Page 198 of Faceless

“I thought of you at night,” he said. “Not always nobly. But often like this. Tired. Alone. Ill, perhaps, and trying not to trouble anyone. I thought of every moment I had missed with you and came near madness over it more than once.”

She turned towards him within the circle of his arm.

“I hated it too,” she said. “Not only the fear. The missing. The thought that this was happening to us and you were not there to put your hand on it and look grave and think yourself entirely responsible.”

His eyes closed once.

“I am entirely responsible.”

“For the child? Certainly. For the whole world? Not even you are equal to that conceit.”

He chuckled. “I am relieved to hear my arrogance has survived these trials in your estimation.”

“It has done more than survive. It flourishes.” She slipped her hand into his hair and drew his mouth to hers.

It was not, in the event, what he had been imagining for one hundred and twelve nights. The Elizabeth he had in his arms in the bed at Matlock House was a different woman. She was heavier in his hands than she had been. She moved more carefully. She required small, deliberate accommodations, and he discovered, as he made each adjustment, that he had not been imagining anything sufficient to the reality.

He had not been with her since she had been carrying the child. He had not put his hands on her body in this state.

He had not felt the new fullness of her breasts under his palm. He had not felt the warmth of the curve between them, or the sharp movement under his hand that was the child shifting against him as he moved. He learned, by degrees and in the half-light, the shape of the woman he could have only partially imagined. The line of her where her waist had once been, gone now to the soft and unmistakable rise of her belly. The dark hollow under her jaw he had used to find in the dark at Auchengray, and which still tasted of her in the same way and made her arch against him as it had then. The slow, generous warmth of her, opening to him with a sigh he had heard a hundred times by candlelight and had thought, on the bench in the cell beneath the court the previous evening, that he might never hear again.

He kissed her at the temple, and at the full lower lip, and at the place under her ear that had always been his, and along the line of her throat down to the hollow where his face had used to rest in November, and he found, as he went, that he was attending to her with a slow care he had not had in him on any previous occasion. He had once thought himself an attentive husband. He had not, in any previous experience, known what it was to have been kept from her for so long, and to be returned to her, and to feel the glory of her body quaking under his hands as it received him.

He had her. He had her, and he had the morning, and he had every morning that would follow this one.

He went carefully. He went slowly. He tried to make her comfortable, and he listened to the small sighs he had spent five months at Auchengray learning to read by in the dark, and waited for her to make the little groan at the back of her throat that had used to mean she was growing impatient with his patience. He brought her to the place she had been working towards with a gentleness he had not known he possessed, and he held her as she came apart against him with a deeper, more powerful sort of violence than her body had ever offered in that moment.

And he discovered, in the moment that her gasps filled his ears, that he was weeping again, quietly, into the side of her hair where she could not see it.

She knew anyway. She knew his body too well not to. She did not say so. She only put her hand against the side of his face afterward and held it there, and he turned his face into her palm and kissed it, and he did not, just then, have any words for what he was feeling.

After a long while — when the morning had moved a little further along at the window, and the carriages outside were no longer occasional but steady — she lay against his side with her face in the hollow of his throat and his hand on the small curve she had let him keep his hand on through the whole of it. She said, into his chest, “I had been afraid I should never hold you like that again.”

He stroked her hair. “Did you? I am glad I could offer you something that you would miss.”

“Do not tease me. I had been afraid for so long that I had stopped permitting myself to know I was afraid. The only time I felt safe was when I remembered how it felt when you held me.”

“You shall have it — have me — as long as you wish to. Tonight and tomorrow, and on the morning and evening after this one. You shall have me on every occasion thereafter that you choose, for the rest of my life. I promise you. I make a poor husband to be promising it in this condition without having bathed, but I promise it, nonetheless.”

She smiled and kissed the tip of his nose. “You are a perfectly adequate husband.”

“I am a filthy one.”

“You are mine.”

She kissed his throat. Her hand had come back to the curve at the front of her where his hand was, and she pressed his hand under hers, and the child moved once, small and definite, against his palm.

He held her a long while.

Outside, the carriages had begun to move more steadily in the street. The household below was up. There would be coffee in the breakfast-room within the hour, and his sister waiting at the foot of the stair, and his uncle in his temper of the morning, and a great many things to be said and done in the course of the day that would constitute the first proper day of the rest of his life.

LXXIII

Home

He came down the stair with her on his arm an hour later.

He had been put back together as a gentleman by stages — shaved, dressed in clean linen, a coat that had been sent over from Grosvenor Square — and the gentleman who descended the stair was, by every external measure, the Mr Darcy of Pemberley who had last walked these stairs the previous spring. He was not. He knew it. He suspected the house knew it also. He had Elizabeth’s hand on his arm, and he had no intention of releasing it.