Page 29 of The Marriage Articles

Darcy felt a quiet, profound relief at the lightness of his wife’s reply, grateful for the gentle skill with which she received a frightened girl’s clumsy overture.

“You would not be afraid of her for a whole minute together. My cousins would see to that. They have three children, you see. Henry would shake your hand as though you were a magistrate. He is eleven, and he has the gravity of a man of fifty, and my uncle encourages it shamelessly.”

“Eleven,” Georgiana repeated. “And the others?”

“John is eight and has never been known to finish a sentence or a meal.”

“And the youngest?” Mrs Annesley asked, from her end of the table, which was the first thing she had ventured all evening.

“The youngest is Lizzy. She is in her fourth year. She is named for me. My aunt chose it, and I confess I was vain enough to be pleased.”

Georgiana’s face brightened all at once. “Truly? Your own aunt named her little girl after you?”

“She did, and my uncle has taken to calling us big Lizzy and little Lizzy to save everyone the confusion, though four-year-old Lizzy usually insists on being the only one heard.”

“Fitzwilliam has always called me Georgie,” Georgiana said, casting a quick glance at him, “though I am much too old for it now.”

“You are not,” Darcy said. “I have considered the matter, and you are not.”

She coloured and looked pleased, rendering whatever protest she might have made entirely unnecessary.

With his wine in his hand, he sat back and watched his wife tell his sister about the house in Gracechurch Street. She had changed since the afternoon, or the light had changed, or he had. Her cheeks still held something of the cold from her morning walk, and the candles did the rest. The white muslin, the one with the sprigged hem, the one she had worn to Sir William’s soirée, suited her.

“Do you think the children will like our house?” Georgiana asked. “This house, I mean. Will they come and see it?”

“I hope they will. My aunt means to bring them, if your brother’s invitation to the opera has not frightened them all into the country.” Elizabeth’s glance rested on him in a manner he was beginning to comprehend.

“I was not aware the invitation had astonished them quite so greatly.”

“I was merely teasing, Mr Darcy. It was very handsomely done, I assure you.”

Georgiana looked from one of them to the other with the open fascination of a spectator at a sport whose rules she did not know. Darcy could have told her the rules. There were none. There was only Elizabeth, who teased by contradicting him with an air of perfect seriousness, and himself, who had decided some weeks ago that being teased by her was preferable to almost every pleasure he had previously enjoyed.

“You are quiet, Mrs Annesley,” Elizabeth said, turning, and the kindness in it was genuine, a circumstance Darcy noted as he noted all proofs that his wife was better than the bargain he had forced on her.

“I am listening, ma’am. It is much the better entertainment.”

“There,” said Elizabeth to Georgiana. “That is the most dangerous sort of person to have at table, the one who is only listening.” At that, Georgiana let out a real, unguarded laugh, the first Darcy had heard from her in company since long before the wedding. Mrs Annesley looked up with mild surprise, and then bent her head over her plate, hiding a small smile as she pretended to attend to her veal.

The evening loosened after that, the way a knot loosens when somebody finally finds the right thread. More words passed across that table than at any dinner in recent memory, and Darcy said perhaps a dozen of them, and was not once in want of anything to say.

When they removed to the drawing room, Georgiana went to the pianoforte. She played something soft, a sonata she knew well enough to play while listening to the room, and Elizabeth sat in the chair nearest the fire with her hands still in her lap, and listened with her whole face. Mrs Annesley took up her needlepoint by the other candle. Darcy opened a book. He read the same page several times and retained none of it. His attention kept finding better employment than the page. The fire settled. The music went on, unhurried. Nobody required anything of him, and it occurred to him, in a plain and unadorned way, that he was content, and that the condition had been rare enough in his life that he could have dated most of its previous occurrences.

The clock struck ten. Elizabeth rose.

“I shall say goodnight. The walk and the visit and your excellent wine have conspired against me.” She nodded to him, then turned to face the room. “Georgiana, the music was lovely. Mrs Annesley, I hope you will remember only the agreeable half of what I said.”

“I remember nothing but discretion, ma’am,” Mrs Annesley said.

Georgiana stood, closing the instrument. “I shall go up too, I think. Goodnight, Fitzwilliam.” Mrs Annesley left with her.

He stayed where he was when they had gone, the book open on his knee. He heard their footsteps on the stair, his sister’s quick and light, his wife’s a measure slower, and the murmur of their voices for a moment on the landing, and then nothing. The room was quiet. He sat with it a while longer, and then he closed the book on the unread page and went up himself.

In his bedchamber, with the curtains drawn and the fire low, he thought about the evening the way a man walks back over a favourite road. The laugh. The sonata. Elizabeth by the firelight in the white muslin, her hands still, her attention whole.

He stopped with his pocket watch in his hand.

The white muslin. The sprigged hem. She had worn it at Sir William’s soirée, and she had worn it tonight. He set the watch down very carefully on the dressing table. A lady of Mrs Darcy’s station wanted walking dresses and carriage dresses and evening gowns in number. His wife had one white muslin doing the work of several, and had done it without a word of complaint, because complaint was not in her and because she did not expect to be asked.