Page 50 of Yearning

“I heard the babe squalling,” said Mr. Darcy. “I thought… I can go.”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “You are not crawling back down the stairs. Come here, if you can manage it. Sit down. Come and see her.”

“It is a girl,” he said, and the smile on his face, it was pure joy.

She was exhausted, but the last bit of the labors had flooded her with a feeling of strange euphoria. She felt half-drunk, truly. “Yes, yes, a girl.”

He drew in a breath and pushed off the door. He hopped two steps and then flailed until he caught a bed post. He pulled himself onto the bed and scooted up to her. “That wasn’t very graceful.”

“It was extraordinary,” she said, holding his gaze.

“You are extraordinary,” he said.

She wanted him to kiss her.

The midwife was there.

She thrust the babe between them instead. “I am glad you were here.”

“So am I,” he breathed, looking down on the baby. “Thank goodness she looks more like you than the baron.”

She laughed.

She would have stayed there with him forever and ever, but the midwife dragged him out of the room ere long, and then Elizabeth fell into a deep, deep sleep.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MR. DARCY TOOK himself home over the muddy path in the woods late, late that night, really early in the morning. He felt triumphant in a strange and wondrous way, and he slipped off to sleep and did not wake until late in the morning the following day.

As luck would have it, he managed to catch sight of the baron’s carriage coming through the road, right past his house, and he knew that the baron had been too far away to have come because of hearing about the child, so that he must have been on his way home already.

It seemed as if fortune had arranged it all perfectly for him to have been there with her when the babe was born, and he was grateful for it. He had not thought he would experience such a thing in his life, being present for an occasion such as that, but he had been.

He wondered why he had given up on so many things.

Perhaps they could not look the way they would have before, when he had been whole, but that did not mean they could not happen at all. Yes, he must compromise now, but it did not mean he must not live a life.

Ideas were blooming in his mind. He had once been taken to task for not wearing a fake hand, but he had never considered how he might make use of fake limbs.

What if I could walk?

It was all he could think of.

He wanted to see Elizabeth, of course, wanted to see the baby girl—he had somehow not gotten her name, or perhaps Elizabeth had decided to wait until the girl’s father was there to name her—but he realized this was likely impossible. He could not go there. She would be confined to bed for some time, so she would not come to him. He would not see her, he began to realize, not again, not for some time.

And then the baron came to his house and Mr. Darcy received him in his small sitting room and the baron refused tea and refused cakes and only leveled a look at Darcy that made Darcy feel ashamed of himself.

“I do not think it is your child,” said the baron. “I believe what she said, because there is no reason, otherwise, to think that you would have let her go.”

“Of course it’s not my child,” said Mr. Darcy. “And your wife has certainly not betrayed you in any way. It is not like that, I swear to you.”

“I believe that as well,” said the baron in a low voice. “She is very good. She is the sweetest and most beautiful creature I know. I still marvel that something as young and vibrant as my wife would allow me near her.”

Darcy did not know how to respond to that.

“But that is why I came to beseech you to stay away from her.”

Darcy’s lips parted. “I have not—”