Preview
Homeless
Elizabeth woke beneath a man's arm.
White morning leaked through the shutter.
The blanket lay hot about her legs. A broad hand rested at her waist through the wrinkled linen of her chemise, heavy with the heedless intimacy of sleep; and before memory rose high enough to name any part of it, her whole body had already gone rigid under the simple knowledge that if she drew one full breath, the man beside her might wake, and she would be forced at once to become a woman capable of speech after such a night.
The room returned in pieces. Vitoria. The inn.
Rough red wine on the table. A quarrel carried too far because neither of them had ever possessed the grace to leave the other the last word.
Silence after it, black and thick and drawing nearer instead of breaking.
His mouth. Her own astonishing want of sense.
The bed striking the wall. Her hand at the nape of his neck.
His name in her mouth, once with anger, once with something far worse.
She lay still and stared into the dim corner above the bed, as if cracked plaster might offer counsel where her judgement had failed her so signally.
The room was scattered with the disordered remains of two travellers who had disgraced themselves beyond all decent excuse.
Her gown lay in a heap near the chair. His shirt had fallen across one of her stockings.
A stay had vanished beneath the bed as if modesty, finding the place intolerable, had tried to quit it in the dark.
Worst of all was the man himself. Weeks on the road had taught her more of him than any unmarried woman ought to know of any man: the leather and horse and hard-used linen that clung to him after a day's travel, the clean severity he preserved whenever water could be had, the masculine heat of him after labour, and now this final misery, that sleep made him reach for her blindly and keep her when he found her.
A low ache moved through her, deep and wholly without delicacy. She drew herself inward with all the force she possessed, as if indignation might return her to yesterday. As if she could take it all back.
No.
This had come of wine, exhaustion, Spain, weeks of privation, and the infernal habit they had fallen into of making every quarrel run too near the edge of something neither of them would confront. By daylight it should contract into what it was — an error, a lapse, one night shut up and buried.
The arm across her waist tightened by a hair's breadth.
Elizabeth stopped at the edge of a breath.
He did not wake. His hand only settled more fully against her, broad and warm, the contact plain through the thin cloth gathered at her middle.
The answer it drew from her was so swift, so bodily, that she might have cursed aloud, if cursing had offered any hope of escape.
She closed her eyes. That served only to restore memory more completely.
His mouth at her throat. The roughness of his jaw against her skin.
The grave care with which he had touched her before care gave way.
One look, wholly unguarded, when she had drawn him down to her and he had understood, at last, that she meant it.
Her eyes opened at once.
She would not lie there and soften him.
With the caution of a thief, though she had never in her life stood on less ground from which to condemn one, Elizabeth turned her head upon the pillow.
He lay half turned toward her, one arm under the pillow, the other flung over her as if sleep had repealed all the severe ordinances by which he ruled himself in daylight.
The sheet had fallen to his hips. Morning spared him nothing — the white scar high on his shoulder, older than Spain; the half-healed graze along his ribs from the barge-work at Estella; the new leanness the weeks of hunger and travel had carved into him.
Sun had browned him beyond the complexion Hertfordshire knew.
His hair, too long for fashion and too tousled for his own liking, had fallen across his temple and taken from him, in sleep, something of the forbidding reserve which waking restored entire.
Without coat, cravat, boots, hauteur, or any other article of the armour in which he ordinarily met the world, he was only a man — exhausted, formidable, indecently handsome, and close enough to undo her… twice. If memory served.
She turned her face back to the ceiling so quickly that the pillow rustled under her cheek.
There lay the true peril. The bed was ruin already and beyond prevention.
The greater danger lay in one glance too many, one recollection too warmly entertained.
She remembered enough as it was. His patience where she had offered him none.
The change in his anger once it had burned clear of pride.
The devout attention of his lips. The astonishment that had gone over his face when the last of his restraint broke in her hands.
This would never do. She must leave the bed.
Resolve came more readily than execution.
Her first attempt brought such protest from her limbs that she was obliged to stop.
The second failed because the arm across her waist, which had lain there as a circumstance while she merely endured it, became a barricade the instant she tried to move it.
He was warm, heavy, wholly unconscious, and more obstructive in sleep than many men were by intention.
Elizabeth gathered his wrist in both hands.
Warm skin. Dark hair against her palm. Bone and tendon and more muscle than any gentleman had a right to. She knew too much of that hand. Its strength. Its hesitation. Its restraint over these starving weeks. Its different character after midnight.
She lifted with exquisite care.
A low, wordless sound broke from him, and he drew her nearer.
Her whole being rose in mutiny.
His face settled at the curve of her neck. His breath touched the place below her ear. The roughness of his jaw followed, and from some depth in herself over which reason possessed far less dominion than she had ever granted, there came, swift and appalling, an answer. A fleeting impulse…
she could stay…
Oh, no, indeed.
She wrenched his arm from her and escaped before soreness, conscience, or the mattress could conspire against her further.
The boards struck cold through her bare feet.
Her chemise lay near the chair; she dragged it over her head with hands considerably less obedient than they had once been, while her body, treacherous from first to last, insisted upon remembering every liberty it had allowed.
Her mouth knew. Her breasts knew. Her thighs knew. Such knowledge improved nothing.
Movement behind her turned her blood to ice.
She stopped with one arm through the sleeve and listened.
Only a long exhalation followed, the breath of a man still sleeping.
She sat at the edge of the bed to draw on her stockings, because standing demanded more self-command than she could just then promise, and kept her face turned toward the shutter, toward the thin blades of day entering where the wood had warped.
Before he woke, she must be composed. Before he woke, she must have some language by which the night might be acknowledged and buried in the same breath.
Before he woke, she must make herself equal to addressing the man behind her as though he had not, a few hours earlier, known her more intimately than any creature on earth.
And there, advancing at last to the front of everything, came the final indignity.
They had done this in wine, in wrath, in want, in folly; they had done it lawfully; and whatever she might call the night in order to survive the morning, her own body would refuse the lie.
Half dressed in the chill Spanish dawn, aching, ashamed, furious, and far too alive to the warmth of the sleeping man at her back, she waited for Fitzwilliam Darcy to wake so that she might begin the impossible labour of pretending that the road before them remained what it had been yesterday.
He was not merely Mr. Darcy.
He was her husband.
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