Page 99 of Faceless

The discipline had held everywhere except at delivered of a daughter. And delivered of a daughter was a piece of news at which any number of men would have caught their breath, for any number of reasons she could not begin to enumerate, and she had no business making the foundation of her entire investigation rest on a single short breath she might or might not have heard from a man speaking in a whisper four feet from her in the dark.

It could not be Fitzwilliam Darcy.

But then… Why else had he been intercepting her on those paths at Rosings? Seven or eight mornings, perhaps. The same lane. The same hour. She had decided at the time that he had been bored, that the lane had suited him, that he had been condescending to her in the way he was condescending to everyone — and any of those was true, and any of those had been reason enough — and the man four feet from her in the dark, who would not now answer whether he had been on a lane in Kent in April, was not — could not be —

The whisper had stopped. He had heard her not pick up the wit again, in the way he had been hearing every small alteration in her for two months together; he was hearing this one now.

“You are tired,” he said.

“I am.”

He rose. He came round the table, and he was at the door of the room, and he was about to kiss her good night.

She caught his sleeve.

XXXVIII

The Husband She Had

She did not know exactly why she had done it. She was mortified of who he might be, but in equal measure, knew she did not want him to leave. The hand on his sleeve was investigation as much as anything else; it was also the hand of a wife whose body had learned him in their few nights together and was not minded, tonight, to send him out and down the passage by himself.

“Stay.”

She did not let go of his sleeve. He did not move towards the door, and after the breath of his hesitation, he caressed her cheek, and she let him take her face between his hands.

“You have been unwell.”

“I have been entirely recovered for five days.” She turned her cheek into his palm. “I have been waiting for you to notice.”

“I did not wish to—”

“I know.” Her hands rested against his shirtfront, the linen warm beneath them, but she did not move them yet. “You were being considerate. George. I am asking you to stop being so.”

“Elizabeth—” Something in him pulled back, and his hand closed over hers and stilled it. “We should — for a little while — perhaps not. While you are not quite — there are reasons to take care, only for a little time. I should not have come to you tonight if I had thought —”

She did not let him finish the sentence. Her fingers tugged at his cravat, then slipped the topmost button while his words were still in the air between them, and she pressed her face into the opening her hand had made of his collar. Her other arm went round him under his coat, and what she was doing was not affection — or was not only affection — and she was not going to allow herself to ask just yet which of the two was the larger part of it.

Mr Darcy had broad shoulders — broader than Bingley’s, by a fair margin, and not unlike those under her palms. But his posture had always been rigid to the point of pain. Her husband’s shoulders were softened — round, even, as he folded her in. The hand that had stilled hers opened on the back of her head and pulled her closer, and what came out of him next came from a man who had stopped trying to hold himself together.

“Lord, but I love you.”

She stiffened.

She had not been ready for that. He had given her so much for four months in this dark room without ever having put a name to any of it, and the name when it came hit her in the chest like a hand, and she went still inside his arms. Whatever was happening in her, she did not yet have a word for; she did not know how to regulate it, especially if the man whose arms she was in was the man she was beginning to suspect he was.

“I —”

He laid two fingers across her mouth, very gently.

“You need not say the same. I do not ask it of you. It is enough that you talk to me. Let me touch you. It is more than I —” The whisper failed him for the first time tonight, and he steadied it, and started again. “Oh, my Elizabeth, I wish I could see your eyes!”

She had not been asking for any of it. He had given it to her anyway; the fact that he had volunteered the thing he most wanted and could not have was a kind of plain speech she had not had from him in any room before.

She turned her mouth against the inside of his fingers and kissed them where they rested. Then she reached for the next button of his shirt.

He drew breath against her hair. “Elizabeth.”

She found the button. She worked it.