Page 44 of The Marriage Articles

He held her gaze. “We never had a wedding tour, Elizabeth. We might do it properly, if you will let me. The Peaks. Matlock. Dove Dale, if you are not afraid of being obliged to admire a great deal of scenery in a short time.”

“I am never afraid of scenery,” she said. She did not look away.

“Then you agree?”

“I should love to see it all.” She heard herself say it. “With you.”

Something moved in his face that he did not trouble to hide.

He was quiet a moment, and then he said, “Bingley has a standing invitation. He and his sisters are to come to us in June. It was settled before any of this. Should I put it off?”

“No.” She let out a breath. “If you do not mind, I had thought Jane might come to us instead. To Pemberley, I mean. When we go.”

“If you like,” he said.

“She would enjoy it.” She turned the wedding ring on her finger and kept her voice level. “And I have observed a something, Fitzwilliam, between my sister and your Mr Bingley, which neither of them will thank me for naming, so I shall name it only to you.”

He was silent long enough that she began to review what she had said for offences. At length he said, “You are matchmaking from my sickbed.”

“I am never idle. It is my one consistency.”

“I must warn you, Elizabeth,” he said. “Fond as I am of Bingley, he is in love with a new face every other week. You should not set your hopes too high upon his constancy.”

“I suspected as much,” she said. “Still, I should like Jane’s company regardless.”

“Then we shall stop at Longbourn and take her with us to Pemberley,” he said.

She rose and straightened her dress. For a moment she stood looking down at him. He was asleep again almost at once, breathing slow and deep, the fever’s colour gone from his face and his hand open on the coverlet where hers had been.

She picked up the fallen cloth and set it over the basin’s edge. The barley water stood on the side table, untouched, and the bark was laid out in neat folds beside it. Mrs Fenwick would see to the doses when she woke.

At the door she looked back once. Something had changed tonight.

“Barely tolerable indeed,” she murmured, and went out to write to her sister.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Elizabeth had woken before six, as she had every morning since they came to Pemberley. Smith helped her dress, and Elizabeth hurried, for she prided herself on never keeping anyone waiting. Still she stood at her window a full ten minutes watching the light come up over the park. Now she came down the main stairs with her shawl over her arm and her bonnet in her hand. There he was at the foot of the stairs, looking up, smiling because she was late.

“Good morning,” Darcy said.

“Good morning.” She reached the last step and looked him over, which she had earned the right to do. He wore a coat of excellent cut and a waistcoat of excellent taste, and nothing over either of them. “You are not properly dressed for a walk.”

“The morning is fine.”

“The day was fine in London too, as I recall. And then you were taken ill with a fever.”

“I am appropriately dressed,” he said. “Besides. I cannot pretend I regretted the fever in every particular. You were very attentive.”

She started for the door, and he fell in beside her. “I sat up with you because you were too feverish to be trusted, and too insufferable to be left with anyone else.”

“And now?”

“Now you are merely insufferable.”

He laughed. It was still a sound she was collecting, that laugh, still rare enough to be counted, though less rare here than it had ever been in London. She laughed too, in spite of herself, which she suspected had been his design all along.

The door opened on the gravel drive. The gravel crunched under their feet, and beyond the drive the park lay open in the early light. Behind them the house rose above the river in warm grey stone, its three storeys brightening as the sun cleared the trees. She had lived in it three days and had not yet stopped wanting to look at it. He did not press her pace. They went along the gravel and then off it onto the grass, where the dew wet the hem of her gown, and then onto the path that followed the river upstream.