“Is that where you have been?” she said.
He nodded.
She let out a noisy breath, and the look she gave him made him feel as if she was looking at a perfect stranger. “Good God, Fitzwilliam,” she said, and she shut herself back inside her room.
He felt ill again.
Had it been the right thing?
What good was he, really? What good was he if he could not protect the people who had been given to him to protect?
Damnation.
He walked away from her room.
He needed to see Elizabeth, but he did not go. He went away to be alone, and he spent too much time contemplating the vacant look in Mr. Wickham’s eyes after he had shot the man in cold blood.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THERE WAS NOdinner at Pemberley that night again, though everyone knew that Mr. Darcy had returned.
Elizabeth and the Bingley sisters dined at the dower house, but they did not speak. Nervous silence reigned over the table. The sisters picked at their food, but Elizabeth had a healthy appetite.
She retired to her room afterward, and as she lay down on her bed, she felt it for the first time. She had heard of it from other women. The quickening. They had explained it as a feeling like tiny fluttering wings inside one’s belly, and when she felt it, she knew exactly what it was, and it was exactly like that, like a butterfly battering against the inside of her.
It made tears come to her eyes.
She put both hands against the small swell of herself there, and everything was suddenly different.
Oh, obviously, the babe had been there, and she had known it, so perhaps it shouldn’t have been different, but it was.
It made her feel such a surge.
The love she felt for this tiny being inside her, it overwhelmed her.
She lay on the bed, stroking her own belly, and the tears that pricked her eyes began to fall.
Things shifted. Her priorities gently aligned differently. She had never been so selfish as to think of herself first, of course, but she had thought of her family first—her parents, her sisters, Jane. But now, it was simply the babe. Her babe. She was its only protector. It was shielded now, inside her body, and she must do whatever it took to give it the best life she might give it.
If that meant that she must put herself first, it would only be that she must because she was the babe’s best and most strong protector, and there was nothing more important in the world than that role, not anymore.
She felt it like a sacred, almost divine, role, and she felt humbled to have been given it, but she knew it was her first and foremost responsibility, from now on. She was a mother.
And at that moment, there was a faint knock at her door.
Mr. Darcy’s voice, low, came from without. “Elizabeth, I am here. I am coming in.”
She sat up on the bed. “Yes,” she said, wiping at her eyes. She got to her feet as he opened the door.
She met him there in the space between the bed and the door.
He looked somewhat haggard. He had a bit of growth on his chin, not quite a beard, but something that indicated he had not been shaving, and his waistcoat was unbuttoned, his cravat not well tied.
“Your sister seems to think you have plans of marrying me,” she said to him.
“Do you object?” he said, eyeing her. “I do seem to remember that you once told me I was the last man you could ever be prevailed upon to marry, and I should tell you that I have come straight from shooting him down like an animal, and I suppose I could say I did it for you, but I am not sure it is what a woman wants in a husband, now that I go over it in my head. I shouldhave taken you straightaway to Scotland, I think. If it had been about you, about your protection, I would have seen to you first.”
She swallowed, this information going through her in a way that warmed her, she found. Perhaps moments ago, it would not have, but things were different now. “He’s dead?”
