Page 47 of A Quiet Affection

She suddenlyknewthat she should have told Jane that Wickham had already violated their vows before they had even made them.

Elizabeth felt a deep sense of shame and wrongness.

Why hadn’t she?

Jealousy? Anger? Stupidity? Fear of making a spectacle of herself? Fear that Jane would not have listened?

If she had only thought to do so.

If only…if only.

Jane should have known. And marriage was forever.

At this time though, Elizabeth had great hope that Jane would be happy. Hopefully she would never learn of what Wickham had done. Perhaps Wickham would never do it again. And even if he did, it was after all an ordinary thing for a gentleman to keep a mistress, and many of them were able to keep their wives happy at the same time.

But Elizabeth felt a sense of dread and shame for the whole of the wedding breakfast and a sense of guilt about having failed to care properly for her sister that would not leave her for a period of many years.

Chapter Fourteen

While at Matlock to see Richard, Darcy never settled.

He was angry at his father, and he was disappointed by him. Darcy felt some guilt himself.

It was hard at first, for he was mostly filled with reacquainting himself with Richard—letters often separated by months had been the only exchange they had enjoyed for three years. But as he became comfortable once more with his cousin, he eventually told him about his frustration with his father, and his anger at his own failure to protect Miss Bennet, and his deep, deep annoyance that Papa thought he was in love with Jane Bennet, when he’d never given her a serious thought in his life.

In time though their conversation turned towards happier and more interesting matters—Darcy talked about his brief time in Russia and longer time in Sweden, and the course of his studies, and how he was no longer so obsessed with trying to understand Kant, Hegel, and the rest of German philosophy as he’d been when he’d last seen Richard.

He also found himself frequently talking about Lizzy Bennet, and how she had grown up very well, and how he looked forward to seeing her again when he returned.

Richard spoke about his time in India, the battles he’d fought in, and his eagerness now that he’d been made a colonel to go to Spain and serve there, as he would in another month.

Upon his return from this brief exile from his ancestral manor, Fitzwilliam Darcy found the house covered in gloom, servants downcast, weather dreary, stones cold, fires insufficient, Georgiana and Miss Wilson gone. Elizabeth Bennet provided theonly remaining brightness. Mr. and Mrs. Wickham were still absent on their tour.

Upon meeting Lizzy, she did not give him her usual instinctive embrace, and Darcy rather regretted that. However, it was for the best.

The lecture that his father had given him, and Papa’s attempt to make him swear to only marry a woman of fortune and consequence had left Darcy with intensified awareness of the beauty and appeal of females who would make unsuitable wives for the heir of Pemberley.

No, for the master of Pemberley.

His father would be dead when he married.

Perhaps for this reason, Darcy found himself exquisitely aware of those changes in Lizzy’s body and face that proclaimed her to no longer be a child, but rather a beautiful young woman. Her bosom and hips had grown out. Despite the caution with which she moved, often sweeping the floor in front of her with her cane, there was grace and beauty in every motion. Perhaps because he was long used to them, the scars on her face and neck did nothing to detract from the oval prettiness of her face.

Even with all his fondness for Lizzy, Darcy would not deny that when her eyes were exposed the way that one of the eyes had sunken in, while the other was covered by white cloudiness had a rather unpleasant look made uncanny by the lack of symmetry, but he had come to even find that pleasant to look on. And she generally kept a folded scarf wrapped around her eyes, with the pretty color chosen to match or compliment the look of her dress.

It was uncomfortable for Darcy to think that someone who he had known for many years as a child was now a beautifulwoman. That awareness would have been magnified if she embraced him tightly, as had been her wont.

He was aware enough without it. And the thought refused to leave him that she would make a far more unsuitable wife, in his father’s eyes, than even Jane.

The conversation about Wickham and the demand that Papa made that he swear to only marry a rich and well-connected woman had been the first time Dacy ever seriously questioned his father’s judgement and even his character.

During his first conversation with Lizzy after his return, there was an awkwardness between them that had never been there before. Darcy did not like it. It must have come about because of the sudden awareness that he had of her as a woman. When he inquired about the wedding and if the couple were happy at the breakfast, Lizzy had frowned, mumbled something he could not hear, and then she barely spoke for the next minutes.

Darcy hoped, rather than expected, for Mr. and Mrs. Wickham to be happy.

Over the course of the first evening spent in the drawing room together, Darcy’s awkwardness around Lizzy slowly dissipated—he could not forget that she had grown into a beautiful woman, but they were familiar with each other, and easily able to talk. He found her to be even more clever, more sensible, and better informed in conversation than he remembered her to be the previous Christmas, which had been the last time that he’d spent many hours able to talk with her.

There was a great change in something indefinable. Her mind had become that of a woman, and not just her body.