Page 26 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

It was very quiet. The snow muffled everything. There was only the fire, and the soft tick of the settling logs, and his wife standing in the middle of the room in her blue spencer with the violets drooping at her breast, looking at him.

His wife. He had been saying the word to himself all day and it still did not seem real.

He had not been nervous in the church. He had not been nervous at the breakfast, or in the carriage. He was nervous now, suddenly and completely, like a schoolboy. He was not an innocent. But he had never in his life been with anyone he loved, and he was discovering that it was an entirely different thing, and that he did not know how to begin.

"Are you hungry?" he said. It was the stupidest thing he had ever said.

"No," said Elizabeth. "Are you?"

"No."

"Then perhaps," she said, and her voice was not quite steady, "you might help me with these pins. Mrs Gardiner put in about two hundred of them this morning. I cannot reach the half of them myself, and I do not think I should ring for Mrs Pym's daughter."

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She sat on the low stool before the fire, and he knelt behind her, and began to take the pins out of her hair.

He was very slow about it. She had thought he would be quick and practical, the way he was about most things, and instead he drew each pin out as though it were a small separate ceremony, and set it on the hearthstone beside him, one after another, in a neat gleaming row. She could feel his fingers in her hair, careful and unhurried. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck. She had never been so aware of anything in her life.

The first curl came down onto her shoulder. She heard him draw in his breath.

"I have wanted to do this," he said quietly, "since the assembly."

"Take out my pins? It is a very odd ambition, sir."

"Not the pins." Another curl, and another. "To see it down. I used to wonder how long it was. I used to wonder about it in church, which I am aware was very wrong of me."

She laughed, softly, and the laugh loosened something tight in her chest that had been there since the door closed.

She had not known what to expect. Her mother's advice, delivered the night before in a breathless whisper behind a closed door, had been so confused and so alarming that Elizabeth had been obliged to go and ask her aunt Gardiner what on earth she meant. Mrs Gardiner had been kinder and a good deal clearer, and had finished by kissing her forehead and saying, He loves you, Lizzy. Anybody can see it. That is the only thing that matters. The rest you will find out together.

The last pin came out. Her hair fell loose all down her back, heavy and warm, and she felt his hands sink into it and stay there.

"Elizabeth," he said, and his voice had gone rough. "I want you to know something before anything else. There is no hurry. There is no hurry at all. We have the whole of our lives. If you are frightened, or tired, or simply want to eat Mrs Pym's fowl and go to sleep, then that is what we shall do, and I shall be the happiest man in England, because I shall be doing it with you."

She turned round on the stool, and looked at him. He was kneeling on the hearthrug in his shirtsleeves, his coat long since flung over a chair, the firelight gold on one side of his face. His hair was disordered where he had pushed his hand through it. His eyes were very dark, and very anxious, and full of so much love that it almost hurt to look at them.

She thought of Mr Wickham, telling his sad story to a stranger at a card table. She thought of Lady Catherine in the frozen garden. She thought of the letter folded small inside her bodice, still, even now, against her heart. Any slight to her is a slight to me.

"I am not frightened," she said. "Not of you. I have never once been frightened of you." She put out her hand and touched his face, very lightly, the way he had touched her curl in the library, as though it were something precious that had been lent to her. "I am only a little nervous. And I think you are too."

"I am terrified," said her husband.

"Then we shall be terrified together. Is that not what we promised this morning?"

He turned his face into her palm and kissed it, and kept his lips there, and she felt him tremble.

Then she leant down, and kissed him.

It was not like the conservatory. It was slower, and deeper, and there was no one to interrupt them and nowhere else to be. It went on for a long time. At some point she was no longer on the stool but on the hearthrug beside him, in the warm circle of the fire, and at some point his fingers found the hooks at the back of her gown, and paused, and waited, and she said yes against his mouth, and he went on.

He was patient. That was what she remembered most, afterwards. He was so patient, and so gentle, and so careful of her, and he kept stopping to look at her face, and to ask, in a low unsteady voice, whether she was all right, until at last she laughed and pulled his head down and told him that if he asked her once more she would push him into the snow. And he laughed too, against her throat, and after that he did not ask any more, because he did not need to.

The fire burned down. The snow went on falling past the little window. Somewhere below, very faintly, Mrs Pym was singing in the kitchen.

What happened then was theirs alone.

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