A/N: Nearly finished. One or two more chapters and, probably, an epilogue.
Darcy's Struggle
Chapter 21: Lead and Follow
With Steele's expert help, Darcy, bathed, closely shaved, and almost dressed, readied himself to go to Longbourn. Desperate to hold Elizabeth, to kiss her, desperate to apologize (abjectly) for Lady Catherine's hateful words, he could not stop himself from bouncing in his tall boots, despite making Steele's efforts to tie his cravat a series of white-eyebrow-knitting failures.
Darcv's aunt had long been intemperate and unjust, but he had never admitted to himself how vicious she truly was, how capable of a vulgarity much more like Wickham's than Mrs. Bennet's. Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity was born of a blinkered concern for her daughters and herself; it was benign, if unseemly. The product of a mean understanding. Forgivable. But Lady Catherine's was born of a bigoted concern for herself and her wishes; it was malignant, poisonous. The corruption of a superior understanding. Unforgivable.
Darcy had allowed family pride — and, to some extent, lingering cowardice — to prevent him from breaking with his aunt years ago, as he should have done. At the very least, he should have rid her of the delusion that he would ever wed Anne.
Hertfordshire had taught Darcy that improper pride sponsored other vices. And caring too much about the judgments of others guaranteed a second-hand life — as Lucretius said, one gets the taste of things from other men's mouths.
I'm done with borrowed life, living off the lives of others. First, I borrowed my parents' life, then the life of fashionable London. I tasted nothing first-hand.
Darcy had spent too much time conforming — worried about an imaginary life as a title, not a man, as Fitzwilliam Darcy, Master of Pemberley, and not about the life he had in himself, about his own existence. He had chosen appearance over reality until his life had become a motley of mere appearances.
Until Elizabeth. She is so alive, the peculiar brightness of her eyes a testament to the overflowing life in her. She is life to me.
Choosing her — or being fated to find her — or being providentially graced with her — or whatever it was that had happened, perhaps somehow all of these — had brought reality to him again, allowed him to shift past appearance and to discover the life he had in himself. Elizabeth's acknowledged love, Darcy realized, — as Steele finally finished with the cravat, — her acknowledged love was the first and only thing since his father's death that Darcy had desired simply for and from himself.
And now, it appeared, he had it. "I do. I do. I love him."
To be a gentleman is to conform to true standards, not simply the standards of society, of others. I can be a gentleman by conscience or one by convention, and I choose the first.
As Darcy rushed down the stairs, he realized that, when he next saw Elizabeth, it would be the first time as mutually acknowledged lovers. Or something like that. She would not necessarily know he knew what she told Lady Catherine. Although Miss Bennet would likely share that she had sent Bingley to Netherfield. A shiver of nervous anticipation shot through him and he pulled on his great coat as he leaped over the last steps and bounded toward Netherfield's front door.
A groom would have his horse waiting outside.
Another servant opened the door and Darcy threw out his arms to the side and slid to a stop, like an overbalanced skater.
Snow blew in the doorway, dusting the floor. And standing in the blowing snow was Elizabeth.
Darcy stood agape. In the periphery of his vision, Bingley and Richard and Georgiana and the Hursts, all intending to wish Darcy well on his trip to Longbourn, heard him say Elizabeth, and all turned to find other places to be. In a moment, their footfalls ceased to echo and only Elizabeth, Darcy, and the servant stood in the entranceway.
A myth-born creature. Elizabeth was wearing the brown cloak, its hood up. Her color was high, from exercise or emotion or both, and her eyes were impossibly bright. She had a staff in her hand — Darcy had no idea if it was from Longbourn or if she had picked it up on the way from Longbourn to Netherfield, but he guessed she had used it to steady herself on the frozen ground.
She looked idyllic — a shepherdess, his shepherdess.
As she stood there in the blowing snow, words leaped unbidden to Darcy's mind, not to be taken in vain but as the ripest expression of everything he had, and did, and would feel for her: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou are with me, thy rod and thy staff comfort me…Surely thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…"
"Elizabeth," he said again, no longer a whisper. "Please come inside."
She stepped into Netherfield.
The servant shut the door, took the staff, and the cloak, and withdrew. Elizabeth held Darcy's eyes the whole time, a smile on her face that he had never seen before, a delighted, delicious consciousness in her fine eyes.
"Fitzwilliam," she said in the gentlest of voices.
She was wearing the dress she wore when she came to care for Miss Bennet. Pale green with faint mud stains ringed around the edge of the skirt; he guessed those stains would never entirely wash out.
She must have worn it for a reason. Neither of them was of the sort to miss such a thing; she must have known he would not. Especially given how he stared at her when she first wore it to Netherfield.
"The library," Darcy requested softly. Elizabeth nodded and took his arm. Her eyes were full and shy all at once.
Darcy led her into the library and closed the door, then to a small couch that Hurst favored for napping but which was now empty. They sat. Elizabeth slid closer to Darcy once he was settled.
He turned to her and took her gloved hands in his bare ones. His gloves were still in his coat, and he was still wearing it. He did not care.
"Elizabeth. My aunt — I have no words — what she said to you — "
Elizabeth shrugged, smiled, and took off one glove. She put her bare index finger on his lips as he continued to search for an apology adequate to the violent storm of Lady Catherine.
"Fitzwilliam, it is unnecessary. You are not to blame for your aunt, no more than I am for my mother or father. Both of whom today acquitted themselves well, and upheld me — though who knows what tomorrow might bring? And Jane was wonderful. But I did not come to talk about your aunt, or her daughter, or her parson. Your aunt is evil."
"Yes, she is," Darcy agreed, knowing it was true and ashamed of it. That he could have harbored her in his family pride was yet more proof of how improper his pride had often been. He had been guilty of something like that, more complicated, where Wickham was concerned. No more.
Elizabeth gave him that delighted, delicious smile again. "I came to tell you something…" She let her words trail off.
Darcy nodded, swallowing despite himself and despite Bingley's tale of what happened at Longbourn.
"Yes?"
Her smile became saucy, more familiar. "Yes, but first I have questions."
Darcy nodded, raising his eyebrows. "Cross-examination? So I am the contrary party?"
"No, you have never been the contrary party, sir. Someone else has played that part. — But I am afraid I am a quarrelsome, impertinent creature, headstrong and interrogative, and there are questions I simply must ask." Her smile was a tease.
This all felt game-like in a way that her questions after his proposal did not, although Elizabeth had a distracting ability to make anything seem game-like, and he loved it and loved her for it. She makes me playful, and I was hardly that even as a boy.
"I will answer as fully and honestly as I know how," Darcy said with pretended formality. Elizabeth smiled crookedly, recognizing his words from Oakham Mount.
"Very good. I want to go back to the beginning."
Darcy sighed and laughed. "I was born at Pemberley on a snowy February morning — "
"That's more beginning than I meant. I want to ask about another beginning. I want you to account for ever falling in love with me. How could a man like you have done so? For I have it, sir, on reasonably good authority, that you do love me. But how could you begin? I can comprehend your going on charmingly when you had once made a beginning; I am a delight, after all. But what could set you off in the first place? — Did you perhaps find yourself in the middle before you knew you had begun?"
"In media res? No, not exactly," Darcy said, clearing his throat, "the beginning, the middle, and the end all happened simultaneously, although I grant it was all that is charming. It was you, after all. You were her."
She drew back in smiling confusion. "I do not take your meaning."
Darcy tried to find the words.
But as he did, she took off her other glove, glanced at the fire burning brightly in the fireplace, reached for his greatcoat, and started slipping it off his shoulders, then tugging softly on the sleeves.
As his coat came off, her gestures seemed overpoweringly intimate; she was undressing for him and undressing him. The library became intimate, close, and warm, inviting, and Darcy was pierced by desire at a depth he never imagined possible.
His breath caught and he dropped his eyes, not wanting to frighten her, knowing that his gaze had become darkly male, impassioned. But she put her elegant taper fingers under his chin and made him look up. She let him gaze at her. The fire crackled loudly, a log shifted, and she leaned to him and kissed him.
Her lips parted in soft invitation and he responded, the kiss intensifying until he was pillaging her mouth and she was leaning back, almost reclining, on the couch. She made a soft sound deep in her chest and Darcy wondered if the flames of the fireplace had leaped across the room and were now consuming them both. With a willpower only a man as disciplined as Darcy could summon, he ended the kiss, pulling Elizabeth back upright, but leaving his forehead against hers, his vision filled with her eyes and hers with his.
A first-hand taste of his beloved.
"That was a powerful explanation," she said breathlessly, her warm blood displayed in her cheeks. Darcy shifted, trying to loosen the tightened fall of his trousers.
Darcy smiled, hoping to keep her eyes up, keep them from settling in his lap. He began an answer. "The beginning? It began at the Netherfield door. You were muddy and I was done for. I could not stop staring at you, and I knew, somehow I knew, that the woman I had been waiting for was standing before me. But I did not just begin there, I was finished there. I loved you then instantly — and although I wrestled with it half-heartedly — I loved you then irrevocably. "
"That is why you were staring? I thought you found me shockingly…pastoral, bucolic…" she said the words consciously, then changed her tone, "...a country miss too low to wipe your feet on. But you loved me…at first stare?"
He laughed with a mixture of satisfaction and self-dissatisfaction. "When I feel most deeply, I often seem not to feel at all. I lose expression when I have the most to express."
"I am learning that, darling," she said, cupping her hand around his jaw, caressing his chin with her slow-moving thumb. "Jane smiles; you stare; I jest." She kissed him lightly. "What did you mean when you said you were waiting for me?"
Darcy reached around to the pocket of his coat, now bunched on the end of the couch, and he pulled the black velvet bag from the pocket. "This is for you."
She took it with a quick, slightly nervous glance. "I keep forgetting that you come to me trailing Pemberley in all its glory, and trailing riches I cannot imagine."
"I love that you keep forgetting that. I hope you continue. I am happy to have it slip your mind — so long as I do not."
"Your heart has taken root in my heart, Fitzwilliam. They now grow together."
Parts of him that had never known a voice sang, an inexpert choir.
She carefully turned the bag upside down and a string of large, perfect pearls fell from the bag into her other hand. A quiet gasp. The pearls shone with milky luminescence, each a small, full moon. She stared at them. Then she handed them to Darcy and rotated on the couch, angling her back to him and reaching up to remove the humble amber cross she wore habitually. "Please, put it on me." She put the cross into the velvet bag.
Darcy leaned forward to kiss the back of her long, bare neck and watched, pleased, as gooseflesh claimed her. He opened the clasp on the pearls and put the string on her, closing the clasp and kissing her neck again.
Her hand rose to the pearls and slipped along them contemplatively, contacting each pearl. "Thank you," she said simply and turned to face him.
He gazed at her with open affection and admiration. His was not an open nature but she had an occult power to unlock him.
It took Darcy a moment to speak and, when he did, his voice was thick. "I have been waiting for you, dearest Elizabeth, through these many interminable London seasons. But I was waiting in the wrong place. It took a visit to a Meryton assembly to present you to me, and I almost managed to lose you before I found you. Tolerable, indeed!"
"You have apologized for that, twice over. I may never let you forget it, Fitzwilliam," she said with her quicksilver, mutinous grin, "but I promise it has been forgiven."
"I glanced at you several times at the assembly but never really saw you. I believe I was not ready yet to see you. It took your surprise appearance at Netherfield for me to see you, or begin to see you."
She studied him for a moment and then her expression became serious, her tone confessional. "I chose to sit in that chair at the assembly, the one close enough to you to overhear your conversation. There were many other empty chairs. It was no accident. I watched you all night."
"You had?"
She nodded self-consciously. "I hoped to dance with you from the moment you entered the assembly, but I did not want to be forward. I kept hoping you would notice me. That hope played a role in my resentment of you for what you said. As did my vanity."
"You admired me?"
She put a finger to her chin, reflecting. "I do not know if that is quite the right word. Admiration I have felt before, but it has never…frightened me…"
"Frightened you?" He remembered Miss Lucas telling him that he had terrified Elizabeth. "How?"
She took a moment to gather herself, glancing down at her hands. "Have you ever had anything affect you so deeply that it reached past sense to become part of the sensibility from which sense proceeds?" She asked the question slowly, exactly. She had given the matter thought but that did not surprise him. They were both thoughtfully alive; it was one of the primary ways they suited each other.
Darcy took a moment to parse what she said, struck anew by her mind's incisiveness. He gave her an extended, eloquent look, a look telling her he understood and hoping she understood him. "Yes."
"It was a wholly new experience for me, sir. I have been a connoisseur of first impressions; I have prized quickness in perception above all else, a rapid, decisive nicety in discernment of character, and first seeing you was the overthrow of all that. I could not make you out at all, and, as I discovered, that was because I could not make myself out." She paused in embarrassment all jesting done.
"If it had not been for my father and Charlotte, and, yes, Mr. Wickham and Lady Catherine, I might never have known myself, my own heart. You see, I had collected only first impressions of myself. My sense of myself was glancing, superficial. I no more puzzled myself than my neighbors puzzled me. Some of my nonsense and follies I knew, but I had never asked if I was wise and good. I made sport of myself.
"When you apologized to me at Netherfield, I felt unsure around you; I believed I was unsure of you. But the truth of the matter, as I have only recently owned it to myself, is that you had power over me from the first. I could feel it. No man had ever had that. I felt it especially when you proposed to me. And I did not dislike it. I did not know what it meant, what the source of that power might be, but I had never felt so…magnetic…a force. Your gravity."
She had continued to cup his jaw as she spoke, loath to be out of contact with him. He took her other hand. Another kiss, this one slow and lingering.
When their lips parted, her eyes were even brighter. "In church, when we were both supposed to be praying," she laughed at her daring, "but we stared at each other, I was out of my depth."
A moment of silence during which the fire crackled again. The laugh slowly left her and she dropped her voice. He knew she was about to say something she had never said.
"All my life, Fitzwilliam, the word 'love' has been bandied about, but it has been a steady reality only in my Uncle and Aunt Gardiner's home. My parents — well, you have seen them, you know — they neither esteem nor love one another.
"And despite each having favorites among their daughters, they neither esteem nor love any of us, not steadily. And what is esteem or love if not steady?" She fixed her eyes on Darcy's. "At best, we receive flashes of attention or appreciation. Even as my father's favorite, I am only a little less silly than my younger sisters, or only a little more clever. A source of amusement to him more dependable than any of my sisters — and less painfully needy than my younger ones." Her pain was audible, both past and present. He squeezed her hand softly.
She sighed and stood. A globe stood beside one of the bookcases and Elizabeth walked to it and began to spin it in lazy revolutions, the passing of days.
"I have relied on myself, Fitzwilliam, there was no one else, not — not even Jane. She is as harmless as a dove, lovely and good — but are we not also to be as wise as a serpent?
"I have borne that burden, and although I could do little to change my sisters, I at least sought to contain them. But it is difficult when my parents encourage shameful behavior, either actively in Mama's case or passively, in Papa's. Conceding any of myself to anyone else has not been my way. I have kept my own counsel. Mama could not keep my secrets, Papa would not care to know them. And there is so much Jane refuses to know." She reached out and stopped the revolving globe.
Darcy recalled what Miss Bennet had revealed to him over the past few days. Maybe she refuses to know now less than you believe, my love.
"I'm sorry it took me so long to understand my heart, to understand that I had already conceded it to you before Lady Catherine's visit."
She returned to him and sat down close to him again. "I came to you today because I love you, Fitzwilliam, and because I want to tell you, nay, show you how eager I am to be your wife. I am here, and I am yours!"
Darcy pulled her to him and embraced her, kissing her cheeks, her forehead, and her lips.
An insistent knock on the door preceded Richard's voice sounding through it. "Time's up! Bingley, your host, is worried about impropriety. He's starting to wriggle."
Darcy and Elizabeth both laughed. "I love you too, Elizabeth. — Now, I'll let the others in. It would be a shame if Bingley wriggles himself into an apoplexy."
Elizabeth touched her hair, smoothed her dress, and ran her hand once more along the string of pearls. Her eyes never left Darcy. He turned.
Her loving-kindness and mercy followed him to the door.
A/N: As Mary Lascelles has written, Austen normally enshrouds her acknowledged lovers in a gentle, obscuring mist. I thought we deserved one chapter at least, unmisty. Thanks for the responses!