“B-b-but. You said. But…” she took in a deep breath. “But…”
And then she turned away. She started crying.
He held her. “My dear, dear Elizabeth.”
She was soft and vulnerable.
He understood her. She was frightened, not of happiness but of completely trusting herself to another person or believing that that person trusted her and would remain present with her.
After a while she wiped her eyes off against his naked chest, looked at him, fiercely kissed him and rang for her maid.
Darcy felt a slight disappointment at not hearing her say the same to him, but he did not really mind. He was too completely and wholly happy, and too delighted to have such a woman in his life, and in his arms, and too delighted to know with certainty that she was happy with his touch, and that she was his to care for.
Besides, he knew that it would take her time, perhaps even a great deal of time, to admit to herself what was clear to Darcy: She loved him in return.
Chapter Twenty Three
Elizabeth was rather distracted the next morning as she sat in the housekeeper’s office, listening to Mrs. Reynolds describe the usual times of meals, the preparations that should be made in the next several months to ready the house for winter, the excellent modern stoves that the estate had installed over the last decade, and other patterns and regularities with which Pemberley was managed.
He loved her.
Was this marriage really an actual love match? Had all that discussion of duty and prudence been a pretense?
It would, as Georgiana liked to say, be romantic.
“I apologize, Mrs. Reynolds,” Elizabeth shook herself, “I did not quite catch that question.”
The woman had a slightly offended look. “Mrs. Darcy, are there any particular foods that you wish to have added to the regular menus?”
Elizabeth smiled. “Chocolate with the desserts, but from Georgiana’s habits, I am confident that there will be enough to satisfy me already. I am hardly able to pay attention this morning. Perhaps we might continue this in the afternoon, if you have time.”
“Of course, Mrs. Darcy.”
Elizabeth stood, and then holding the back of the chair, she asked, “What was Mr. Darcy like as a child?”
This brought a smile to the white-haired woman. It made her appear more approachable, less formal and more civil. “The sweetest tempered and most generous-hearted boy in the world. But I have always observed that those who are good-natured when children are good-natured when the grow up. I have never heard a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old.”
“It must have shocked you then to hear that he fought in a duel,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs. Reynolds fiddled with her spectacles, pulling them off, closing the legs, then opening them again, and then pushing them back onto her nose. “Not so much. Young Wickham had always been a jealous sort. His mother was not a good woman, and she led his father to excesses and into many problems. No, no, I was not surprised at all to hear that he provoked Mr. Darcy. We’d heard that he had not lived well.”
“Washegood-natured as a child?”
“Wickham? He was whatever he thought would get him a cookie.”
Elizabeth laughed at that description of her first husband’s character. “He was much like that for the whole of my connection with him—but there was a hint of anger growing in him. It must have consumed him in the end.”
“He always hoped to get more. He expected more than was reasonable. He was jealous.”
“You think the rot was already there when he was young—Two, three years younger than Mr. Darcy. You must have known him as a young child. At four, was there any sign that he would become what he was?”
“I would never judge a four-year-old boy with much harshness.”
“Yes, but had the rot already set in?”
Mrs. Reynolds took off her spectacles again. She pulled a soft cloth from a drawer in her dresser. “Do you worry for your own child?”
“Exceedingly. But that is not why—how can youknow?—oh, forget that question.”
