Page 64 of The Marriage Articles

And she had been lucky. That was the fact she had resisted longest, because luck of this kind had arrived wearing the disguise of ruin, and she had required months to take the disguise off. A marriage forced upon her by scandal and it had become the great good fortune of her life. There was no justice in it that she could discern. She accepted it regardless, as one accepts weather that has turned in one’s favour.

Her mother had said something to her on the morning of the wedding, drawn close in the bustle of dressing, about how these things were apt to be awkward at the beginning, and that a wife must simply bear it. The exact words had not stayed with her. Mrs Bennet had delivered the warning in a whisper of great consequence, and Elizabeth had received it in the manner in which she received most of her mother’s confidences, with a polite attention behind which her thoughts went elsewhere. She still could not tell what had been meant. She suspected her mother could not have explained it either, that the warning had been handed down like a receipt for a dish nobody cooked any longer, the proportions lost, the purpose obscure.

Whatever it had meant, she was certain it did not apply. Nothing with Darcy would be awkward in that way. She could not have defended the certainty with arguments, and did not attempt to. He had become, somewhere between the winter and this summer afternoon, her whole existence, and awkwardness required a distance between two people that no longer obtained here.

What remained was her education.

Years of upbringing, every governess and every conduct book and every example set before her, had taught one lesson above all others. A lady never initiates such a thing. A lady receives, consents, declines, endures, but she does not begin. The lesson had no reason attached to it that Elizabeth had ever been able to discover, and in the ordinary run of her life she had dismissed a hundred such lessons without a qualm. This one was the last of them still standing between her and the door.

Her courage always rose at every attempt to intimidate her.

Elizabeth stood.

She had instructed Smith to leave her hair loose, which Smith had done with the incurious competence of a servant who had long since decided her mistress was eccentric and had made her peace with it. Over her night rail she belted her robe, a thing of pale silk that had come from London with the rest of her new wardrobe, and she looked at herself once in the mirror and declined to look a second time. The candle she carried was the one from her dressing table, held low.

Her chamber opened onto the small private sitting room that stood between her rooms and his. She had never used it. The little room was dark and cool. No fire had been laid in its hearth, for no one sat here. It was a room that existed only to be crossed, and she crossed it, her bare feet silent on the boards, her candle throwing her shadow tall against the far wall.

His door stood before her. She knocked, softly.

The door opened almost at once, as though he had been standing near it, and perhaps he had.

He was half undressed for the night. His coat was off, his waistcoat hung over the back of a chair behind him, and his shirt stood open at the throat, the linen loose where he had pulled the stock free. His eyes went over her once, from her loose hair to her bare feet and back again to her face. What was in them was not surprise. He had expected her.

He did not say anything. In the way he looked at her she could read that he was pleased to see her. More than pleased. In the crossing of the sitting room she had prepared several sentences of considerable quality, light ones, arch ones. Every one of them abandoned her. Her mouth went dry. Her head went empty. She stood in his doorway like a girl at her first assembly, all her wit packed away in some other woman’s reticule, and she discovered that she did not know what to say.

It appeared she would not be required to say anything.

He reached out, took the candle from her hand, set it somewhere behind him. Then he drew her in, gently and without any hesitation at all, and the door shut at her back. He brought her against it, against the cool panels of it inside his chamber, and kissed her.

It was nothing like the kiss at the lake. That had been all restraint giving way, careful even in its surrender, the kiss of a man checking his own advance. This was a man who had waited, and who had finished waiting. His hand came up to her face and then into her hair, scattering the last order out of it. His other arm went round her and held her to him. She had not known a person could be held so carefully and so hungrily at once. She had wondered, in the way she allowed herself to wonder about such things, whether the education she had been given on this subject, which amounted to her mother’s one obscure warning and a great deal of silence, would prove adequate to the event. The question did not survive its first minute. Nothing adequate was required of her. Nothing was required of her at all except to be exactly where she was.

Her hands found his shoulders and then went beneath the open linen of his shirt, and the warmth of him under her palms was a fact plainer than any she had set down on paper. Beneath her fingers his skin moved as he breathed. The strength in him was held in check around her, carefully, and the care of it cost him something. Knowing what it cost undid her more thoroughly than the kiss itself.

His hands moved from her waist to her back, gathering the silk of the robe. A sound rose low in his throat. He lifted his head at last, his forehead against hers, his eyes closed, his breath uneven in a way she had never heard it. Neither of them spoke. There was, Elizabeth thought with the last clear corner of her mind, nothing to say that had not been said that morning among the wildflowers.

His mouth found hers again.

The candle she had brought burned down in its holder on his dressing table, and the house slept on around them, guests and family behind their own doors, nobody the wiser.

Chapter Forty

There is a great deal of nonsense talked in this world about what a wife is to expect of her marriage bed, and the greater part of it is talked by mothers, who ought to know better and very likely do. Elizabeth lay considering this truth in the grey hour before the light came up, with the evidence of it strewn across the floor of a room that was not, strictly speaking, hers. Darcy’s arm lay across her waist, heavy with sleep, his breathing slow against her shoulder, and she took the whole of it in with a care she usually reserved for scenery.

She woke content and certain, with no shyness in her. What rose in her instead was laughter, which she pressed down, because the man beside her slept the sleep of the blameless and she had no wish to wake him before the humour had been identified.

It proved impossible to hold. A small sound escaped her, and then another, and she put her face into the pillow to stifle it.

His arm tightened. “You are laughing,” Darcy said, his voice rough and low with sleep, not opening his eyes. “I should like to be told what is so amusing at this hour, when any reasonable person is still asleep.”

“I am not reasonable,” Elizabeth said to the pillow. “It has been remarked upon.”

“By me, frequently.” He did open his eyes then, and regarded her from a distance of some six inches with the weary amusement of a man who knows not what his wife will say next. “What are you about?”

“I was thinking about my mother.”

“Elizabeth.” With an economy of movement he pulled her against him. “I am prepared to concede that a time exists for thinking about one’s mother,” he said into her hair. “I am even prepared to concede that Pemberley contains a room suitable for the purpose. The library, perhaps. The breakfast drawing room.” His hand moved slowly up her back. “This is not that room, and this is not that hour, and if you are lying in my bed in the dark thinking of Mrs Bennet, then I have failed somewhere and should like the particulars at once.”

“You have failed nowhere,” she said, and felt him relax by some small degree against her. “That is rather the point.”