Page 72 of The Marriage Articles

“Because by the time she is of an age to be courted, you will have had twenty years of practice at the frown you wore last night. No gentleman in England will survive it. I shall have a daughter on my hands until she is forty, and it will be your doing.”

“Any daughter of mine,” Fitzwilliam said, with the calm of a man stating the time of day, “will not need to marry.”

It was said so seriously that Elizabeth had to press her lips together and look at the river. She adored him for it.

“How fortunate,” she said, when she could trust her voice, “that she will have a mother to teach her humility.”

“She will have a mother,” he agreed, “who will teach her to ride too fast and answer back. I am aware of the risk.”

The breakfast drawing room was empty. Georgiana, who had danced until the musicians had given up before she had, would not be down for another hour at least, and neither of her guardians begrudged her a moment of it. Elizabeth took her chair. Fitzwilliam took his at the head of the table and looked across at her before the coffee was poured. It was all so ordinary and so entirely sufficient that Elizabeth, buttering her toast, considered that nobody had ever warned her happiness would come in this shape, not as an event but as a repetition. The same chairs. The same man watching her across the morning table with that quiet, settled attention.

“You are smiling at your toast,” he said.

“I am smiling at the state of the world. The toast is of no consequence.”

He returned to his paper.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. Sir.” The nurse’s hands were folded very tightly at her waist. “I would not have disturbed your breakfast, only Master George is asking for his mother, and he will not be put off. I have tried the pony cart, and I have tried the kitten, and Cook sent up a sugar mouse, and he threw it at me, ma’am, I am sorry to say.”

“Oh, dear,” said Elizabeth, with sympathy and very little surprise.

“And Mrs Reynolds came up to the nursery herself, ma’am, thinking he might settle for her, as he sometimes does, but he would not have her neither. He stood at the door and called for you until he was hoarse with it.”

There was no higher measure of a household crisis at Pemberley than that. Mrs Reynolds had run the house since before Fitzwilliam was born and could settle anything in it, up to and including Fitzwilliam himself. A child of two who remained unmoved by Mrs Reynolds was a calamity beyond ordinary skill. Elizabeth set down her toast.

“It is only a cold,” she said. “He has had it three days and it has cost the household more sleep than the harvest.”

“He is very cross, ma’am.”

“I shall come up directly,” Elizabeth told her. The nurse’s whole bearing eased, and she curtseyed again and went out ahead.

“Your son,” Elizabeth rose, and looked at her husband over the table, “is as insufferable when he has a cold as his father.”

One brow went up. It was meant, she knew, to look dignified, and it very nearly succeeded. “I do not recall the incident.”

“You recall it perfectly.”

He set his cup down with deliberate care. “The boy has a strong sense of his own requirements. I decline to apologize for it.”

She laughed and went out through the door the nurse had left open, and at the threshold she glanced back over her shoulder, as she had not planned to do and somehow always did. Fitzwilliam Darcy sat alone at the head of his breakfast table in the summer morning light, the coffee cooling, looking after his wife with a smile he made no attempt to disguise, as though there were no one in the house left to see it. There was.

She carried the sight of it with her up the stairs to her son, and it went with her, as it went with her everywhere now, into all the ordinary rooms of her life.

❧ ❧ ❧

The afternoon had emptied the house into the garden, and Elizabeth carried her workbasket out to the terrace with no intention of opening it. Charlotte was already there, settled into the wicker chair with the cushion it had required two footmen to find, her hands folded in her lap with her usual composure. Beyond the balustrade, at the far end of the gravel walk, two gentlemen stood in the shade of the chestnut with their heads inclined towards one another, deep in a conversation that had now lasted the better part of an hour. Mr Darcy of Pemberley, who could not be prevailed upon to walk with a party of more than four without developing an appointment elsewhere, had spent that hour in the company of Mr Collins, and showed every sign of wishing it might go on.

Elizabeth took the second chair and set her basket on the flagstones between them. “I have been looking for you above stairs,” she said. “I might have known you would have the sense to take the air outside.”

Then, looking at the chestnut tree, she continued. “And what are they about down there, do you suppose?”

“I have given up supposing.” Charlotte regarded the two figures under the chestnut with the mild attention of a person watching the weather. “They went down after breakfast to look at the wall where the espalier had failed, and they have not looked at anything since.”

Elizabeth smiled, and let her head rest against the back of the chair. She had wanted this hour since the carriage came up the drive yesterday evening, had wanted it through dinner and through breakfast, and she was determined to be robbed of none of it. Charlotte beside her had the same face she had had at seventeen, which was to say a face that would not put on any feeling it did not truly have, and Elizabeth found she was gladder of that than of any news the visit could possibly bring.

“Tell me of Kent,” she said. “Your letters are all facts but they tell me nothing of how you pass your days.”

“Kent is pleasant,” said Charlotte. “William’s business does very well. He has a good head for figures, as he tells me himself, frequently, and with more pride than is quite consistent with his opinions on vanity.”