Page 32 of Courting Elizabeth

“You fear I might believe I must please you to get money?”

The question wounded me for what it revealed about her understanding of marriage.

“Above all, I want you never to have to flatter me to receive what the agreements guarantee you.”

She closed her fingers around the key. The metal warmed against her palm before she let it go.

“My uncle Gardiner read the contract.”

“He defended your interests with great care. My solicitor sent him a copy. The desk contains another, annotated in plainer language.”

An almost amused gleam flickered in her eyes.

“You had a contract translated for me?”

“I doubt that conjugal happiness depends on a wife's ability to decipher legal jargon she has not mastered.”

“That is the most sensible remark you have made since we met.”

“I feared my marriage might harm my reputation.”

Her smile appeared, cautious but real.

She slipped the key into her pocket.

I followed the movement of her hand and understood, with an unwelcome clarity, what I had just done.

I had just given her the means to do without me.

The man I had been at Hunsford would have called this foolishness. He would have kept the contract, the money, and the keys in a drawer only he knew existed, and he would have waited for her to come asking. That man believed a woman is won by withholding from her everything that is not oneself.

He had obtained a wife who did not love him.

I descended the stairs behind her, setting my conditions.

I would not enter her chamber. I would seek no tenderness she had not offered first. I would never ask her the question whose answer would destroy me.

So much for what was forbidden.

There remained what was permitted…

I could learn what she loved, open Pemberley to her without presuming to dictate how she used it, offer her the chance to know Georgiana, the tenants, the horses, my father's library, and the estate school. I could show her the man I was and leave the rest to her.

I could make waiting a discipline.

I had administered Pemberley for many years. I had drained lands that three men had declared lost, rebuilt a mill, won an eleven-year lawsuit against a neighbor. I had never failed in an enterprise to which I had applied method and time.

I resolved to apply to myself the only discipline I knew.

It was absurd.

Above all, it was the only thing that would keep me from forcing her door that very evening.

I climbed into the carriage with the serenity of a man who has just solved a problem.

The journey toward Derbyshire altered our relationship by degrees so minute that I noticed them only afterward.

The first day, we spoke almost exclusively of our families. Elizabeth asked me about my parents, about Georgiana's childhood, about the management of Pemberley. I answered with unusual frankness. I told her of my mother's death, my father's long illness, the weight of the estate received too soon. She listened without seeking a joke to lighten what needed none.