Chapter 10
Darcy
I woke first.
Light came through the windows of Pemberley, that Derbyshire light I had known since childhood, washed clean by the night's rain, brighter and clearer than London's. It fell on the floorboards, on the carpet, on the foot of the bed, and crept up to the face of the woman sleeping beside me.
Elizabeth lay on her stomach, one arm folded beneath the pillow, her face turned toward me.
Her loose hair covered her shoulders and the top of her back like a dark veil.
The sheet had slipped during the night, baring the curve of her shoulder, the three freckles, the line of her spine.
Her mouth was slightly open. Her breathing—regular, slow, peaceful.
I did not move.
Time no longer felt the same. For weeks, I had counted the days, the hours, the minutes.
Thirty-five days, thirty, nineteen. Each number had been a stone in my pocket, proof of waiting, a reminder of all I could not yet have.
Now the counter had stopped. Nothing more to count.
Nothing more to wait for. Nothing but this: the morning, the light, and the woman asleep in my bed.
Our bed.
I pressed my lips to her bare shoulder, where the three freckles were, for no other reason than the newfound right to do so. Her skin was warm from sleep and smelled of yesterday's lavender, and something else beneath—something that belonged only to her, something I had come to know in the night.
Elizabeth opened her eyes. Looked at me.
For one second, only one, I saw surprise cross her face—the surprise of waking in an unfamiliar place, in a bed that was not her own, beside a man who had been watching her sleep.
Then the surprise faded, replaced by something softer, slower, something that looked like a smile before it became one.
“Good morning,” she murmured.
“Good morning.”
“You were watching me sleep.”
“Yes.”
“Is that a habit you plan to keep?”
“Every morning. For the rest of my life.”
Her smile widened. She reached out and touched my face, as she had done at the inn, tracing the line of my jaw with her fingers.
But this time, she did not pull her hand away.
She left it resting on my cheek, warm, familiar, and in that gesture there was no longer any urgency or frustration or waiting.
Nothing but the quiet certainty of what now belonged to us.
“Do you remember the Swan?” she said.
“Every hour.”
“You were right.”
“I did not feel that way that night.”
“You still don't,” she admitted, slipping a finger under my open collar. “That's what I like.”
We did not go downstairs for a long time.
?
What I had not anticipated was having to learn my own house.
I thought I knew Pemberley. I was born here, I had buried my parents here, I had kept its accounts for seven years. But I had never seen it occupied by someone who was not afraid of it.
She began with the library. Of course. The first morning, I found her in her morning dress and slippers, a book in one hand, reorganizing the shelves with the authority of a general on campaign.
Mrs. Reynolds, standing in the doorway, watched her move Johnson's volumes with an expression caught between consternation and respect.
“Johnson has no business among the poets,” Elizabeth explained, moving a single volume. “I'll start with this one.”
“Your late father-in-law would have approved, madam,” said Mrs. Reynolds with diplomatic neutrality.
“I know. Mr. Darcy told me.”
She cast me a glance over her shoulder. The same glance as at Longbourn, over the teapot, the day of our first visit. Complicity. Mischief. And beneath them, something deeper that the vocabulary of propriety would not allow me to name.
On the second day, she asked Mrs. Reynolds why the east drawing room was used so seldom.
“It is maintained and aired every day, madam,” Mrs. Reynolds replied. “But no one has used it since Lady Anne's death.”
I was about to intervene. The room had remained closed by my will, not through neglect, and I believe I would have found a reason to keep it closed.
Elizabeth did not give me time.
“Then let us change that. Have the covers removed, the chairs moved closer to the windows, and bring some books. The view of the park deserves to be enjoyed.”
She turned to me afterward, only afterward, and her question lay in a raised eyebrow.
I nodded.
That very evening, the small drawing room had regained its purpose.
Derbyshire air billowed through the curtains, the chairs finally faced the landscape, and Georgiana brought her needlework there as if the room had always been hers.
I remained a moment on the threshold, unable to enter, watching my sister sew in the window light where my mother had once sewn.
Eleven years, this room had been dead. All it took was one woman who didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to enter.
I came upon her that morning in the west wing corridor, a ledger under her arm, heading toward the kitchens. No one was around. I caught her by the waist and pressed her back against the paneling, and the ledger fell.
“Fitzwilliam, it’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
“I’m perfectly aware of that.”
Her skin still carried the scent of soap and fresh linen. I kissed her neck where the collar fell open, and I felt her surrender her protest.
A footstep on the stairs pulled us apart. She picked up her ledger, tucked a pin back into place, and went down to receive Mrs. Reynolds with the dignity of an irreproachable mistress of the house.
Her cheeks stayed flushed for an hour.
On the third day, accompanied by Mrs. Reynolds, she visited the kitchens and spoke with Mrs. Hewitt, the cook, about a dish she’d tasted in London.
“This house is a labyrinth,” she said at dinner. “I need a map. Or Ariadne’s thread.”
“You’ll come to know every room,” I said.
“I’ve counted seventy-two rooms so far. It will take time.”
Georgiana giggled into her napkin. The sound filled the dining room, and I thought: there. That’s what Pemberley had been waiting for. Not a perfect mistress. Noise.
?
It was Elizabeth who told me about the conversation, one morning as we walked along the lake.
“Your sister came to find me last night.”
“Georgiana?”
“She knocked on my door past ten o’clock. She was holding a piece of music she wouldn’t show me, and it took her a quarter of an hour to come to the point.”
I stopped. My sister didn’t knock on doors. Since Ramsgate, she had waited for people to come to her, and more often than not, no one came often enough.
“What point?”
Elizabeth kept her eyes on the water.
“She wanted to know if I despised her.”
Something turned over in my chest.
“Why on earth would you despise—”
“Because she knows who married my sister,” Elizabeth said. “She learned it this winter. She spent six months imagining that her brother’s new wife was now sister-in-law to the man who had tried to run off with her at fifteen, and that I must think her foolish, or frivolous, or worse.”
The lake was very calm. I heard only the wind in the reeds and my own breathing.
Six months. She had carried that for six months, under my roof, and I had seen nothing. I had congratulated myself on how much more cheerful she seemed since the engagement, crediting Elizabeth, without ever wondering what that cheerfulness might be concealing.
“What did you tell her?”
“That we shared the experience of being deceived by the same man—she at fifteen and I at twenty—and that the only difference between us was that she’d had the courage to confess everything to her brother, while I had merely laughed at his jokes all autumn, believing myself discerning.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t.
“She cried,” Elizabeth added more quietly. “Then she played me her piece. She’s far more advanced than you think, Fitzwilliam, and she’s terrified of disappointing you.”
“She doesn’t disappoint me.”
“I know that. She doesn’t. You’re her brother, her guardian, and the man who repaired her mistake without ever speaking to her about it. She venerates you, and you don’t confide in someone you venerate—you stay silent, afraid of falling from the pedestal where you believe they’ve placed you.”
She stopped and turned to me.
“Stop being irreproachable with her. Be clumsy once. She’ll be relieved.”
That evening, I knocked on the door of the little east parlor where Georgiana sat working at her needlework.
I didn’t know what I was going to say. I sat near her and watched her hands ply the needle for far too long, and finally I confessed that I had never known how to speak to her about Ramsgate, that I had kept silent out of shame for having failed to protect her, and that this silence,
I understood now, must have felt to her like a reproach.
Georgiana set down her work.
“I thought you didn’t want to think about it anymore.”
“I didn’t want you to think about it. That’s not the same thing. I handled it badly.”
She looked at me for a long time, this child of sixteen who looked twelve when she was frightened and thirty when she played, then she rested her head against my shoulder, as she used to do at seven, before our father’s death made me her guardian rather than her brother.
“Elizabeth is very good to me,” she said.
“I know.”
“You were very lucky.”
“Georgiana,” I said, “I know that too.”
We stayed like that until the candle burned low. She did not play that evening. She spoke, which was rarer still.
?
On the fifth day, she reopened a matter I had not wanted her to reopen.
It began at the Hewsons’, one of our tenant farmers. Recent rain had come through the roof of the room where their two youngest children slept. Mrs. Hewson had placed basins beneath the dark stains on the ceiling and explained she was still awaiting a response from the steward.
Elizabeth looked up at the damp rafters.
“This roof will be repaired before the next rain,” she said.
Mr. Sutton, who had accompanied us, consulted his papers.
“Madam, the lease stipulates that maintenance of this part of the building falls to the tenant. We must first determine whether the damage resulted from the storm or from a pre-existing defect.”
“The children should not have to wait while we determine who owns the rain.”