CHAPTER 25 #2
Even Lady Catherine's absence, for she had neither come nor written, though Colonel Fitzwilliam reported her temper somewhat softened toward Anne, who had returned to Rosings chastened and quiet and was said to be considering, at her mother's rather forceful suggestion, an extended visit to Bath, could not dampen the day's easy warmth.
Anne herself had written a brief letter to Elizabeth some weeks prior, awkward and sincere in equal measure, asking forgiveness for a part in the scheme she swore she had never understood the whole of until it was too late to prevent it, and Elizabeth, who understood better than most what it was to be deceived by a man skilled in deception, had written back forgiveness freely given, though she privately thought it would be some while yet before Anne trusted her own judgment enough to fully believe herself forgiven.
***
Darcy had, in the small space of days between his return from Kent and the wedding itself, secured a modest house at the edge of Meryton, hastily let, at no small expense, so that the two of them might have some few days entirely their own before the world reasserted its claims upon them.
It is not Pemberley, nor anything approaching it, he thought soberly.
It was by all means a plain, comfortable house of no particular distinction, the sort a modest gentleman's family might have occupied for a season, but it answered its purpose admirably, being near enough to Longbourn that Elizabeth need not feel herself wholly parted from her family in the first days of her marriage, and private enough that neither Mrs. Bennet's transports nor Meryton's curiosity could follow them past its door uninvited.
They had arrived late at the let house, having spent the better part of the day with Elizabeth's family, the wedding breakfast stretching on, by slow and happy degrees, well into the evening, as neither Mrs. Bennet's raptures nor the general goodwill of the gathered company showed any early sign of exhausting itself.
It was full dark, the last of the well-wishers finally seen off and Longbourn's candles beginning to gutter, before Darcy handed Elizabeth up into the carriage and they set off at last for the quiet house that awaited them at the edge of Meryton, the two of them alone together, in the fullest sense, for the first time since the church that morning had made them so.
It was not until they had arrived that Elizabeth finally had a quiet moment alone with her husband.
The word came to her now with a naturalness that rather surprised her; she had, after all, heard the name ‘husband’ said often enough in relation to Mr. Darcy while she was on the Isle of Man.
And yet it had lost none of its private delight for having been so well rehearsed; if anything, each time she reached for it now, it felt less like a word newly hers and more like one she had simply been waiting, all this while, for the world to finally agree with.
Elizabeth was shown up to the bedroom by a maid hired only that week for the purpose, a quiet, capable young woman named Susan who asked no questions and offered no opinions, for which Elizabeth found herself grateful beyond what the small service strictly warranted.
She stood a while before the looking glass once Susan had gone, her hair let down from its wedding arrangement and falling loose about her shoulders, and found she hardly recognized the woman who looked back at her, not because anything in her face had changed, but because everything behind it had.
She heard his step in the passage before she heard the knock, unhurried, though not without its own quiet urgency, and had only a moment to compose herself, an effort that proved, in the event, entirely unnecessary, for whatever composure she might have gathered dissolved the instant she heard his voice through the door.
Elizabeth turned toward the door, her heart beating with an unfamiliar mixture of nerves and gladness in equal measure, “You may enter.”
"Mrs. Darcy." He said it slowly, savoring the shape of it.
"Mr. Darcy," she replied. "I find I much prefer seeing you compared to that good English oak," she said pointing to the door he had just entered.
He laughed, turning to look at the door, before turning back to face his wife.
"I find myself wanting to say it again and again, now that it is mine to say freely, without disguise or deceit.
Mrs. Darcy. My love. My true wife." A faint, unguarded smile touched his mouth.
"I confess I had begun to wonder, this past season, whether I should ever have the right to say it at all, and now I find I cannot seem to stop. "
He heard her laugh, softer than he expected, and something in the sound gave him pause; she is nervous, he thought, and found the thought did not trouble him so much as steady him, for he had spent enough of the day being nervous himself to recognize it in his wife.
"Then say it as often as you like, sir, for I find I have no objection whatsoever to hearing it.
" Elizabeth's eyes were bright, though whether more with laughter or with feeling she could not herself have said.
"Only I would remind you that I have waited a great while to hear it too, some six weeks since you said it last on the Isle of Mann.”
"Six weeks," Darcy repeated, and something rueful moved across his face. "I had not thought to be held so precisely to account for the counting of it, though I own the number is correct, and I have felt every day of it rather more keenly than I let on in my letters."
"Your letters were very good, sir. I do not fault them.
Only a letter, however well written, is not quite the same as hearing a thing said aloud, in a voice one may watch as well as read, and I find I missed that particular pleasure rather more than I expected to, for a woman who has always prided herself on needing very little from anyone. "
"Then I am sorry for every day of the six weeks, and sorrier still that duty required them of us both.
" He lifted her hand, then surprised her by turning it over and pressing his lips to her wrist in that same unhurried way that had, on the island, first taught her that his reserve concealed rather more feeling than his manner ever let show.
"I promise you I do not intend to test that particular patience again, if it is within my power to prevent it.
I found Kent a good deal harder to endure for the wanting of you in it, and I have no wish to discover whether absence grows easier with practice.
I suspect, from what these six weeks have taught me, that it does not. "
"No," Elizabeth agreed, low. "I do not think it does."
"Then we are agreed on one point of our marriage already, before it is even a full day old.
" A faint smile touched his mouth. "We shall simply decline to be parted, so far as it lies within our power to arrange it, and leave Kent and its mysteries to men with rather less to lose by their travels than I have. "
"That," said Elizabeth, "is very possibly the most sensible thing you have said all day, Mr. Darcy, and I have heard you say a great many sensible things today, given that you have also somehow contrived to say them all while looking at me as though you had never seen me before."
"I find I have not," he said simply. "Not quite like this. Not as my wife."
He crossed the small distance between them, and Elizabeth found that whatever composure she had gathered in the looking glass had entirely deserted her, though she found she did not want it back.
He reached for her hand first, as he had so many times these past months, in a fevered sickroom, in a sunlit yard, in a hundred small unremarked moments that had taught her, by slow degrees, to trust the particular gravity with which he touched anything he cared for, and then, when she did not draw back, his hand rose to rest against her cheek, and he studied her face a long moment, as though memorizing it anew now that he had the right to.
"May I?" he asked, low, and something in the asking, so entirely unlike the presumption she might once have feared from a man of his rank and consequence, and it undid the last of her nerves more thoroughly than any declaration could have.
"You may," she said, and found her own voice unsteady with a feeling she had never before had cause to name.
When he kissed her, it was nothing like the careless gallantries she had watched other women receive and privately thought little of; it was unhurried, searching and asking rather than taking.
He drew back only far enough to look at her again, some question still lingering in his face despite everything he must have read as answer already in hers.
"Elizabeth," he said, and it was not quite a question, though it asked one nonetheless.
"Fitzwilliam." She had never once called him by that name before, and felt the whole of the year's distance close somewhere behind the word.
Whatever remained of his restraint yielded at last, and he drew her into another kiss, deeper than the first and no longer tempered by uncertainty.
The candle between them burned low and unremarked as the little house at the edge of Meryton settled into a new and sacred intimacy around the freshly married couple.
Together they discovered, with wonder and delight, the joys of belonging wholly to one another, each moment deepening the affection that had brought them to this night.
Beyond its walls, the world remained exactly as it had always been, with its expectations, its uncertainties, and its endless occasions for misjudgment.
But within that room, where husband and wife began the first night of the life they would henceforth share, neither pride nor prejudice had any claim.