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He had imagined those words too often with a meaning she had not given them. This time he received the meaning she offered: here, tonight, by her choice. When she took him upstairs, he followed without asking what it promised.

Her bedchamber at Ashbourne was smaller than any he had slept in since he was a boy. A single lamp, a fire burnt low, a window standing open on the smell of the cooling garden. Elizabeth set the lamp on the chest of drawers and turned to face him. He found he had no idea what to do with his hands.

“You are nervous,” she said, as if it were a discovery worth having.

“Yes.”

She came to him and began to undo his coat. He let her. He had undressed her many times in their marriage and been undressed by her rarely, and never like this, slowly, as though each button were a sentence she meant to finish. When his shirt was off she unbuttoned his breeches as well and pushed them down. He stepped out of them. She ran her hands up his arms and over his shoulders, and he shut his eyes because he could not look at her face and keep his composure at the same time.

“Now you,” she said.

He undressed her with more care than skill. His fingers had never been clumsy with her before. She stood patiently while he struggled with a lace. When it knotted she laughed at him, and the laugh undid something in his chest that had been tight for eight weeks. When she was bare in the lamplight he went down on his knees in front of her without deciding to. He put his arms around her hips and pressed his face against the soft skin of her belly. She was warm. She smelled of soap and lavender, of the garden. Her fingers came into his hair and held him there.

He kissed her belly and the crease of her thigh. When her hand tightened in his hair in a way he understood, he put his mouth between her legs.

He had done this for her before, in the first weeks, as a skill he possessed. He did it now as a man asking a question with no right to an answer. He went slowly. He listened. When she gasped he stayed; when her thighs began to tremble he held her steady with his hands and took his time. She said his name once, low and astonished. Then her knees gave. He caught her. They went down together onto the narrow bed, and she was laughing, breathless, pulling him up to her mouth.

If she tasted herself on his mouth, she seemed not to mind.

He lay over her, his weight on his forearms, and waited. He had waited in her hall and her garden and through an entire dinner, and he found he could wait here too, though every part of him ached with it.

She said his name, low, and the sound of it went through him like heat. “I asked you to stay.”

She reached between them and touched him. He heard himself groan. Then she lifted her hips to him, and he sank into her slowly, inch by inch. When he was wholly inside her he stopped, because the feeling of it was too much and he was afraid of ending before he had begun.

“Wait,” he said, hoarse.

She waited. She lay beneath him with her hands moving on his back and her eyes on his face. It came to him that she was seeing him: not the master of Pemberley, not the man who had bargained at Hunsford, but whatever he was now, undone and shaking in a borrowed bed because she had chosen to let him in.

When he moved at last it was with a care he had seldom shown her in the first weeks of their marriage, and it was not enough for her. She rolled her hips up to meet him, her fingers digging into his back, and told him plainly that she would not break. He laughed against her throat, and then he stopped being careful.

The bed was too narrow. Her heel struck the wall, and she put her hand over her own mouth to stifle a laugh. He was laughing too, helplessly, his face in her hair, still moving in her. Then her laughter changed. Her eyes widened and her hand fell away, and when she began to cry out she brought her own hand back to her mouth. She tightened around him, again and again, pulling at him. He could not hold back. He drove into her twice more, deep, and spent himself inside her with a groan he buried in her neck, his whole body shaking.

Afterwards he lay with his head on her breast and listened to her heart slow. She stroked the back of his neck. Neither of them spoke. He remembered her taking his hand in London and telling him that she had decided only that afternoon. Tonight was another choice, not a promise that either choice could be claimed again.

Later, when the house was still, Elizabeth asked whether he wished for the lamp to remain lit. He had been looking towards the window, unable to sleep, and had thought himself quiet enough not to disturb her.

“No. I am sorry.”

“For being awake?” She reached for his hand beneath the coverlet. “You may do that without an apology.”

Darcy turned towards her. He had no explanation which would not ask her to comfort him for consequences he had earned. Yet she was offering the ordinary kindness of sharing a wakeful hour, and refusing it would be another way of making the night answer only to his judgment. He told her he was thinking of the morning. Then, because it was true and incomplete, he told her what his aunt had said in the drawing-room after the others had gone: that a man who would put his own cousin in the dock to oblige his wife's relations deserved whatever they chose to do with it. He had already written to her of the letter that followed, in which his aunt repeated her refusal to receive him. He had not written that he had stood and heard it to the last word. Elizabeth held his hand until he ceased searching for anything more to say.

* * *

At breakfast she wanted the table moved nearer the open window. Darcy objected that the draught would cool everything before they ate it. She looked at the dishes, then at the bright garden beyond them, and proposed that he eat more quickly.

“I had hoped for a more sympathetic answer.”

“Then you should have asked whether I minded moving my own chair. I mind it very little.”

She shifted her place, leaving him beyond the reach of the strongest draught, and continued with her breakfast. She offered him the preserve. He declined it on the grounds that the cook had mistaken sweetness for flavour.

“An objection which has never troubled you when the dish is yours.”

“My cook knows when to stop.”

“Then you may recommend this one a lecture. I shall continue to eat it.”