Chapter 10 #3
But in this small room, before these two brass letters, her defenses gave way.
She didn't cry. She did worse. She crossed the room, placed her hand on my chest, over my heart, and stayed there, her palm against the cloth of my coat, saying nothing.
I covered her hand with mine. Beneath my palm, beneath the cloth, beneath hers, my own heart was beating far too fast for a man who had simply had two letters engraved on a secretary.
The silence said everything.
Then she raised her face, and there was no longer any tremor in her voice.
“Fitzwilliam. That woman you had engraved on copper in April—she was still Elizabeth Bennet then.”
“Yes.”
“She refused you once. Quite brutally.”
“I remember it with remarkable precision.”
“She was wrong about many things. She was right about one.”
She closed her fingers around the lapel of my coat.
“You didn’t know how to ask. You do now.”
I didn’t need to answer. She didn’t give me time.
What she did next cannot be recounted in my mother’s study. I will say only that the lamp burned long, that the ledger remained open to the wrong page, and that neither of us thought to close it.
?
Later. The library. The rain.
Elizabeth was in the left armchair, her feet tucked beneath her, a book open on her lap.
The fire crackled in the hearth. Candles cast circles of golden light on the mahogany shelves, on the leather bindings, on the polished floor.
Outside, the rain fell on Derbyshire with that stubborn regularity that was as much a part of the landscape as the hills and lakes.
I sat in the right armchair. Opened a book. Read a few lines. Elizabeth turned a page.
I looked up. She didn’t see it, or pretended not to.
She read with that complete concentration that was her way of inhabiting every moment, her brows slightly furrowed, her lower lip caught between her teeth, a lock of hair falling before her eyes that she pushed back mechanically without lifting her gaze from the page.
The volume lay open on her lap to the poem she claimed to understand better than I did, the one she had defended just the evening before with unreasonable passion.
Insignificant. No. Nothing was insignificant anymore. Not when she was the one reading, in this library, in this house, with her feet tucked beneath her and that lock of hair falling and the Derbyshire rain beating against the windows.
She looked up. Met my eyes. Smiled. I returned her smile.
“You haven’t turned a page in a quarter of an hour,” she said.
“I’ve given up.”
“On reading?”
“On pretending.”
She closed her book on her finger so she wouldn’t lose the page.
“Then come here.”
I came.
The armchair was not made for two. We made do.
She settled against me, her legs folded across mine, the nape of her neck in the hollow of my shoulder, and reopened her volume.
Her hair smelled of lavender. Beneath my palm, through the muslin, I felt her breath lifting her ribs, slowly, at a rhythm that was no longer waiting.
The rain beat against the windows. The fire crackled.
She read aloud, because I asked her to.
Her voice rose, fell, paused on certain verses to take them up again differently.
I wasn’t listening to the words. I was listening to the voice that carried them, and I thought how I had heard this same voice tell me, in a drawing room at Hunsford, that I was the last man in the world she could ever be prevailed upon to marry.
She turned a page. I turned nothing at all.
Outside, the rain fell on Derbyshire. On the lake. On the oaks lining the avenue. On the roofs of the farms, one of which had just been repaired. On the whole world, perhaps, but I knew only this one, and this world was enough.
My mother’s portrait, in the great drawing room, continued to regard the world with her queenly benevolence.
The house no longer belonged to her. It belonged to this woman with her feet tucked beneath her, reading aloud in my armchair, whose laughter that very morning had carried across the garden to the lake.
“Fitzwilliam,” she said without looking up from the book.
“Yes.”
“You’re not counting anymore.”
It was not a question.
“No.”
She found my hand without looking up from her page and folded it into hers.
“Elizabeth.”
“Yes.”
She finally looked up from the book. The firelight gilded her cheek, and a lock of hair fell, as always, to the exact spot where she would eventually push it back.
I had not planned to say it. I never said it first; it was she who found the words, at Longbourn as in the darkness of that room, and for a year I had contented myself with receiving them, with the gratitude of a man who had expected none.
“I love you,” I said.
She didn’t answer right away. She closed the volume on her finger, as she did each time she agreed to be interrupted, and turned just enough for her forehead to touch my jaw.
“I know,” she said. “You’ve been telling me since Longbourn. You simply use other words: books on a shelf, a room reopened, two letters on a copper plate.”
Her hand remained in mine.
“But I like this one too.”
For the first time in my life, I am home.
THE END