“No, no,” I said. “You were a bit loud is all.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Too loud.”
When we visited my aunt and uncle, she and my uncle struck up a conversation about the slave trade, both agreeing such things were appalling and that it all must be abolished, that the economic elements of the argument must not be taken into the consideration against the magnitude of the moral implications.
My aunt and I both attempted to change the subject multiple times, but they seemed oblivious.
Finally, I said, rather pointedly, that there were some topics that did not make good dinner conversation, and my wife turned rather red-faced and quieted entirely.
When we met my sister, Elizabeth turned down the notion of singing while my sister played the piano, even though I was mostdesirous of hearing her voice again. She said that she would be far too embarrassed to do so after she heard my sister’s singing voice.
Well, I suppose that was not her being fearless.
No, the truth was, by the end of the three weeks we stayed in town, something in her had dimmed.
Even the delivery of the dresses from the modiste did not quite ignite it, nor did my kisses, nor did the prospect of the final ball in town, which I had spoken of. I tried to engage her on the subject of which of her new dresses she would like to wear, but she only said that I should likely choose for her, since I would know what it was that she should do to be proper.
I felt a bit alarmed at this. I said that we did not need to go to the ball at all if she did not wish it.
She said that we should do whatever I thought was best.
And that was when I knew what the issue was. “I wonder,” I said, “if you are missing your brother, Mrs. Darcy?”
She looked up at me. “Well, we have been apart for some time.”
“Let us go back to the country early?” I said. “Would that please you?”
There was a little smile on her face, not the sunbeam smile, but some echo of it. “But you had such plans for us. Are you certain?”
“I would rather make you smile,” I said.
“I wish I made you smile,” she said.
“It makes me smile to see you smile,” I countered.
Though I could have continued to make use of the house my family owned in Redbourn, I did not wish to do so indefinitely. My wife and I would be settled here for some months, and itseemed only right that I looked into finding something for us that would be our own.
I had sent out inquiries to this effect, but there had been very little of the sort of appropriate house we might need to rent in the nearby area.
Eventually, I had been obliged to take Lady Susannah’s offer. Trawlings was vast and had enough room for us both, and Lady Susannah would be delighted at our presence there. We would be quite close to Netherfield, where I supposed we would spend a great deal of time with my wife’s brother, and if there had been any concerns about the way we would be as newlyweds, unable to keep our hands off of each other at inopportune times, well, all of that had essentially stopped.
Of course, I had never been the one initiating kisses in improper places. It had been her, and I supposed it was better to say thatshehad stopped. It should have pleased or reassured me, I supposed, but I found that it didn’t. I found that it made me feel sad and a bit hollow.
At any rate, it was all for the best, since we would not have our privacy staying here with Lady Susannah, not in the way we might have had if we’d been in our own house, at any rate.
We made arrangements to come a week earlier than planned, but no one had any objections. We were greeted at Trawlings by both the Mr. Bennets, her brother and her father, who were eager to see her and embraced her, one after the other, in public, in front of everyone, and I supposed I knew why my wife had internalized these sorts of habits from her effusive family.
Mrs. Bennet, however, was nowhere to be seen, and my wife said that her father and mother did not like to take the carriage together, so that probably explained it. We would see her mother soon enough, for we had been invited to dinner at Longbourn.
Mrs. Darcy and her brother lingered close, heads together, and eventually, I told her to go off for a walk with him on the grounds. She clearly wished to speak to him alone. I supposed she was going to tell him positively everything that had passed between us, and I did not know how to feel about that.
It would be worth it if her sunbeam smile returned, I decided, and that was that.
Later that night, I looked in on her before bed. All right, all right, I visited her bedchamber for purposes of marital associations, which—truth be told—I had been doing with startling regularity since all this began.
She was always eager to accept me, turning her face up to mine to be kissed, pressing into me and sighing, and she was quite the most perfect and wondrous of wives in every possible way.
When it was over, I did not leave, though I had been trying to do better about that, to make myself go back to my own bedchamber, for certainly it was not comfortable for either of us to share a bed all night. But it was increasingly difficult, because I did so love the way she felt in my arms, and also she had a tendency to cling to me afterwards, to burrow in against me.
