“I cannot tell you how well I like to hear you say you are happy.”
“Are you?”
“Happy does not do justice to what I feel. I thought this day would never come.”
“As did I—it seemed to take forever.”
“And yet Bingley asked me whether you felt rushed into marrying.”
“Jane asked me the same.”
Elizabeth was toying with the buttons on his waistcoat. Innocently, he knew. Still.
“She does not know that you wrote to me?”
She glanced up at him, revealing a heightened colour to her countenance. “No.”
“Or that you were impatient for me to make you my wife?”
She neither answered nor looked up this time. Her hand had stilled and now rested, flat, on his stomach.
He slid his hand over hers, caressing her wrist with his thumb. “There are more ways to interpret what you wrote than just an exchange of vows.”
She moved slightly—a shrug, or a nod, or some other vague acknowledgement that was not a denial, and which made Darcy altogether too hot for the blanket.
“Did you mean…that?”
“I do not know,” she said in a hushed voice that was barely audible over the thundering of the carriage’s wheels. “I did notnotmean it. I do want to be with you at Pemberley. But I suppose I…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I…I want to be withyou.”
He exhaled heavily, and brought his hand to cradle her face, tilting it until she was looking at him. “God, not as much as I want to be with you.”
Her eyes flashed, and she cocked her head by the smallest degree as though bestowing a challenge, and that was Darcy’s undoing. Thereafter, the inside of his carriage became the stage for the fiery, transcendent prelude to the denouement that followed that night, and the next, so that by the time they reached Pemberley, Elizabeth was his wife in every conceivable way.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-SEVEN
BELOVED IMPERFECTION
‘Mrs Darcy’ had an elegant ring to it that Elizabeth liked very well, and she would be forever proud to be known as the wife of such an honourable and generous man. Nevertheless, she was not sure she would ever grow accustomed to the effect her new name seemed to have on other people. No one had ever flushed in fright, bobbed absurdly deep obeisance, or scrambled to do her bidding at the mention of ElizabethBennet. She could not think how to prevent it, for all attempts to dismiss such behaviour as unnecessary had drawn only further grovelling apology from those doing it.
She wondered how the servants at Pemberley would treat her. Not a thing would get done if everyone was resolved to start bowing and scraping each time she walked into a room. She was somewhat worried that Darcy expected them to do just that, but she was hopeful it was a whim that would pass once he was assured of her contentment. After all, it was for him, not the servants, to treat her like a princess—a job which, to her vast pleasure, he was performing commendably.
The past few days had been wholly unlike anything Elizabeth had anticipated. Pleasures she had never known existed, intimacies she could never have supposed, human frailties for which she had been wholly unprepared, had all been discovered with the loving guidance of a man who treated her as though she were the most precious gift he had ever been given. She ended the journey to Pemberley more in love with Darcy than she had understood was possible.
Occasionally, she forgot. Every so often, in the midst of buttering a muffin, or lacing a boot, or looking at a clock, a recollection would pop into her head of this or that nuptial revelation, and she would grow hot and lose her train of thought. More often than not, Darcy would guess what had crossed her mind and worsen her plight by smiling at her in that particular way he had that seemed to melt every bone in her body. It was outrageously unfair. As the carriage neared Pemberley, she began to imagine herself catching his eye halfway through her introduction to the servants and being reduced to a blushing, mumbling bottlehead. That idea was promptly usurped by the even sillier notion that none of the servants would notice anyway, for they would all be too occupied with preposterously exaggerated genuflections to look at her.
“What amuses you?” Darcy enquired.
“I was just imagining all the ways in which my reception could go awry.”
It was the wrong thing to say; his countenance clouded. “Any servant who does not treat you with the respect you deserve will be dismissed. You have my word—you will not have to tolerate insolence of any sort.”
“That was not my meaning. I was thinking of all the ways I might embarrassmyself.”
“I do not employ servants so they may judge my behaviour, or that of my wife.”
