Page 63 of The Marriage Articles

“I am not a man who says such things easily.” He drew breath. “I love you. Ardently.”

He paused. He looked at her steadily.

“And I never want to be parted from you.”

Her hand was in his, her eyes very bright. “I know,” she said. Simply, without archness, without coyness.

“I love you too. More than I could ever imagine loving anyone, and I say so having spent a considerable thought on the subject of not loving you, and wasted it entirely.”

Afterwards, he could not have said that he decided anything. His hand went to her waist. Hers came up to his lapel. He kissed her as a man possessed. Her fingers closed in the cloth of the blue coat he had chosen with such care. His other hand found the small of her back. There was her breath, the warmth of her, the water moving somewhere behind her, and nothing else at all, for a time he did not measure and would not have traded for the whole of the estate that surrounded them.

When at last they drew apart, she did not step back. She stayed within the circle of his arm, looking up at him. He was content to stand so.

“These past days have been torment,” he said.

“Torment?”

“A comfortable torment, with a full table and excellent company.” He looked down at her. “I could not speak to you. I could not guess your feelings from across a dinner table, though I attempted it with diligence. And I was obliged to watch you laugh at Richard’s jokes.”

She stopped and looked up at him.

“I know it is childish.” He kept his voice even. “You have an easiness with him that you did not have with me. I was vexed. A little. I state it as a fact and not an accusation, and I am aware that it does me no credit.”

“Then I must confess something in return,” she said, “since we are confessing, and since mine is worse.” Her voice had changed. It was quieter. “I was a fool, that day when I asked you for more time. I have told myself since that it was prudence, and that a woman ought to be certain, but it was not prudence, it was folly.”

She looked out over the water. “People speak of love arriving all at once, but mine did not. It came by degrees, and I perceived none of them. And then one day in the library you stood before me, saying something perfectly ordinary, and there it was, as though it had been there all along.”

She stopped. She looked at him.

“I love you, Fitzwilliam. Dearly. I have not said it plainly enough, and I intend to keep saying it until the saying of it bores us both.”

He kissed her again, there at the turn of the path, with the water on one side and the wood on the other and no one in the world near enough to matter. It was longer this time, and slower. Her hand was at his collar, his at her waist, and the morning had about it the settled quality of a thing decided at last.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

There is a particular species of furniture in every bedchamber in England which pretends to exist for stockings and combs, and serves in truth as the keeper of a woman’s private resolutions. Elizabeth set her hand on the brass handle of her dresser drawer, and the thought arrived complete, as it had been arriving all afternoon. She would go to him tonight.

Smith had gone at last, dismissed with more ceremony than the girl’s usual hour allowed. The chamber stood in that settled quiet of a great house after dinner, when the corridors have swallowed the last footsteps and the rooms below give up their murmur one voice at a time. Elizabeth had sat through that dinner with perfect outward composure, answering Lady Matlock on the subject of the Derbyshire roads and allowing Richard the satisfaction of winning one hand of cards in three. The whole of her attention had been elsewhere, three floors up, on a folded sheet of paper in a drawer. It was a mercy, she reflected, that Lady Matlock’s conversation required so little of its hearer. Somewhere beneath her, Lord and Lady Matlock would be taking their leave of the drawing room. Richard would be stumping his way towards his own bed on his cane, slower than his temper liked and faster than his physician advised. Jane and Georgiana had retired an hour since. Pemberley held its full complement of guests and family, every one of them behind a door of their own. When Elizabeth considered it, that was exactly the arrangement she was about to disturb.

She opened the drawer. She drew the paper out by its crease and carried it to the candle by her mirror. Seven Articles. She did not read them all. Her eye went to the first of them.

First. Separate bedchambers, and no exercise of a husband’s rights, until both shall freely consent to a change.

She had written that clause herself, in a freezing room with her jaw set. She had locked the door from her side that very wedding night and every night since.

Both consent. He had consented long ago, in everything but word.

How on earth, Elizabeth thought, was she to accomplish it.

This was the real question, and she addressed it with the practicality she brought to all genuine difficulties. It was not a question of feeling. The feeling had been settled for weeks and had been spoken aloud that morning, among the wildflowers, with a completeness that left nothing further to be said on the subject. It was a question of mechanism. A door was locked. She held the key. The operation was, reduced to its elements, the work of a moment, and yet she had been married since the winter and had not performed it, because the operation required her to stand up, cross a room, and knock, and no part of her education had ever described how a lady did such a thing.

She folded the sheet along its crease and set it on the dressing table.

He had fulfilled every promise. All of them, to the letter, without a single failure she could name, and she had watched for failures with the attention of a woman who expected to be right about them. She had been wrong. The admission had long ago stopped costing her anything.

She loved him. The word was too small for the fact, and the fact needed no ornament. It stood in her day from morning to night, like furniture in a familiar room she no longer stumbled over.

He was handsome. On this point she had spent the better part of a year refusing to grant the evidence of her own eyes, out of loyalty to a grievance that no longer existed. The refusal now struck her as one of the more laborious foolishnesses she had ever sustained. That very afternoon, watching his hands as he poured the wine, she had been obliged to answer Georgiana’s question with a delay of some seconds, and Georgiana, who noticed everything and said nothing, had smiled into her glass.