They named her Patience, for she had taken her time in coming into the world, and she looked like a perfect copy of her mother, just exactly like Elizabeth, with that mouth, copied and tiny, and she was perfect, the most beautiful little girl in the history of time, he thought, though he might have been biased, he supposed.
But he quite fell in love with her.
Her mother was so exhausted in the wake of it—two days of laboring, of walking, of weathering the contractions of her womb as it tried to expel little Patience—that he got to hold the small girl for a disproportionate amount of the time.
If he put her down, she woke and cried, so he did not put her down. She liked it if he walked with her, so he spent the first five days of her life walking with her nearly constantly, walking her all over Pemberley, telling her all manner of stories about every hallway and room. “This, little Patience, is the room where I broke a vase when I was but seven years old and my mother liked it very much and got quite red in the face and scolded me for some time,” he would say. Or, “You will like this room whenyou are older, Patience, because it is the dining room, and you will enjoy all of the delicious food we eat here.”
When Patience’s mother was awake, the baby girl wanted nothing except her mother’s arms, nothing except to be snuggled in against Elizabeth’s warmth, and he spent time wrapped around them both.
Elizabeth would yawn and say that she would be up and about soon and he would tell her that she would stay abed for some time more yet.
“You are always asking too much of yourself, my Lizzy,” he would say, addressing his wife but speaking in a sing-song-y voice directly to their little daughter. “You have just brought an entire person into the world, and you must rest. You need rest.”
Elizabeth would laugh. “You are always looking for excuses to keep me in bed, Fitz.”
He would chuckle. “Not in front of Patience, really, my love.” And he would kiss her, and she would ask who was being inappropriate now.
Anyway, it was the best late winter and early spring of his life.
He had never been so happy. His heart had never been so full.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE VISITS STARTEDscarcely a month later.
Mr. Darcy welcomed his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam first, and Elizabeth was still not much up to playing hostess, and Darcy himself spent too much of his time walking about with little Patience, who had grown a bit spoiled, the nurses told him, and would not go down for naps without her mother or her father. Darcy spent much of this visit, then, walking about the hallways of Pemberley with Patience in his arms, sleeping, while his cousin kept pace with him.
“You must tell me the truth,” said the colonel, “have you truly claimed Wickham’s child?”
“Patience is my daughter,” he said.
“Are you dodging me?” said the colonel. “Of anyone, you can trust me with the truth of it, I suppose. I do know her, you know, Darcy, and I have seen that wickedly expressive mouth of hers.”
“Are you truly talking of my wife’s mouth in that way to me?”
“Well, I am only saying, she is the sort of woman a man might do extraordinary things for, that is all,” said his cousin.
Darcy gave him such a look that his cousin’s steps faltered.
“Well, then,” muttered the colonel. “If that is your response to my saying that, it seems unlikely you would stand for anyone actually touching her.”
“I did try to kill him,” said Darcy. “I missed his heart by two inches, and now he is recovering.”
The colonel was stunned, and stopped walking entirely.
Darcy continued down the hall with little Patience in his arms.
When the colonel caught up to him again, he said in a low voice, “You are a better man than I am, but then you always were, I think. My guess is that he did to Elizabeth what he did to Georgiana? We have confirmation, then, that he did it?”
Darcy only nodded.
“We should have strung him up back then.”
“Perhaps,” said Darcy with a sigh. “But if they are saying his name, bandying that about back in London? I would rather he not hear that. He will begin to question everything again, and he may cause trouble for us.”
“I doubt that,” said the colonel. “What does Wickham want with an infant girl?”
“True,” admitted Darcy. He supposed he and Elizabeth had feared the worst with all of that, but Wickham would have no desire to claim a child and take responsibility for it. Darcy supposed there was still a chance that Wickham might come to make threats and wish to be paid off, but Darcy did not entirely think so, not with the way Wickham was behaving now. Why, these days, he seemed to have decided to fall back on his training to be a parson.
