Page 87 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

#

She made him bathe first. She was quite firm about it.

"You smell," said Elizabeth, "like every inn yard between here and Barnet. And a horse. Several horses." She was sitting on the edge of her bed in a dry nightgown and a clean wrapper, with Hannah kneeling in front of her bathing her cut feet in a basin of warm water and trying not to smile. "Go. Through the door. Grey is not here, so you will have to manage by yourself. I shall not look."

"You may look," said her husband, from the doorway between their rooms, "if you like."

Hannah dropped the sponge. Elizabeth threw a cushion at him, and he went, laughing, and she heard the splash through the open door a minute later, and a long, deep, heartfelt groan of relief that made Hannah go scarlet and flee with the basin.

Elizabeth sat alone on the bed in the bright morning, with her feet bound up in clean linen, and listened to him through the open door, and felt as though her heart would come out through her ribs.

The sun was pouring in through the south windows over the lake. The blue room was full of it: gold on the walls, gold on the floor, gold on his mother's Cowper, which Hannah had picked up from where it had fallen and put back on the window seat, with its crumpled violet. The dust sheets were gone from the room next door. She had heard the housemaids pulling them off while she was being bathed, and the snap of clean linen, and the rattle of a fire being lit, all at once, in a great rush, as if the house itself had woken up and remembered it had a master.

She got up, and went across the room on her bandaged feet, and stood in the open doorway, and looked in.

He was standing by the window of his own room in a clean shirt and nothing else, towelling his wet hair, with the light full on him. He had shaved, badly; there was a small cut on his jaw. He looked tired to the bone, grey under the eyes, thinner than when she had left him sixteen days ago. He looked like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

He turned, and saw her in the doorway, and went still.

For a long moment neither of them moved. They only looked at each other across his room, in the morning sun, the way they had looked at each other across a crowded assembly room in Meryton, a lifetime ago.

Then he dropped the towel, and came across the room to her, and stopped in front of her on the threshold, and did not touch her yet. He only lifted one hand and touched a curl that had fallen over her shoulder, and held it between his fingers, very lightly, as though it were something precious that had been lent to him.

"Good-morrow," he said. His voice was rough.

"It is gone seven o'clock," said Elizabeth. "It is broad day."

"I do not care. I have been saying it to an empty pillow for sixteen days. I intend to say it to you."

She put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart, through the thin damp linen of his shirt, and felt it beating, fast and hard, under her palm.

"Good-morrow," she whispered.

He kissed her.

It was not like the kiss on the drive: desperate and clumsy and tasting of dust and tears. It was slow, and deep, and very, very tender, and it went on for a long time. He kissed her as though he had been starving for sixteen days, which he had, and as though he had all the time in the world, which now, at last, he did. His hands came up and framed her face. Hers slid up round his neck, into his wet hair. Somewhere between one breath and the next, he lifted her off her bandaged feet, and she did not know, and did not care, whether they were in his room or hers. It did not matter. The door stood open between them. It was all one room now.

She had thought, in the long nights at Pemberley, lying awake with the door open onto his dark empty room, that she remembered what it was to be held by him. She had not remembered anything. She had forgotten how warm he was, and how careful, and how his hands shook the first time they touched her, every time, as though he still could not quite believe he was allowed. She had forgotten the sound he made when she kissed the hollow of his throat. She had forgotten the way he said her name, low and broken, as if it were a prayer.

He had not forgotten anything. She understood that soon enough. He had spent sixteen nights remembering, and he meant her to know it.

The sun climbed. The rooks settled again in the beeches. Far below, somebody was laughing in the kitchen yard, and Georgiana was playing the pianoforte in the saloon, very softly, the sonata, all the way through without stopping.

What happened then in the morning light was theirs alone, and nobody else's in the world.

#

Afterwards they lay tangled together in the sun, in the big bed that had been his father's and his grandfather's, with the sheets kicked half onto the floor and her head on his chest and his fingers moving slowly in her hair. He was nearly asleep. She could feel it coming over him, the long ride and the long night and the long, long fortnight, all at once, like a tide.

"You stood in the path," he murmured, into her hair. "I shall never get over it. You stood in the path."

"You rode a hundred and fifty miles in a day and a night."

"A hundred and fifty-two. I counted." A pause. "I stopped at the top of the rise."

"I know. I saw you."

"I said it," he said. "There. Out loud, to nobody. And then the door opened and you came out and began to run." His arm tightened round her. "I have spent my whole life trying to understand what my mother meant. I understand it now. It was not the house. She was saying it to him. To my father. She could see him in it, from the top of the rise. That was what she meant."