Page 201 of Faceless

“That has not, in my observation, proved a strategy of any reliability.”

“No. I have a son who has made plans for me.”

Darcy bent and put his face briefly against the crown of the child’s head. He drew breath there and held it for a moment. He had been doing this since the morning the child had been born, with the wonder of having spent too many months half-believing he would never be permitted to do it.

He straightened. His hand stayed on the back of the child’s head.

“The post has come.”

“Anything of interest?”

“Several things. Pemberton writes that the final disposition of Sterling’s estate will be settled before Christmas. The Crown has determined that what was not seizable will be distributed among the parties on whose evidence the conviction was secured. Foss shall at last be pleased. Webb shall now be a comfortably retired man of means, which is a fine thing because I ruined him for any other business. Marsh also wrote. His wife and the children are well.”

She lifted her face. “Have they settled into their new home in East Riding?”

“Yes, in a cottage on the property where he is employed, and the children at the village school. The steward is the brother of an old friend of my father’s, and was glad of a clerk with Marsh’s experience. The youngest has acquired a kitten of indeterminate breed. The daughter — Anne, you will recall — has been given charge of the kitten on the condition that she also read aloud to her brother every evening, and is, by all reports, taking the office with considerable gravity.”

“Tell them — tell Mrs Marsh — when you next write — tell her I think often of them.”

He kissed the crown of her head. “She knows. Marsh wrote his wife’s greeting for you explicitly.”

Elizabeth bent her face into the soft, pale hair of her own son and did not, for a moment, answer.

The evening came on with the rain. They had supper in the small dining-room, because the great one was, by general agreement of the household, not to be opened until they had guests enough to fill it. Georgiana was at Matlock for the month with the countess, who had decided in October that her niece’s musical education had been neglected during the troubles and required immediate attention; she would return at Christmas.

Jane was at Pemberley still, in the small set of rooms off the south corridor that Elizabeth had given her in September and that Jane had not yet, two months in, shown any inclination to vacate. Richard was with his regiment and not coming home this winter for any consideration he had been offered. He had written a letter to Jane the previous Tuesday, by Darcy’s observation — a third letter to her in a fortnight, by the same observation, which exceeded the number of letters Richard had written to Darcy himself in the same interval by a margin Darcy had not been able to make innocent in his own mind, however he tried.

He had not yet raised the matter with his wife. He suspected she had been aware of it for considerably longer than he had.

The child had woken at six. He had been fed. He was asleep again, in the nursery off Elizabeth’s dressing room, with the under-nurse listening at the door because Elizabeth had not yet, nine weeks in, been able to surrender the night entirely to any other woman.

Darcy had come up at nine.

He found her in her dressing room with her hair down and a shawl over her chemise, sitting in front of the fire with a piece of needlework in her lap that she had not added a stitch to in some considerable interval.

“My love.”

“I am awake. I have been pretending not to be.”

He took the needlework out of her hands and set it on the table beside her. He bent and kissed her, properly, on the mouth — which he had not been permitted to do in any sustained way for the first several weeks of the boy’s life, on the orders of the physician her aunt had recommended, and which they had been permitting themselves again, by stages, in the past month.

“Mrs Pratt has gone to bed. The under-nurse is at the door of the nursery and is, by my information, fully equipped to manage the next four hours without consultation. I have spent the better part of the evening determining this in considerable detail, on the grounds that I had specific plans for the use of those hours and did not wish them interrupted.”

“And what manner of plans, Mr Darcy?”

He bent and kissed her again, more slowly. “This kind.”

He drew her to her feet — slowly, with the unhurried solicitude that had become his habit since the child had come — and unfastened her shawl and let it fall over the back of the chair. He lifted her chin with his hand. He looked at her in the firelight as a man looks at something he has been keeping the rest of his life in the same place against the chance that the rest of his life would arrive.

She smiled against his lips. “Fitzwilliam, you are being so gentle, I cannot decide if your intent is to seduce me or lull me to sleep.”

“Then I shall ask the wife of my heart, who has not yet, in a year and a half of marriage, refused me anything I have asked her in the privacy of her own chamber, whether she would consent to come to bed. What we do there is entirely up to you, but I was hoping for something rather… more than sleep.”

She put her hands against his chest. She slid them up to the open collar of his shirt, and to the line of his throat above it, and into the soft hair behind his ear that she had once told him was fine.

“I should consent, Fitzwilliam, to a great deal more.”

He laughed.