One Blanket, One Mule #2
He did not bother arguing. He had learnt, at some cost to his pride, that this was simply how they ate now.
He could out-argue scholars in Latin, school his own steward in planting and flock management, manage all the investments and ledgers his father’s wealth had left to him with or without accountants and solicitors, but he could not talk a farm wife out of a single egg.
Elizabeth, however, wearing a smile that shamed the sunrise and dressed in a gown a beggar would decline, could stand in a strange farmyard and, within the quarter hour, have the household half in love with her and the kettle on.
She was doing it now. He watched her make herself known to the woman of the house — the battered English couple, robbed on the pass, the husband still ailing, only wanting a dry corner and willing to earn it — and watched the wariness in the farm wife's face give way to Christian charity.
He thought, not for the first time, that he had married the most formidable person he had ever met, and had been too great a fool in Hertfordshire to see it.
Charity only went so far. The keeping of two people and a hungry mule meant that they must offer something to earn their meal. The wife asked Elizabeth to write a letter to a son gone for a soldier, which she managed in half an hour. Darcy’s end of the bargain took somewhat longer.
“The wall,” the farmer said, in slow Spanish, pointing, and mimed the stacking of stone as he looked doubtfully at Darcy's swollen face and gentleman's hands.
“Sí,” Darcy sighed, and went to mend the wall.
It was beyond him, honestly. A month ago, it would have been nothing — he was a strong man, or had been — and now the lifting of the stones set his bruised ribs screaming and the fever sweat breaking over his brow again.
After the third course, he had to stop, brace, and breathe, and go on, because it was the price for his wife’s supper and the feeding of the mule that would carry or drag them to the coast.
He got the wall mended. It took him twice as long as it should have, but when it was done, he stood looking at the poor crooked line of it — one of the first honest labours of his life, he supposed, the first stones any Darcy had laid with his own hands in three hundred years — and found that he was, absurdly, a little proud of it.
Pemberley had ten miles of such walls. He had never once wondered who built them. He would wonder now.
That night, they feasted on bean soup, bread, and a little bacon, and it was the best meal he could remember eating.
The family gave them the byre loft to sleep in, warm above the animals, dry under the good thatch, and it was, after the stable at Reinosa and three cold nights on the open ground, very near to luxury.
And that was something he meant to take advantage of.
The notion trickled into his blood the moment they climbed up into the loft and he saw her face in the last of the light — that the frosty nights had been, in their miserable way, a kind of unspoken agreement.
On the open ground, frozen and famished, a man's body had other business than wanting, and a woman could not possibly be asked to permit cold hands under her gown.
Here, it was warm. Here, there was soft hay, and full bellies, and a low golden light coming up through the boards.
Elizabeth was an arm's length off, unpinning her hair because it had come loose in the day's walking, and every reason his body had found not to want her these last few nights fell quietly away.
They lay down under their one blanket, and he pulled her close, his arms around her, and felt the deep sigh ease her bones.
He smiled to himself and closed his hand over hers.
She did not respond at first, but after a few seconds, her fingers moved to hook in his.
But it felt less like affection and more like a grip, like she meant to keep his hand there rather than somewhere else.
He kissed the back of her neck, then dragged his softened lips over her skin.
That never failed to elicit a sigh from her, but tonight, she tensed instead.
He slowed, drinking in the scent of her, the feel of her hips pulled against his.
Her hair smelled of wood smoke, hints of fresh, coastal air, and the sweetness of her own sweat.
She was exhausted, his dearest Elizabeth.
He ought to be ashamed of his own selfishness, but there was — did he imagine it?
— a faint rock in her hips, the slightest arch in her spine that pressed her backside a little more deeply into him.
He tugged his hand from hers and smoothed it over her shoulder, kissing the nape of her neck again. His fingers sought and found the tight lines between her muscles, easing the knots, soothing the tension away with his touch and his kiss.
She rocked back, her body melting a little more.
Only a fraction, the smallest surrender, with a little moan of pleasure when he let his fingernails trace the tight line of muscle down from her skull and deep into her shoulder.
He followed it with his mouth, and her head tilted just a little, letting him…
But on the next breath, she stiffened.
Sore. She was probably very sore. After walking all day, writing and worrying and carrying more strain and distress than her frame should have to bear, she had every right to flinch at his touch. But she was not pulling away, not protesting.
He should have stopped there, should have let her have her rest, lain like stone and given her the warmth of his body and no more.
He was not that strong. No man could be.
He pulled his other hand from under her ribs and set both of them to stroke her shoulders, her neck, her back.
He heard her swallowing, saw her eyelashes fluttering, and felt her breaths deepening.
He raised up on his elbow a little, tugged her shoulder back to roll her half towards him, and set his mouth to the side of her throat, softly, where it curved to her shoulder — the gentlest question he knew how to ask.
Her breath stopped, and she arched the smallest degree further into his mouth, her whole body going warm and pliant against him —
And then she rolled away.
“No.” She took his hand from where it had come to rest at her waist and set it firmly away. “No. Fitzwilliam, we cannot. I cannot. Please.”
He lay still. His heart was ringing like a bell, pulsing and singing, and his mouth still held the warmth of her skin. It took him a moment to trust his voice.
“Forgive me. You are tired, I —”
“That is not it.”
He propped up a little further on his elbow. “May I ask why? We are married. We have — Elizabeth, there is no line here left uncrossed. Why do you refuse me now, when it is only the two of us and a warm loft and no reason on earth to —”
“Because I want you.”
His brow creased. “I… I am afraid I do not understand, then.”
She turned her head towards him. “Because if I let myself have it — have you — every time I feel like holding you, then when the time comes that I must not, I will have forgot how.”
He shook his head. “Must not… For what purpose? Elizabeth, you are making no sense.”
“I do not feel equal to arguing it, either. Please, just go to sleep, and do not ask me again tonight, because I have not got another 'no' in me and we both know it.”
He did not ask again. He lay in the warm loft, a careful foot from his wife, with the whole aching length of the night ahead of him.
He could make no sense of those words — when the time comes that I must not.
There was no such time, would never be such a time.
That foolish pact they had made in Tudela, the notion of a marriage made of paper, had gone the way of blood and ruin two months ago.
She was his, and he was hers, and the war and the money and the whole ruined world could do their worst, and it changed nothing.
What the devil was she guarding against?
She was not asleep. He could hear the uneven breaths, even a shuddering sigh or two, but he dared not try to soothe her again. He turned on his back, letting her keep the blanket, and stared at the roof of the warm loft until blackness claimed him.