The Reckoning
XXX
Darcy woke smiling.
The smile pulled at his face before his eyes opened, before any thoughts clarified in his head, before the room returned except as warmth and rumpled linen and the remembered luxury of not being alone in the bed.
He lay still, content with darkness gone to moonlight behind his lids and the soft drag of waking while his body was still pleasantly worn out.
Shafts of memory lit one by one, until he was reliving all of it, and joy ran through him with such force that he might have thanked God aloud if gratitude had not seemed too small and too public a thing for what the night had been.
His wife had slept in his arms.
More than that. She had come to him first in anger that turned to passion, and then had come to him again with only drowsy desire, which had seemed more honest than the first. He had gone to sleep with the wild conviction that the world had altered at last into something almost merciful.
He moved his hand across the sheet beside him. Cold linen met his palm.
His eyes opened at once.
A thin white blade of light entered where the wood of the shutter had warped and lay across the floorboards.
The blanket had fallen into disarray round his hips.
Her place beside him was empty, the impression of her body already fading in the mattress.
For one foolish instant, he thought she must have gone, or perhaps he dreamt it, after all.
Then he saw her.
Elizabeth sat at the edge of the bed with her back half turned, one stocking drawn nearly to her knee, the other still lying in her lap with the ribbon twisted round her fingers as if she had forgot for a moment what she was doing.
Her petticoat was bunched around her waist, and her chemise had been dragged on in haste and sat wrong at one shoulder.
Her hair, only partly confined, fell in dark disorder down her back.
The sight of her half-dressed in the room they shared, after such a night, struck him with an almost unbearable tenderness.
Shyness in the morning light, that was to be expected.
Embarrassment, perhaps. Natural enough. There had been wine, quarrel, exhaustion, darkness, astonishment.
Of course, daylight must feel different.
Of course, she might wish to gather herself before turning toward him and meeting what had changed between them.
But nothing essential had changed — not last night. The essentials had changed one violent day in Tudela. It was only now that the truth had shown itself.
“Elizabeth?” He reached for her, let his fingertips graze the back of her elbow.
She went rigid. “Pray, do not touch me, sir.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow. “Do not what? Elizabeth, are you well?”
“Do not make this worse by trying to speak tenderly.” She did not turn, but bent to draw the stocking the rest of the way up her leg. “Do not try to make last night something it was not. We were drunk, exhausted, out of our senses, and it is not happening again.”
The last of sleep left him so completely that it seemed some other man must have been smiling a moment before. He sat up fully and crossed the mattress on his knees until he was beside her. “Elizabeth?”
She rose out of his reach, and her petticoat tumbled down to cover her legs, with the second stocking falling to the floor unheeded. She dragged the chemise straight, and it fell open still where the buttons were missing. She bent to gather her stays from the floor, and laced them about her ribs.
Then, at last, she turned and faced him.
Whatever he had expected, it was not this face. Not awkwardness. Not blushes. She looked him frankly in the eye, without troubling to cross her arms over her stays and chemise. She did not seem inclined to examine his own naked form, which she had found so intriguing last night.
He tugged the blanket up to cover himself. “Elizabeth, there is nothing to be ashamed of. You are not… I did not hurt you, did I?”
“No.” She bent to collect her stocking, but did not put it on. “No, you did not hurt me.”
He moved closer, gathering the blanket as he went. “What is it?” he asked in the gentlest voice he could manage. “Are you afraid I will… expect to take more liberties this morning?”
Her jaw hardened, and she glanced at the window. “What I am trying to tell you, Mr Darcy, is that what happened was a mistake we need not repeat, and do not persuade yourself it was anything but.”
“But you…” He bit down hard on his own lip. “Elizabeth, you talk as if I took you against your will!”
“I make no such claim, but neither will I soothe your vanity by claiming I liked it.”
He stared at her. “You did like it. I do not consult my vanity in this, but your own responses.”
“I was drunk, and so were you. It was one night. A lapse. A piece of madness. If you have the smallest generosity in you, you will let it remain one.”
The wind had gone out of him. It was not possible she could believe any of this.
It was not possible she could think him so gross, or so easily appeased, that once he had her, he might now relinquish any claim on her, or give up hope of the marriage they had consecrated last night, simply because she called it a mistake the next day!
He moved from the bed, the blanket still bunched in front of his waist. His shirt lay near the chair, tangled with her gown. He stooped for it, found one sleeve, then the other.
“This is not generosity,” he said as he pulled it over his head. “It is falsehood. We are married, Elizabeth. Last night, we sealed the paper with our own bodies. It cannot be undone.”
Her colour changed. “Oh, do not.” She stuck her foot out on the edge of the bed and pulled her stocking on, and he had to avert his eyes from the sight of her shapely leg, the muscle curving as she pointed her toes.
“Do not begin that,” she repeated as she set her foot down. “I told you what the bargain was when we made it. England ends it. That remains true now. I will not have my life and this bargain altered every time we do something foolish enough to regret by daylight.”
“I am not altering it because it suits me! I was trying to make you see the fact of the matter.”
Her laugh had no mirth in it. “Convenient! We pay for a paper to save our lives, and since we got it from a church, last night is no longer just a seduction. Now, it is some sacred covenant I must submit to for the rest of my life under the name of duty!”
He reached for his trousers. “Even without a marriage certificate, I would say we now had a duty to each other. You think I would seduce you and then discard you?”
“I am hardly the first, am I?”
The blood drained from his face and seemed to pool somewhere in the pit of his stomach. “I am no rake, Elizabeth.”
“Neither were you innocent. How many women have you bedded before me? I do not see you claiming any duty to them.”
His chest was heaving now, and his knuckles ached from how he was knotting them in his trousers. “That is not something a man discusses with his wife.”
“And that is as good as a confession.”
He ground his teeth. “I am nine and twenty years old! Did you honestly expect I would have no experience? Fathers see to it that their sons are taken in hand early. There are respectable arrangements which —”
“There, you said it yourself. Respectable. A willing woman, a matter settled and concluded as a business affair, and neither party is bound by some lifelong contract.”
His hand went slack, and the trousers dropped once more to the floor. “This is an entirely different situation! You are a gentlewoman, with no protection but your own reputation and the oath I swore to you in Tudela!”
“Do you not find it odd that a gentleman need have no fear for his reputation? Why can men do precisely as they please with whomever they like, and they are afterwards not labelled as a whore or a wife?”
“You may call it unjust, but that is the way of the world, and it cannot be undone just because you are sorry for drinking too much wine and taking me to your bed! If it is a confession you want, you shall have it. I came to find the imbalance distasteful some years ago, when my eyes were opened by an unfortunate…”
He stopped, put a fist to his mouth and breathed, then closed his eyes before he spoke again.
“Someone tried to take advantage of my sister. They did not succeed, but the thought of her ruin, and the realisation of how other women came to such straits, made me so uneasy with the practice that I have not touched a woman in three years.”
The tautness of her figure softened, and she blinked for a few seconds. “You have not?”
“No, and I wish to God I had no memories but those of my wife, but neither will I deceive you.”
Her lashes fluttered strangely, and she turned her head towards the window.
“Elizabeth, I do not deny that you have the right of it. A man may do as he pleases, while the woman pays with her body, with her name, and with whatever future remains to her. Whether you choose to admit it or not, you are no longer innocent. I took that last night. It is not spared for some future husband of your choosing, and I cannot let you bear that consequence alone.”
She turned round to him again. “Since you are sensible of the consequences, and you agree that they would be mine to bear, I pray you do me the justice of letting me choose them. It is I who would suffer, is it not? You may congratulate yourself that you offered what a gentleman ought and were refused.”
His veins had turned to ice, and he could hardly pull air into his lungs.
She could not mean that. She could not mean any of this nonsense!
Last night might have begun in wrath, but it had ended in a tenderness and intimacy that he had only ever dreamed of.
And he had been so sure that she felt the same, that she had wanted him as he had her.
How could she be speaking so differently now?
He turned away, his movements stupid and listless as he fumbled to pull on his trousers. She had found her gown and likewise turned her back. He could hear the fabric being shaken out and pulled into place, and he did not attempt to look at her until they were both fully attired.
She was unjust in claiming she would be the only one to suffer if he released her. She had owned a piece of his heart for two and a half years, and now, she had made his mind, soul, and body hers, as well. There was no walking away now, no clean restoration, no second life untouched by her.
And what if there were consequences from last night that even she could not deny?
Would she confess their marriage then? He found himself hoping savagely that he had got her with child, that she would suspect it by the time they returned to England, and that she would be forced to claim the name Mrs Darcy for good.
And she would resent him for it.
He could not bear it, and he felt the tears squeezing from his eyes. He dashed them away and turned around. “I would never keep you by force.”
“You could not keep me, by force or otherwise. Last night changes nothing.”
He should have been silent. Honour, mercy, common sense, all told him so.
Pain moved first.
“Ten to one,” he said, and heard venom eroding his voice even as he spoke, “you were so drunk you do not remember it anyway.”
She stopped as if a shot had gone off between them.
One hand was at her sleeve ribbon. She did not finish tying it. She looked at him with such naked astonishment that for an instant, he believed he had done what cruelty always pretends it means to do and won some advantage.
“It must be a bitter blow for you, Mr Darcy, to discover you are so forgettable.”
If she had struck his face, he might at least have understood which part of him hurt. But this was worse, because it took the most holy night of his life and reduced it to a common, blurred, dismissible matter, a thing so little marked in her memory that he might as well have been any other man.
When she spoke again, the anger had flattened into something almost businesslike. He hated that tone more. Anger, at least, had blood in it.
“We need not behave like idiots. What is done is done.” She tied the ribbon at last, pulled the knot tight, and went to the table for her hairpins.
“If there are no consequences, there is no reason it need govern the rest. I will be free to choose elsewhere. You will be free to marry your heiress. We shall both of us have what we wanted from the beginning.”
Free.
The word crossed his mind and found no place to lodge.
What freedom was there now in a world divided into before last night and after it?
She thought she was restoring order. She was asking him to assist in the erasure of the only sacred happiness he had ever touched, while bearing herself the harsher cost if the erasure were ever tested before the world.
Yet even now, he could not tell her so.
He could not tell her that she was his wife in more than law now, and that he would never again be a man untouched by her.
He could not tell her that the night had gone deeper into him than any vow spoken in the church.
If he pressed, if he pleaded, if he let one syllable of his private torment show, he became monstrous.
So, there remained only one answer.
He fastened the first button of his waistcoat and found that even so small an action required more concentration than he possessed.
“Then, by all means, let us leave Vitoria as soon as possible.”