Page 62 of The Marriage Articles

“Elizabeth,” he said, and stopped.

“Fitzwilliam, I...”

The commotion reached them from the upper floor at precisely that moment. Lady Matlock’s voice, sharply pitched, then the Colonel’s, raised in protest and unmistakably calling for his cousin, then a great many footsteps going at once in a passage that had been quiet a moment before.

“Later,” he said.

“Later,” she agreed.

He went up the stairs. Elizabeth stood a moment longer in the empty hall, among the quiet and the settling dust of the arrival, and then she went to see to her household.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Darcy woke with his hand already reaching across the bed, and found the other side of it cold. He lay still a moment, attending to this fact with more patience than it deserved. Elizabeth kept her own chamber, as she had done since their marriage by the terms of her Articles. She had never lain beside him in that bed. He had dreamt that she had, and his hand had sought her before he waked.

The light at the window was the pale gold of early morning, and somewhere below, a servant was already about the business of the house. Pemberley was full again. His aunt and uncle held the best suite. His cousin, who three days ago could not sit up without assistance, had insisted the previous evening on coming down to dinner on a cane and a quantity of sheer obstinacy, and had held the table until ten.

He had been home four days. In those four days he had spoken to his wife in private for a sum of minutes he could count on one hand, and most of those had been conducted in corridors, with one ear on an approaching footstep. Since then there had been nothing. Looks across the dinner table. Her fingers brushing his when she passed him a dish. The house being full, he had been wanted by turns by his steward, for his name to a paper, for his leave to hang a tapestry, and at his cousin’s bedside.

Richard was insufferable. Though they had come by easy stages and with every care against jolting, the road had inflamed the wound and brought back a fever that necessitated the household taking turns day and night to tend to him, leaving his wife and himself without a single private hour to speak. Darcy was glad of the complaint. A man who complained was a man who mended. But there was a limit, and it had been reached the previous evening, somewhere between Richard’s third refusal to have his leg raised and his judgement that the broth at Pemberley was inferior to the broth at Portsmouth.

“You are the worst patient in Derbyshire,” Darcy had told him, helping him up from the table.

“I am the worst patient in England,” Richard had said, with some pride, and Elizabeth, who with Jane had stood apart as if out of hearing, had laughed.

He turned his face into the pillow at the memory, and then turned it back. It would not do. The laughing was what bothered him. What vexed him was the laughing. She laughed at Richard’s jokes, which were not uniformly good, and she showed Richard an ease she did not show him.

He trusted them both entirely, which did not prevent the observation that his wife was at ease with his cousin and on her guard with her husband. It was not distrust. It was crossness, and he was honest enough to name it so, and honest enough to find the crossness faintly ridiculous.

There was, he decided, throwing back the counterpane, no dignity in love whatsoever.

He rang for his man and dressed with more care than the morning required, dismissing the valet’s suggestion of the blue coat twice before accepting it on the third offer.

The corridor was empty. The stairs were empty. And at the bottom of the stairs, in the morning light off the hall windows, stood Elizabeth, in her walking dress, bonnet in hand, not yet put on.

She was waiting. “I am glad we can walk together today,” she said.

“So am I,” he said, and came down the last step, and offered his arm.

They went out through the side door, into air still cool from the night. The park lay wet with dew, the grass silvered where the sun had not yet reached it, and the house fell behind them at a pace he did not attempt to govern. She walked quickly, as she always walked, and he matched her. For some time neither of them spoke.

The path took them past the home wood and down towards the water. The lake lay below the lawn, ringed on three sides by forest. Along its nearer edge the summer wildflowers stood in drifts, white and yellow and a pale violet.

“Elizabeth,” he began.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said, at the same moment.

They stopped. She laughed, and after a moment he laughed too, and the held breath went out of the morning entirely.

He turned to face her. The water lay behind her, the light on her face. He took her hand, which she gave him without hesitation.

“I have loved you from the first moment I saw you. At the Meryton assembly, where I behaved so badly that you had every cause to dislike me.”

Her hand stayed in his.

“You laughed at something Miss Lucas said. Your eyes lit when you laughed, and I spent the rest of that evening noticing no one but you. Everything about you...”

He looked down at their joined hands, then back at her.