Chapter Twenty
Elizabeth stared at her husband with what she imagined must be a half-distracted expression as he held Emily up to the window so that she could see out as they drove through the lovely woods around Pemberley.
Since she had woken up in the same bed as Darcy the previous morning, she had found it impossible to stop staring at him when she did not think he was looking at her.
The lines of his body were entrancing. She admired the close fit of his breeches, the way that his coat moulded around his shoulders, the colour of his lips, the way his hair fell over his forehead.
She was not surprised that she had found pleasure in the marital act, or that she was now eager to repeat it as often as they might.
What surprised her was the way it had changed how she saw her husband, and perhaps herself.
“Here, here!” Emily squealed. “Home!”
Darcy turned to Elizabeth, and he smiled in a warm way that made her stomach leap.
He was usually so quiet. Not one word in twenty in the carriage came from him. But he always watched them all, always watched her.
He watched her how she watched him now, with longing.
“What do you think?”
In her distraction, Elizabeth had missed the first chance to see her new home. Sitting next to Darcy, the lines of their bodies pressing against each other, she leaned to look out of the window and study the fine building. “My! It is enormous.”
Georgiana laughed. “The finest house in Derbyshire.”
“One must not let the Cavendishes hear that,” Darcy replied with satisfaction in his voice. “But I cannot disagree.”
Pemberley was larger than she had anticipated.
Even though she had known that Darcy was a great personage with a great fortune, that had been abstract, in a way.
This was more.
The park around the estate was grand, and the view was delightful, with a beautiful prospect and lovely hills rising behind. Deer could be spotted through the trees to the side.
The whole estate was covered with a light layer of snow, but the road up to the house had been cleared.
“I am happy to see that you like the look of the house,” Darcy said.
“It would be impossible not to,” Elizabeth replied, meeting his eyes.
That look that she was beginning to love came upon his face, the one that suggested that he would have kissed her soundly had they been alone in the carriage.
“What walks we shall have!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Inside the house as well as outside.”
“I love to run in the long gallery!” Emily exclaimed. “Papa lets me when it is empty.”
“Then I shall need to run in there with you. Do you think that you can run faster than me?”
“You know,” Emily replied, “you are much bigger than me. Bigger people are faster.”
“I did know that.”
Emily giggled.
Darcy took her hand and kissed it, then he banged on the carriage roof to tell the coachman to move forward again.
There were several servants waiting outside when they pulled up, including a grey-haired woman who Elizabeth knew must be the housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds. She had figured in a great many stories that Georgiana and Emily had told about their home.
A footman immediately pulled the door open, and Darcy stepped out, then turned back to offer his hand to Elizabeth.
After Elizabeth was down, Emily demanded that her father catch her as she jumped out of the carriage, and with a laugh he did so before putting her down on the cold ground and taking Elizabeth’s arm.
He bowed to the housekeeper and made the introductions.
The two women curtsied.
“I know we shall work together well, Mrs. Darcy,” Mrs. Reynolds said before turning to her master. “I decided that it would be best to have the new mistress introduced to the household in the gallery, as standing about in this weather could not be pleasant.”
Although the housekeeper was speaking to Darcy, Elizabeth had a sense that she was being watched by the woman.
Darcy nodded and agreed that was wise before he led Elizabeth up the many steps of the house, eagerly telling her about its history.
“The marble of the stairs cost my great-grandfather a great deal as I understand it. The house was built to a scale rather greater than what our income supported at the time, and we were burdened with mortgages for a generation. I believe that is an important part of why my grandfather placed an entail upon the property—so that if one of his descendants decided to tear it down and have a grander one put up in its place, that spendthrift fellow would need to do so from present incomes and not by selling the future.”
“And I thought that you were richer than a lord.”
“Richer than many lords,” Darcy agreed cheerfully as they went in.
He was talkative as they walked into his home. Cheerful.
Emily ran about, though she soon came to Elizabeth and asked to be carried by her. And then she added her own explanations of the areas of the house—specifically the spot on the paper lining the wall that she had destroyed with jam but that had been cleverly patched over.
“And you have promised to not ever do that again,” Darcy said in a smiling voice to his daughter.
She giggled. “No, I won’t, I promised. That was silly of me! Wasn’t it silly?”
“I am sure you will do a great many other silly things in time,” Elizabeth said.
“I won’t! I’m not silly. You know, it is big people who are silly. Not little children.”
“Ah,” Darcy said. “I am now enlightened. I wish I had known before.”
Emily giggled as they entered the gallery.
There were several dozen servants in the room.
Elizabeth put Emily down and resisted a sudden impulse to hide behind the door like the little girl sometimes did.
Instead, she listened carefully as Darcy introduced the servants to her in order of their rank: the butler, the man-cook, the head gamekeeper, the gardeners, the coachman, the footmen, the grooms, the upper floor maids, the kitchen maids, the laundry maids, the still-room maid, and all the assistants of all these people.
What astonished her was that Darcy knew each of them by name, and something about their family background, even the scullion, whom, Mrs. Reynolds had informed Darcy, they had taken on since the preceding occupant of the role had been promoted to a kitchen maid on account of a chain of such promotions due to the marriage of one of the upper maids.
“I hope,” Darcy said to the housekeeper, “that a suitable gift was given to Mrs. South upon her marriage?”
“Yes, sir.”
When the whole group had been introduced to Elizabeth, Mrs. Reynolds gave her the large ring of keys for the house with some ceremony.
Elizabeth felt, more and more, that to be the mistress of Pemberley was something indeed.
Over the next few days, she settled into her life as the mistress of a grand estate with a household made up of dozens of servants and a park that was many miles round.
Her awe of her new home only slowly faded away.
Daily, Elizabeth was astonished by the volume of the supplies the house required, the proportions of the still-room, the extent of the charity that was given by the estate, the number of horses in the stables, and the sheer size of the home farm.
Elizabeth also often heard herself compared to the previous Mrs. Darcy.
Mr. Darcy’s first wife had been grand, extravagant, spoke four languages, played brilliantly, sneered at the servants, spent little time with Emily, expected the finest French sauces from the cook, was inordinately kind at times, once giving a groom five hundred pounds for saving a beloved horse from an illness, and she always spent all of her pin money and had to beg her husband for more every quarter—an astonishing fact to Elizabeth, who could not yet comprehend how she would spend all the money allocated to her, at least without finding unfortunate objects for charity.
The former Mrs. Darcy had thrown mighty parties, ones that the neighbours whom Elizabeth met all looked back upon with great fondness.
At the very least, Darcy had not intended for her to be a replacement for that woman.
The tales of this other Mrs. Darcy fascinated Elizabeth, though many people seemed to look askance at both her and at Darcy due to the suspicious nature of her death.
The tale that Mr. Wickham had told—before not appearing to fight a duel with her husband—that he had seen Darcy throw his first wife from her balcony, had followed them to Derbyshire.
Darcy engaged a lawyer to start proceedings against Mr. Wickham for slander, though Elizabeth did not think that this was likely to quiet the tales. Only time, and his failure to murder her as well, would.
Even then, like as not, when they were old and grey, there would still be parents scaring their younger children with the tale of how old Mr. Darcy had killed his first wife.
Emily took up the greatest part of Elizabeth’s time.
She wanted to show Elizabeth everything, and as Darcy had married her so that she would be a mother to his daughter, she was obligated to be available for Emily’s comfort and education at any time that it was possible.
For a week this was delightful fun.
But as the girl became entirely comfortable with Elizabeth and convinced that her new Mama Lizzy was permanently settled at Pemberley, she began to engage more frequently in fits and tantrums.
This in itself would not have been so difficult—Elizabeth had sufficient experience with young children to anticipate it—only she did not know how Darcy wished for Emily’s upsets to be managed.
Elizabeth could not avoid a fear that her husband would become angry with her and think that she neglected the girl if she let Emily cry whenever she made a demand that Elizabeth thought was unreasonable, let alone simply inconvenient.
Elizabeth was wholly capable of standing her ground in the matter of not permitting Emily to eat more dessert than was wholesome. Darcy must be happy with that; no sensible parent wanted their child to eat only cake and pastry for every meal—dinner, supper, breakfast, and of course with tea.