and meant to have it.
“I admired it very much.”
She stopped.
The hand on his face stayed where it was, but all the rest of her altered at once — the stillness that came of expecting resistance and finding confession instead.
“You did not show it.”
“No.”
“You showed, if memory serves, something very like disapproval.”
“I was trying to.”
Her brows went up. “Trying to dislike me?”
“Trying not to show how much I liked you.”
“Why, because I was impertinent?”
“Especially then.”
“That is a very suspicious taste in a man.”
“It may be. I have had it for some time.”
“All this time,” she said, “I supposed myself to be mortifying you.”
“You were.”
“There, you see?”
“In the way one is mortified by being too pleased.”
She shook her head at him as if he were beyond remedy. “And at Rosings? When I advised you of a walking path I was fond of, so that you might be able to avoid me?”
“I thought you were flirting.”
Her eyes rounded, and her brows rose. “Flirting? Now you sound more like yourself.”
He put up a hand and caught her wrist very gently before she could withdraw it from his face. Her pulse moved under his thumb, quick and even. “I saw what I wanted to see and heard what I wanted to hear,” he said, “because I was already too far gone to hear any of it with safety.”
“I thought,” she said, “that you disapproved because you found me ill-bred.”
“I found you unlike anyone I had ever met, which was a far more dangerous circumstance.”
“So, I have been punished for my manners by being secretly admired for them.”
“You have not been punished.”
“Hid from, misled, married in darkness, observed through architectural contrivance. These things, I think, begin to amount to a system.”
“Elizabeth.”
“No, let us be accurate. Accuracy is the least you owe me after this.” She shifted closer against him under the coverlet, her hair falling forward over one shoulder. “And my insufferableness, I collect, was one of your chosen pleasures.”
“It was not one of them.”
“No?”
“It was all of them.”
That checked her so completely that for an instant, even her wit gave way. She held him in her gaze a long time.
Then, very softly, “You hide delight abominably.”
“I know.”
She drew her hand free of his and laid it, with maddening deliberation, against the centre of his chest. Her palm was warm. The gesture had curiosity in it, and fondness, and some claim she no longer made shyly. Her hand stayed over his heart, and she tilted her head very slightly.
“Is this where all the admiration was kept? Or was it… somewhere else?” Her hand moved down, over his navel, then lower still.
He let out a breath that was nearly a laugh, and it shook. “You are behaving very ill.”
“No. I am gathering overdue information.” Her hand moved once, the smallest treacherous stroke. “I have discovered that I was not merely tolerated. I should like now to know how much danger I was in.”
He turned onto his side to face her fully. The blankets shifted. Morning cold touched his shoulder and was forgotten immediately.
“You were in considerable danger.”
“Of what?”
“Of being loved far too soon by a man with very little talent for concealing it and still less for confessing it.”
That left her without speech for perhaps three heartbeats, which was as astonishing, in its way, as any silence he had ever known. Then her lashes lowered. She looked, for the first time since waking him, almost shy.
“How soon was ‘too soon’?”
“The second time I ever saw you, I was gone. I should say that was ‘too soon’ by every prudent standard.”
She smiled and leaned a little closer to his mouth. “We have never been particularly obedient to prudent standards.”
“No.” He reached and tucked the loosened strand of hair behind her ear. “You, least of all.”
She leaned into the touch. “I am glad,” she said.
He did not ask to what she referred. He knew.
He kissed her before he could say something inadequate. She kissed him as if she had learned the argument and found it wholly in her favour.
She giggled softly against his mouth, and her hand drifted lower, doing something unseemly.
“Good heavens, woman. I thought here at least I might be safe from your teasing.”
“Then you ought not to have married me. It is too late now.”
“It was too late at Netherfield.”
That silenced her in a different way. Her hand came up to his face, not teasing now, only holding. Her thumb rested at his jaw. He kissed the inside of her wrist, because he could not help it. Her pulse leapt under his mouth. Her eyes darkened.
She came closer of her own accord, the line of her body finding his with that infuriating, perfect rightness that still startled him.
“Tell me something else,” she murmured.
He brushed his mouth to her temple. “I preferred you for being alive where so many others were merely accomplished.” His hand moved over her back, feeling the warm length of her through linen.
“You laughed as if the room belonged to you. You looked at people as if rank were useful only so long as it did not interfere with sense. You spoke to me as though I might be worth crossing swords with but not reverencing. Do you know how rare that was for me?”
She shook her head once.
“No one had ever treated me as if I were better employed in earning amusement than in being deferred to.”
A smile touched her mouth then, smaller and infinitely sweeter than the earlier laughter. “Well. I am happy to have been of service.”
He kissed her again because gratitude in him had always tended, where she was concerned, to become desire almost at once.
This time, when she laughed, it did not separate them.
It melted into a sound that was in his chest. Her hands were in his hair.
He drew the coverlet aside enough to gather her closer.
The room was cold at the edges and warm where they were, the sort of winter morning that made a bed into a country entire.
She came willingly and put her mouth to his shoulder, and he had to close his eyes.
“Fitzwilliam,” she said against his skin, and there was still wonder in the use of his name. “I do not think I knew before how well suited we are.”
“How unfortunate for your peace.”
“My peace has been in ruins since Hertfordshire.”
“Mine met an untimely end rather earlier this morning.”
She smiled without lifting her head. “That, at least, was my intention.”
He rolled her beneath him with a care that would have been impossible had he not already learned the measure of her body many times over. She took it laughing and then not laughing, both hands at his shoulders now, her face open to him in the soft Christmas light.
“You cannot do that,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because I was about to say something cutting.”
“You may say it afterward.”
“That is tyrannical.”
“You married me under conditions which ought to have warned you.”
“On the contrary, I married a whisper in the dark. The tyrant is comparatively new.”
He bent his head, and whatever she meant to add dissolved into his mouth.
He had thought, before, that he knew what it was to fit another person. In the dark, he had learned hunger. In the nights after, trust. This morning, he learned delight, and drank of it in great, satisfying draughts.
Afterward, he lay half over her, unwilling to surrender the exact arrangement by which he might still feel her laughter in the looseness of her breath.
It remained a grey Aberdeenshire Christmas and would, he did not doubt, continue so with northern perseverance until dusk.
But the bed was warm, and she was beneath his hand, and one of the pillows had gone to the floor in the course of events, and there was no magistrate, no clerk, no Home Office, no case at all within the bounds of the blanket.
Elizabeth touched his mouth with one finger. “You look very smug.”
“I am married to you. I think I may be allowed a little self-approval.”
“A little?”
“A vanishingly little.”
“I shall permit it, because I am charitable at Christmas.”
“You are never charitable where my vanity is concerned.”
“I am charitable where it can be improved by management.”
He laughed against her throat, and she put her arms around him at once, not to restrain him, not to persuade, only because she liked to hold him there.
He lifted himself enough to look at her again. Her hair was in disorder. Her mouth was softer than it had been when she woke him. Her eyes, meeting his, held no reserve at all.
“Elizabeth.”
She heard the change in him at once. “What is it?”
He might have said any number of things. What came out was simpler. “You were right.”
“About what? I am right about so many things that you must narrow the field.”
He smiled then, because there she was again, impossible and exact. “About our being suited.”
Her eyes found him, and the playfulness in her face gentled into something grave enough to hurt.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
He kissed her once more, not out of hunger now, though hunger would have answered readily enough, but because agreement on such a point seemed to deserve a seal.
Outside, the ice covered the windows. Inside, he drew the blankets higher around them, and she came against him with the ease of having never belonged anywhere so much as here, in this bed, in this light, in this impossible life with him.