Page 40 of The Marriage Articles

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. Her step faltered just slightly upon the gravel, then resumed with a lighter tread. When she spoke, her voice was warm and clear. “I am glad of it,” she said, and the simple satisfaction of her reply needed no other words to make itself known.

“I shall write to your father today,” he said. “He should hear it from me.”

“My father will be pleased to hear it,” she said. “Jane writes that Lydia and Kitty are already lamenting his loss, purely because my father has forbidden them any further association with him.”

“Then I hope they will not lament him long,” he said.

The path turned at the far corner of the garden, where the trees were putting out their new leaves in a pale new green, and the wet grass gave way to gravel again. Darcy’s shoulder was cold where the wind found the thin cloth of his jacket.

“Do you mean to make a habit of this?” Elizabeth asked.

“Of walking?”

“Of joining me.” She did not look at him. “You have a breakfast room, sir. I have seen it. It has a fire and a sideboard and no weather in it at all. And yet here you are, uncoated, on a wet path, telling me about attorneys.”

“The breakfast room had nobody in it.”

“That is generally the case at this hour. It is one of its merits.”

“I have never thought so.”

She was quiet a moment. The path curved them back towards the gate. The milk seller had gone, and somewhere on the far side of the square a door opened and a voice said something about bread.

“You might join me again,” she said, “if you like.”

“I might,” Darcy said, “if you will have me.”

Elizabeth walked on. The corner of her mouth lifted in a quiet smile, a look he had grown entirely familiar with during the past fortnight, learning its language by close and anxious study. He decided to take it as a sufficient answer.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Elizabeth had her bonnet on and her mind already on the square in the morning air and the pleasure of a walk taken before the world was quite awake. Mrs Fenwick appeared in the hall.

“Ma’am. I beg your pardon. Granger has been down, ma’am. Mr Darcy has not risen, and Granger says he is feverish.” The housekeeper’s hands were folded at her waist, perfectly composed, and entirely displeased. “Mr Darcy gave orders that no physician was to be sent for.”

Elizabeth set the bonnet on the table. “Did he indeed?”

“He was most particular on the subject, ma’am.”

“Then we must be most disobedient on it. Send for Dr Baillie at once.”

Mrs Fenwick smiled. “As you please, ma’am.”

She had never been inside her husband’s bedchamber. That was the fact of it, plain and a little absurd, and the thought accompanied her up the staircase. Two months married, and the geography of his rooms was a foreign country to her, though she could have drawn the library shelf by shelf. The door stood open on Granger’s account. She went in.

The room was orderly in a way she should have expected and had not quite prepared for. His watch laid face up beside a small dish holding his cuff links, each pair arranged by size. A book lay closed on the night table with a marker precisely halfway, which she judged characteristic to the point of comedy. It was an intimate room, a room a man occupied when no one was watching, and she stood in it uninvited on the first morning she had ever been permitted to see it.

The man himself was raised upon a heap of pillows, wearing a nightshirt, his hair unbrushed and his colour amiss, too high across the cheekbones and too pale everywhere else. He looked up when she entered, and she watched him assemble his dignity from whatever materials illness had left him.

“Mrs Darcy.” His voice had a scrape in it. “You need not have troubled yourself. I am perfectly well.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” she said, coming to the side of the bed. “It makes such a refreshing change from the evidence.”

“The evidence is exaggerated. I have a slight headache. Granger has a talent for catastrophe and I fear he has been gossiping.”

“Granger has been doing his duty, which is more than his master is doing.” She put the back of her hand to his forehead before he could object, and the heat of it answered every question she had. He bore the touch without flinching. “You are burning, Mr Darcy.”

“I am warm. The room is warm. It is a warm morning.”