Page 60 of Mr Darcy’s Inconvenient Wife

“Anne has written,” she said.

“So Georgiana told me. Several times, over the soup.” He put his book face down on the arm of his chair. “There was a postscript she did not read out. My aunt has asked twice whether you are keeping well.”

“Twice! I am overcome. Is it curiosity, do you think, or kindness?”

“Curiosity, mostly. But she has never in her life been able to bear not knowing something. And now that there may be an heir…” He hesitated over the word. His glance went to her waist for a moment, and then back to her face. “I expect she will come round by Christmas.”

“Then I shall pray for very bad roads at Christmas.”

He laughed. It was still a short sound, and a little rusty. She would not have traded it for all the clever talk in London.

She went over to him, and he took her hand, and did not let it go.

She thought, as she sometimes did, of a girl in a parsonage parlour on a wet night in Kent. Her cheeks had been burning and her voice had shaken with temper, and she had not let him get past his first sentence. She had been so very certain. She had known exactly what he was and what he had done. She had been right about Jane, and wrong about nearly everything else.

That girl would have laughed in the face of anyone who told her how it would end. A cellar. A wedding she had not wanted. A night at an inn in Islington. And then this room, and the candles, and his thumb tracing her knuckles one by one. She would not have believed a word of it.

Elizabeth would not have changed a single wrong turn.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“Hunsford.” She smiled down at him. “And how very rude I was to you.”

“I seem to remember I deserved most of it.”

“Most,” she agreed. “Not all.”

He did not answer that. He only drew her down onto the arm of the chair beside him. She leaned her cheek against his hair, and for a long time neither of them reached to trim the candle, though it had burned very low.

THE END