Darcy & Elizabeth (19 page)

Bliss Restored

Sleeping through the night without one interruption was always an odd sensation for a new mother. Elizabeth Darcy was no different. The maternal call to flee to her children's bedsides to see if they had survived the night without her personal supervision was keen, but she suppressed it. Rather, she lay laconically amidst the bed-clothes, pleased to no end not to be awakened through insistent, squalling necessity. To once again have
him
awaken
her
—to be sensible of another type of hunger as his morning pride nestled against her, to suppress a shudder as he drew the backs of his fingers the length of her legs was a savour beyond measure. It took nothing more than those few moments of his burgeoning wakefulness to bestir in her desires and longings that were quite unmaternal.

All this he accomplished before he opened his eyes.

With his fingers, he combed her hair from the back of her neck. She anticipated that he would kiss her there. Instead, he puckishly rubbed the stubble of his beard against her shoulder. Understanding her role compleatly, she gave a small shriek as if of annoyance, then they both enjoyed a quiet laugh.

He nestled even closer. “Oh, how I have missed you, Lizzy.”

“But I have been right here beside you every night.”

That was more accusation than observation.

“Have you?”

Elizabeth Bennet Darcy was not of uncertain nature. Indeed, the few times she had been confounded, it had been at her husband's hands—sometimes quite literally. She was confounded then and did not immediately reply. Hearing the hurt in his voice was off-putting. After all, had she not all but thrown herself into his arms by luring him to their little outdoor tryst? Perchance that had not ended impeccably, but it had been concocted and engineered entirely by
her
design. He merely followed her lead. She did not think it unreasonable for him to return the favour. After all, he was the husband—she refused to chase about after him as if she were some love-starved Amazon. (Well, in truth, she was no great hand with a bow, but she had been increasingly love-starved.)

Her quiet influenced him to turn her upon her back so he could gain the expression her countenance bore. He half-rose upon one elbow, allowing her to fall back. He was not entirely happy with what he saw. Placing his forehead to hers, he cupped her face in his hand and then kissed her lips.

“I think we could find better employment during your brief respite from motherhood than placing blame,” said he.

“Well said,” she said agreeably, before her attention was stolen a by distant sound. “Pray, did you hear that?”

“I hear nothing.”

“I am certain that I did,” she insisted. “Perchance…”

“I hear
nothing
,” he insisted. “All is well. If it is not, Nurse will be here in a trice.”

“In a trice?”

“To be sure.”

As a deliberate diversionary tactic he began to kiss her neck.

“Mmmm…” said she. “How easily I am beguiled from duty.”

It was only when she saw the work of the light streaming through the windows making a chequered pattern upon the opposing wall that she realised the jeopardy in which she had placed herself. Their night's lovemaking was so all-encompassing that she had compleatly lost all inhibition. Those forgotten apprehensions reasserted themselves in the harsh light of morn. She was absolutely naked—in all senses of the word.

As his lips slid from hers and began to nuzzle and kiss her shoulders, she steeled herself for what was to come.

“No,” she heard herself say.

He stopt.

“No?” he shook his head slightly as if to reassure himself he had heard her correctly, then his voice altered immediately into his deeper, more formal speech, “Forgive my forwardness.”

“I meant not for you to cease,” she waffled. “I meant for you to…linger.”

Thereupon
she
kissed
him
.

The liberal and meticulous craftsman he believed himself to be demanded that he inquire the specifics of her wishes. “Kiss you? Where? Here?”

He once again began his demarche down her body. Thereupon, she made a desperate feint and grabbed him by the hair.

“No,” she said once again.

He laid back, his head propped upon one elbow, his hair askew.

“What?” he said quite impatiently. “Tell me precisely what you desire if I am to have any notion of what I am to do.”

“I meant only to forestall the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?” his voice was once again deep and a bit starched. Then it softened, he rolled closer, “Lizzy, do you want me now or do you not? You have only to say and I will do your bidding. Perchance, you are still weak. You need to go to your babies…”

“Our babies,” she interrupted.

“Our babies,” he repeated, and went on. “You have only to speak what is true. Your will be done. Even if that truth is that you do not want me as you once did.”

“Yes. I must be honest,” she said, more to herself than to him. “This is difficult.”

“You do not need to speak the words,” he said, “if they are too difficult. I shall understand implicitly.”

“No, you do not understand anything at all,” she then was impatient. “It is not about you or my wanting you—for I love you in all the ways I always have. But…”

It was clear that there had been quite enough shilly-shallying about. She threw back the coverlet, exposing herself compleatly. She then lay in abject mortification, but increasingly defiant. Defiantly mortified was no easy posture, but she managed it as she bethought the situation. Let him see how altered she was. Let him see his wife as she was then and always would be—forever altered by bearing his children. She did not say the words, but had he looked at the flash of umbrage in her eyes he would have understood her feelings without being told.

“Lizzy, why do you torture me thusly?”

“Torture you? Torture
you
?”

His expression was apparent—as was a rather impressive arousal that she happened to glimpse. Both implied that he was in no way displeased with what he saw. Indeed, he was so pleased that he made what could only be characterized as a lunge for her.

He planted his lips upon hers and grasped her thigh, sliding his hand around and beneath it and wrapping her leg over his hip. He buried his face against her and then smothered her abdomen and any and all adjacent areas erotically inclined with long, lingering kisses. From there, shall we say, nature took its course. However sweetly and fervently they had made love the night before, this was at variance with every part of those couplings.

“Far too long, Lizzy,” he murmured. “It has been far too long…”

“Yes,” she agreed, although not quite certain to what it was she was agreeing, she was far too compromised by passion.

Admittedly, she found his reaction to her disfigurement somewhat odd. However, his dutiful attention to all and sundry kept her in eye-fluttering distraction for so long that the incongruity of it seemed quite beside the point. Rather than off-put, he was aroused—aroused, infused, inflamed, and altogether impaled on the pangs of lust (or to be more exact, she was impaled on the pangs of his lust). And because he was aroused, she was aroused. She was aroused to a vexatious degree. Hence, the whole of his away was very nearly recompensed in the space of that one morning.

When at last the reunification of
mons veneris
and
mons pubis
was compleat, Elizabeth was quite astonished to see that their enormous bed was still standing in the same spot and had not rattled its way across the floor. (She, most certainly, had been turned over, under, and around so many times that they were both lying sideways across the opposite side of the bed themselves—which was why she initially thought it was the bed that had shimmied its way thence.) She lay on her stomach, he on his back, rivulets of perspiration slinking down crevices still quivering in achievement.

Darcy lay so still she thought him once again asleep. She smiled to herself, and closed her eyes, re-experiencing the pleasure he wrought. She had betimes wondered if anything could be as sublime as those times past—the ones which she had held in her sweetest recollections whilst they were apart. She realized then that her memory had been far too constrained. Whilst she marvelled at his vigour, the man whom she had thought fast asleep rose upon one elbow. They had spoken very little during the previous interlude. (Their intonations had been largely relegated to moans, groans, and the odd whimper.) He did not speak then, but sat up and bid her turn to him. And as he had often done in years past, he drew his hand the length of her body, softly tracing his fingertips along her curves. Only the rucking of her nipples announced that even with so light a touch, his hand had wrought considerable disturbance.

She lay back, luxuriating in his attentiveness, and allowed this scrutiny, tacitly replacing the office of Nursing Mother with that of Desirable Woman. His fingertips and thumb spread wide as his hand made its way across her body, her belly trembling as if it were the first time he had touched her thusly. In the cheery morning light, all inhibitions were gone. When his hand stopt just below her navel, however, she realized then with goodly haste (and no little mortification) that he was gazing upon her sagging, red-streaked belly. Instinctively, she drew her knee and elbow together and half-turned downward in a feeble attempt to keep from his eyes a disfigurement of considerable abhorrence. She shut her eyes tightly, cringing with an embarrassment that was metamorphosing into indignation with the utmost rapidity. The first gentle nudge of his hand at her hip was ignored.

“Lizzy,” he coaxed.

“Do not,” she said, “please do not look upon me so keenly.”

He relented and reposed once again upon his elbow. She scrambled for a corner of the bed-sheet and drew it across her breasts.

“You are as supple as an eel, Lizzy,” he smiled. “You have not altered whatsoever.”

“How can you speak such a fiction!” she exclaimed. “I despise condescension such as that.”

He looked to be puzzled—and hurt.

“Why do you not allow me to say my mind?” he asked. “And impugn my honour as well? I have never spoken an untruth to you.”

“The first time you look upon me when I am so clearly altered—it is demeaning to pretend otherwise.”

He said quietly, “It is not the first time.”

“Since you returned,” she clarified dryly, he gaze offering no quarter.

Again he said, “It is not the first time.”

“Where?”

Quite without her knowing, his eyebrow rose askance.

“Whilst you bathed.”

She shook her head, thinking she had caught him in an untruth. “I have bathed of late in a bathing gown.”

“Not,” he said firmly, “initially.”

“From the beginning,” she exclaimed, “I have had no secrets from you?”

He pursed his lips at his dilemma, disinclined to admit to all the unseemly spying upon her that he had been guilty of in the preceding months. He was weighing the options before him, those which would allow him to retain some semblance of dignity, when she offered him an escape.

She said, “Accident only could have you discover me thusly. What say you?”

“To be sure,” he smiled.

They lay in that posture for a few moments, implicitly exchanging expressions of love and adoration, ere came a scratching at the door, behind which a cry which threatened to turn into a wail was heard. It did not sound to be Cressida.

Lydia, Scandalised Once Again

It all came about on the heels of Mr. Bennet's untimely passing.

Elizabeth's beloved father had travelled to Pemberley to advise his favourite daughter of the news of Major Wickham's death on the battlefield near a fly-speck of a place called Waterloo. Little did he expect that he would return to Longbourn the principal in his own cortege. But he had.

Pierced by loss, the family soldiered on those first few weeks of summer in 1815. Together they, as their sister Mary so pompously put it, “Poured into the wounded bosoms of each other the balm of sisterly consolation.”

Jane was known as the handsome sister, Elizabeth the wit; Kitty was known as easily offended, Lydia simply easy. Mary was plainest of the five Bennet daughters, and to suffer daily comparison to them was mortification itself. Mary saw only one alternative. She anointed herself Mary the Pious. In that there was no one more certain than Mary of her own eternal reward, that conceit provoked relentless moralising. Her self-imposed martyrdom was only relieved by one near-catastrophic event. For Lydia had scandalised them all by running off with Wickham to London and living in mortal sin prior to marriage. Thenceforward Mary believed that she no longer suffered in comparison to
all
her sisters. To her, every other evil paled in the presence of immoral Lydia's multitude of sins.

Lydia, of course, was quite unchastened by such censure. Her attention was far too compromised.

Always an outrageous flirt, during the months following the news of Wickham's valorous death on the battlefield, the trail of officers calling to pay their respects to the widow of a fallen soldier-at-arms quite overwhelmed Lydia's notoriously weak flesh. Whilst under the exceedingly conscientious watch of Elizabeth and Jane, her unguarded and impudent manner was held in check. But with Elizabeth's impending parturition, Jane and Bingley decamped from their father's house to accompany Elizabeth home to Pemberley with all due haste. Thus, latently lascivious Lydia was left quite at her leisure to ignore Mary's moral admonitions.

As the temptations were many and her mother kept to her room (where she could sit and think with favour of her own ill-use), it was unclear just which officer was actually culpable in sullying Lydia's semi-virtuous honour. Indeed, Lydia had seemed little more interested in specific paternity than would their gossiping neighbours be. Not only was she not discomposed by her predicament, she was very nearly defiant. The single suggestion she was not pleased to be in disagreement with was that she make herself less conspicuous by repairing somewhere other than Meryton.

When Jane received the letter from Mary telling of the latest scandal begat by Lydia, she immediately made for Pemberley with the exceedingly ill news.

“Upon my word!” gasped Elizabeth.

“Forsooth!” cried Jane.

It took near a quarter hour for them to come to some understanding of what must be done.

The country would have been the most obvious choice to conceal scandalous persons, but neither Jane nor Elizabeth was willing to subject her husband to Lydia's unseemliness. Bingley would have suffered her if he must, for he was a very agreeable man, but Elizabeth would not impose upon Darcy on her behalf. Wickham's name was avoided at all costs in his presence by all who knew their history. Lydia, not surprisingly, was far too dense and far too self-involved to be that circumspect. Add to that inherent discourtesy her present condition and it made for a potentially untenable situation. In London, she would be Mrs. Wickham and others would be unable to take count of the length of her widowhood. The Darcys' London house was a brief consideration, but that notion had been quickly abandoned. Lydia needed supervision. There was no telling what might befall her if she were left entirely to her own devices. Reluctantly, they decided once again to impose upon the Gardiners.

Regrettably, this was not the first time that the Bennets had abused the Gardiners' goodness. That couple had once before enjoyed the dubious pleasure of Lydia's company during decidedly ignominious circumstances. Although Jane offered, Elizabeth thought it wiser that she herself undertake the writing of the letter containing the request. She knew it would take considerable gumption (and a temporary forswearing of conscience) to employ language facile enough to couch Lydia's plight as one of a war-widow-mother-to-be rather than a loose-legged-trollop-with-a-bun-in-the-oven. It would all eventually come out (so to speak), but Elizabeth knew too that in the interim, discretion was most imperative.

The thought of London pleased Lydia in all ways. Since the Gardiners were once again willing to take her in and her sisters to fund her time there, she was happy to oblige their generosity. The single objection Lydia had to these arrangements was, however, that Kitty was not invited to accompany her to Cheapside.

The fourth Bennet sister, Catherine, was the last person Elizabeth thought Lydia should have by her side. It was a long-held truth that Kitty possessed an idle mind. She also was easily led. Although she was a year older, she had always been Lydia's protégé. Hence, Kitty was of a sort much prized by overbearing Lydia, and the least apt to be a good influence.

Lydia wheedled and pouted, employing every design to get her way, but Elizabeth resisted.

Although through a momentary loss of reason, empathetic Jane's resolve wavered (“Should not Lydia have a sister by her side in her hour of need?”), Elizabeth held fast to the opposition so long as that sister was to be Kitty. Jane and Elizabeth held the purse strings and eventually forbade the notion absolutely.

Edward Gardiner was Mrs. Bennet's brother. His wife had always been a favourite aunt (even to Lydia, who was oblivious that the affection was not returned in equal measure). Although Mrs. Gardiner was several years younger than Mrs. Bennet and her other sister-in-law, Mrs. Phillips, she was superior in elegance and intelligence to both. As it was, Mr. Edward Gardiner was greatly superior to his sisters as well (granted, that alone would not have been considered a great feat), well-bred, and agreeable. Indeed, although he lived by trade, he was an educated and genteel sort of man. Elizabeth knew that
parvenu
ladies like Bingley's sisters looked upon him contemptuously. She had seen their smirks. Had they not been Jane's sisters-in-law, she would have suggested to them that he was a better gentleman than either of them a lady. But she held her tongue, lending her thoughts to those of pearls and swine.

At one time, the Gardiners' London home was held in some degree of esteem by all their country nieces—Lydia most particularly. As a grown woman, its shine for her had somewhat tarnished. Although she was still happy to spend time in London, the Gardiners' house was on Gracechurch St. It was handy for Mr. Gardiner as it was within view of his warehouses. That meant, however, that it was not a fashionable address. Moreover, her aunt and uncle were much engaged with their own children, hence, their pursuits were not hers. Even was their time not so employed, they could be so
sensible
and their choice of entertainments so
mundane
. Lydia believed that if she wanted to be annoyed by children, she would have been quite happy to remain home with her own brood. Indeed, Lydia was well aware that diversion under the Gardiners' roof would be sorely lacking.

For all that, had it not been for the unhappy fact that an unwed mother-to-be scattered suitors faster than Napoleon's retreat, Lydia would not have been out of spirits whatsoever. The single most vexatious component of the entire plan to them all was that Lydia's stewarding fell once again into the overly abused patience of the Gardiners. Elizabeth despised that it was they who would have to listen to Lydia's incessant whining about “contractions and restrictions.” Lydia was put out not only for the sedateness of their comportment, but she was still miffed over Mrs. Gardiner's dour opinion of her infamous elopement. Of late, the only good opinion Lydia had of either of the Gardiners was that Mrs. Gardiner was
not
much of a walker.

However, once ensconced a few months in Gracechurch St., what Mrs. Bennet liked to call “Lydia's high animal spirits” deteriorated with exactly the same rapidity as her figure ballooned. Always a talker who could not listen to anyone else for more than half a minute—and she wrote less than she listened—Lydia began to post several letters a day. Seldom did they differ in style or content. She wrote Lizzy for money, Jane for more money, and her mother to come fetch her.

Which Mrs. Bennet refused to do—a first, it would seem.

Even Mrs. Bennet was hard-pressed to excuse this last of Lydia's many peccadilloes. Nor, for once, did she endeavour to do so. Her attention was far too engaged with her own travails. Although Lydia had long been her favourite, she was happy to have her out from under her feet in her hour of sorrow. If Mrs. Bennet were to suffer wearing widow's weeds, she would prefer to hold the office of The Commiserated all by herself. She had refused to come to Pemberley to see her newest grandchildren solely because those inhabitants were far too occupied by their own concerns to give proper service to hers.

In the months since Mr. Bennet's passing, her nerves and headaches had plagued her even more mercilessly. The more her woes vexed her, the less frequently her neighbours called upon her to hear about them—a dichotomy that remained unapparent to her. But then, Mrs. Bennet had always resided in a world seemingly inhabited by no one other than herself. Regrettably, her lack of understanding became more acute and her temper, which was once only uncertain, became unambiguously mean. Her overbearing nature spiralled into near tyrannical egocentricity. As time went by, only a few of her closest, most tolerant friends (and Mrs. Phillips, who by reason of relation had no choice) continued to call. Upon the few occasions that the decorum of mourning allowed her to venture out, all shuddered when the bell hailed her arrival.

Elizabeth had only to suffer her mother's nervous complaints by post. Thus her previous gratitude for her husband's generosity in seeing Mrs. Bennet at home at Longbourn for all of her life was inflated to near worshipful proportions by the aggravation of her mother's poor disposition.