Page 28 of Shadows Of Rosings Park: Part 2

ELIZABETH

She woke to the heaviness of his arm across her ribs.

For a moment she did not know where she was. The ceiling was wrong: too high, too white, the plaster moulding unfamiliar in the early light. The sheets smelled of linen and skin and something underneath, the particular scent of a body she had learned in the dark, and the recognition arrived like a door swinging open onto a room she had not agreed to enter.

His wife. I am his wife.

His breathing was slow and deep. His face was turned toward her on the pillow, the severity gone from it in sleep, the jaw unclenched, the mouth slightly open. He looked younger. He looked like a man who had not yet done the things he had done. She studied his face with the careful attention she brought to all intelligence-gathering, noting the dark lashes, the scar above his eyebrow, the faint bruise on his lower lip where she had bitten him. That detail brought back the night in a rush of sensation that heated her face and tightened something low in her stomach.

She had chosen it. That was the fact she could not look away from. Not duty, not submission, not the transaction she had steeled herself to endure. She had wanted him, and she had said so, and he had been (she closed her eyes against the word, but it came anyway) gentle. Gentle and desperate and shaking, and the combination had undone her more completely than force ever could have.

His arm shifted. His hand found her hip in sleep and drew her closer, an unconscious possessiveness that should have repelled her. She let it happen. Her body was sore in unfamiliar places, and the soreness was not unpleasant, and that fact, too, required examination she was not yet prepared to conduct.

She lay motionless and listened to him breathe and thought: This is the most dangerous thing he has done to me. Not the blackmail. Not the marriage. This. Making me want it.

She had always contained contradictions, too proud to bend and too honest not to admit when she had. If desire answered differently from reason, she would hold both truths and pretend neither was the whole.

Three more mornings she would wake like this. Three more mornings of that first disorienting second, the warmth of his body, the press of his arm, the slow recognition of where she was and who she belonged to. Each morning the recognition came faster. Whether this constituted adaptation or defeat, she couldn't say.

Elizabeth found the letter on the fourth morning of her marriage.

She had not been looking for it. She had been looking for writing paper, her own supply exhausted by three days of correspondence to Jane and her father, letters that said nothing and meant everything. Darcy's escritoire sat in the study that adjoined their bedroom, a handsome mahogany piece with brass fittings and a lock he had not turned. She opened the top drawer and found paper, ink, sealing wax.

She also found, half-hidden beneath a stack of business correspondence, a letter bearing the seal of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The drawer had not been locked. A man who read her letters and managed every detail of their shared fiction had left this one opening. Had he forgotten, or wanted her to find it? She could not tell. Even an oversight felt like a trap now.

Her fingers closed around it before her conscience could intervene. The wax was already broken. She read it standing up, in the cold morning light that fell through the study window and made everything look sharp and shadowless.

Fitzwilliam,

I have received your communication regarding your intended marriage and confess myself astonished beyond all expression. That a nephew of mine should contemplate such an alliance is a circumstance I had not thought it within the power of Providence to inflict upon our family. Miss Elizabeth Bennet is a young woman of neither fortune nor connexion, whose behaviour during her sojourn at Rosings gave me no cause to suppose her possessed of those qualities I should wish to see in the future mistress of Pemberley.

I shall speak plainly, for the occasion demands it. The circumstances attending Mr. Collins's unfortunate death have never been satisfactorily explained to my mind. That Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Mrs. Collins should have departed my parish with such precipitate haste, and that you and Colonel Fitzwilliam should have involved yourselves so intimately in the arrangements that followed, suggests a connexion between these events that I find myself unable to regard with equanimity.

I do not accuse. I merely observe that where there is smoke, one is not unreasonable in suspecting fire. Whatever obligation or entanglement has produced this extraordinary attachment, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider before the Darcy name is made to bear a burden from which it cannot recover.

You will attend me at Rosings at your earliest convenience. This is not a request.

Your aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh

Elizabeth set the letter down. Her hands were steady but her blood was cold. Not from Lady Catherine's opposition, she had expected that, had braced for it the way one braces for weather. What chilled her was the precision of the old woman's suspicion. The circumstances attending Mr. Collins's unfortunate death. Lady Catherine did not know. But she smelled it. The blood scrubbed from the carpet. The haste explained as grief. The accident on the embankment that an obliging coroner's inquest had accepted without troublesome questions.

The woman was not stupid. Elizabeth had known this. But the letter confirmed it in a way that general knowledge had not. Lady Catherine was not merely disapproving. She was dangerous.

"I see you have discovered my aunt's congratulations."

Darcy stood in the doorway. She had not heard him approach, that soundless materialisation that unnerved her even after weeks of proximity. He wore shirtsleeves and no cravat, his hair disordered from sleep. The sight of him in the morning's raw light, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the stubble along his jaw, the human imperfections that his public armour concealed, produced in Elizabeth a complicated response she handled by ignoring it.

"I was looking for writing paper," she said.

"Naturally." He crossed to the escritoire, picked up the letter, folded it with precise movements, and returned it to a drawer he locked this time. The key went into his waistcoat pocket. The gesture was unhurried, deliberate, not angry but instructive. A demonstration of how information would be managed in this marriage.

"Your aunt suspects the truth about Hunsford."

"My aunt suspects everything about everyone. It is her primary occupation and her greatest talent."

Elizabeth turned the inkwell on the desk, a slow rotation that gave her hands something to do while her mind assembled the argument she had been preparing since she opened that letter.