XLVI
A Proper Sort of Woman
Harcourt, it turned out, was as good as his noise.
He had spent the better part of a week being insufferable about it — “Leave it to me, Darcy, you have not the first idea how a thing like this is managed, you would take the first leaky coaster that offered and drown the pair of you” — and Darcy had swallowed the condescension because the man was, maddeningly, right, and because a man who knew every master in the harbour was worth a great deal of swallowed pride.
And now it had come good. Harcourt had found them a ship.
The Prudence, out of Bristol, a sound merchantman with an honest master Harcourt vouched for personally, taking on wool and iron and a small number of passengers, and — this was the part Darcy had turned over the whole walk back, testing it for flaws and finding none — sailing in a week.
Not a fortnight. Not “When the wind serves, senor, who can say.” A week, near enough, with a fair chance of less if the loading went quickly, and the weather held.
He had been promised a decent cabin to be had for the two of them, dry and private and away from the cargo, which after two months of floors and lofts and stable corners seemed to Darcy an almost indecent luxury.
A week. He wished to God it were tomorrow.
He had counted the calendar a hundred times and it always came out the same — a week here, then the crossing, ten days or a fortnight if Biscay behaved and longer if it did not, and then England, and London, and the note falling due at the end of the month with a margin that grew thinner every time he counted it.
A week was too long. A week was very nearly not soon enough.
But it was reliable, which nothing else had been, and a fair fast passage on a sound ship would still see them home in time to do what had to be done, and that — after weeks of no and not this fortnight and the wind sits foul — was the first solid ground he had stood on since the harbour swallowed his hopes.
Cautious. He made himself be cautious. A great deal could still go wrong between here and the deck.
But it was good. It was, for once, genuinely good, and he took the stairs to their rooms two at a time to tell her.
He came in already speaking. “It is done — or as near done as makes no matter. Harcourt has found us a ship, a proper one, the Prudence, out of Bristol, and the master is an honest —”
She was in the bath.
They had had it brought up, apparently, in the hour he had been gone — a real bath, a great copper thing steaming before the fire, the sort of thing that cost the earth at an inn and that they could now, God be thanked, afford.
Elizabeth was in it up to her collarbone, her knees just breaking the surface, her hair pinned up in a casual dark knot with strands come loose and curling in the steam, and her eyes were closed.
Her head rested back against the rim on a towel folded for that purpose.
There was a small, private smile on her mouth.
She did not open her eyes, but they were moving under her lids.
“Go on,” she said. “The master is an honest —?”
“— an honest man, Harcourt says.” Darcy found he had rather lost the thread of it. “Vouches for him personally. Which from Harcourt means a great deal or nothing at all, I have not decided which.”
He came further into the room, setting his hat down without looking at where it landed. “A week, Elizabeth. Perhaps less. A cabin to ourselves. Dry, and private, and —”
“Private. That sounds interesting.” The smile had deepened by a fraction, and he understood, watching her, that she knew exactly what she was doing — lying there wet and warm and entirely at her ease with her eyes shut, making him do all the talking to a woman who would not so much as look at him, while the steam curled up off her bare shoulders and the firelight moved on the water.
“You might,” he said, “at least pretend to attend to me. This is news of some importance. Our passage home. The whole object of —”
“I am attending to every word.” Her eyes remained shut.
“A ship. The Prudence. A week. An honest master, or not. A cabin, dry and private.” She smiled again.
“You see, I have it all. I simply do not see why I should open my eyes to hear it, when I am so very comfortable, and you have such a pleasant voice for reciting good news.”
He stood looking at her. His wife, in a copper bath, in the firelight, refusing on principle to acknowledge him, wearing that infernal, complacent little smile that he had wanted, the whole desperate length of this journey, to have the leisure to be undone by.
“Comfortable?” he repeated.
“Exceedingly.”
There was a sponge on the little stool beside the bath, and a cake of soap that some kind soul had provided.
Darcy shed his coat, pushed up his sleeves, and crossed the room.
He knelt down at the side of the bath where she lay with her eyes closed and her smile in place, so certain of him, so entirely sure he would come to her — and he found he had not the smallest wish to prove her wrong.
He took up the sponge. He wet it, and drew it warm and slow across the top of her shoulder, along the line of her collarbone, down the curve of her arm where it rested on the rim. Her breath deepened, and the smile shifted into something softer, and still, she did not open her eyes.
“Keep talking,” she murmured. “About the ship. I like hearing you.”
“I find I have said all I mean to say about the ship. I am sick of the ship. I have thought of nothing but ships for a week and I refuse to think of one more while you are lying there looking like that.”
“Then what will you talk of?” Her eyes were still closed, her head still tipped back against the rim, but the smile had come back to her mouth, curious now. “You must talk of something. I have grown accustomed to the sound. It would be cruel to stop.”
“London.”
He drew the sponge down the length of her arm again.
“I have been thinking of what our home will be like for you.
There is a house — not the Derbyshire house, that is another matter and God knows what becomes of it, but the town house, in Grosvenor Square.
It is mine outright, which no loan touches, and my father's folly did not swallow. It is a fine house. Too fine for a bachelor; I have rattled about in three rooms of it for years and let the rest go under holland covers. But it was built for a mistress.” He sponged her shoulder, her throat, and caught the hook of one wet curl to wrap it around a finger.
“There is a suite of rooms on the first floor, south-facing, that has stood shut up since my mother died.
The mistress's chambers. They will be yours. In a perfect world, I would have had them done over entire before you ever see them, but I rather like the notion of you deciding what it needs — new hangings, whatever colour you like, I should guess green —” he smiled — “and a dressing room, and a woman of your own to keep it, and a window seat where you may sit and read and refuse to attend to me at your leisure.”
“I do not want a private suite of rooms.”
“Better and better. Mine adjoin, and I always thought they were rather dull. A bed far too large for one person, a window that overlooks both the street on one side and a little garden on the other, a wall of books I had brought up for my own private use. My dressing room could be modified to make room for —”
“Fitzwilliam…”
“You shall have many gowns. Not one decent gown that barely fits, bought hurried in a foreign port, but a wardrobe, proper things, a modiste to the house, silk and muslin and whatever the season demands. Furs for the winter. A carriage of your own, and horses, and —”
“Fitzwilliam.” She had opened her eyes.
He stopped. The smile had gone off her mouth — not all at once, but faded as if a cloud had passed over.
“Talk of something else,” she said. “Please.”
“Something else,” he agreed, gently, and set the sponge down on the stool.
“Yes.”
“Very well.” His hand went back into the warm water without it — just his hand now, and the slick of the soap, his palm flat against her side under the surface — and he found another subject, one he was on surer ground with, one that had nothing in it of houses or money or the future she flinched from. “Then I shall talk of you.”
Her breath caught. He felt it more than heard it, his hand against her ribs.
“I have been thinking,” he said, drawing his soaped hand down the line of her waist, the swell of her hip under the water, “of the first time I saw you. Not in Hertfordshire — I have told you of that, and you did not believe me. I mean the first time I truly saw you. In Vitoria.” His hand moved, learning her again through the warm water and the slick of the soap.
“You will recall I had a great deal to say that night, about wishing I had sold all your clothes downriver a month before. I meant it more than you knew. I had spent weeks barely feet from you in the dark, imagining… well, a great many things. I am not a saint, whatever face I showed you on the road. I had imagined you a hundred ways.”
“Had you?”
“Perhaps a thousand.” His hand travelled the curve of her, the water breaking gently over his wrist. “And I will tell you plainly, Elizabeth, that not one of the hundred came anywhere near the truth of you. My imagination is a poor thing beside you. I had thought — a man thinks he knows, he builds the picture, he is very sure of it — and then you lay before me with your chemise gone and every fantasy I had troubled to construct simply fell down, because none of them had got you right. None of them had this —”
His palm smoothed along her breast, reverently, and her eyes had fallen half shut again.