He was not permitted in the room. He had not expected to be, nor had he wanted to be, but the exclusion left him with nothing to do except pace the narrow corridor outside and listen to sounds he was not equipped to interpret. Anne’s breathing was shallow and laboured, punctuated by small, sharp cries that she was clearly trying to suppress, because she had spent her entire life suppressing things and was not about to stop now.
He rubbed his face with both hands. He paced to the window. He paced back. He leaned against the wall and stared at the plaster and thought about nothing, which required a surprising amount of effort.
Hours passed. The light shifted from grey to gold to grey again. The maid brought him tea, which he held without drinking until it went cold, and then she brought him another, which he also held without drinking. At some point he sat on the floor, his back against the wall, his legsstretched out in front of him, because his body had decided that dignity was no longer a priority.
The sounds changed.
He could not have said precisely when or how, only that the rhythm of the room behind the door shifted—the voices quickened, the midwife’s tone dropped from calm instruction to clipped and urgent. He heard a command and some movement. Then a silence that did not seem right.
Darcy was on his feet before he registered standing, his hand on the door. The maid appeared, and her face told him everything. His stomach dropped through the flagstones he had so carefully counted.
“She is asking for you, sir.”
The room smelled of blood and sweat. Anne was propped against the pillows, grey as the linen beneath her. She looked diminished, as though the labour had taken not just her strength but her substance, leaving behind something translucent and temporary. The midwife stood to one side, her hands folded, her expression carefully blank. She had seen this before and knew how it ended.
Anne’s eyes found him. They were clear, sharp, even, and lucid.
“Darcy,” she rasped.
He sat on the edge of the bed. Her hand was cold when he took it, and so light it barely registered in his palm.
“Oliver Phipps,” she said. “He is a gardener at Rosings. He tends the roses in the east garden.” She paused, gathering strength. “He has blue eyes.”
Darcy stared at her. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, because what was there to say? He had married a woman for duty who had loved a gardener.
“He does not know,” Anne said. “About the child. I would not—” She stopped and drew a thin, rattling breath. “It does not matter now.”
Her grip on his hand tightened—a small, fierce pressure that cost her visible effort.
“You have been good to me, Darcy. Better than I deserved. Better than I had any right to expect.” Her eyes were bright, and he realised with a jolt that she was not crying—she was past crying. She was simply saying what needed to be said while there was still time to say it. “Do not abandon her. Whatever you feel about me, about Oliver, about any of it—she is innocent. Promise me.”
“I promise,” he said. His voice came out rough, scrapedraw by something he had not expected to feel. Not love—he had never loved Anne, and she had never loved him. They had both been honest enough to leave that fiction alone. It was respect, perhaps. She had been backed into a corner by her own body, her mother’s fury, and a gardener’s blue eyes, and she was facing the end of it with more dignity than Darcy had managed to summon all day.
“Thank you,” Anne said, and closed her eyes.
She did not open them again.
He sat with her hand in his for a long time after the midwife confirmed what he already knew. The room was very quiet. The candle on the bedside table guttered and spat, and outside, the sea threw itself against the cliffs with its usual indifference.
He should grieve. That was what a husband did. He searched for it. He rummaged through the wreckage of himself for sorrow, and what he found instead was relief. A vast, shameful, flooding relief that loosened his chest. She was gone, and the pretence was over. He was free, and the guilt of that thought was so immediate and so total that it swallowed the relief. It left him sitting on the edge of a dead woman’s bed, hating himself with a thoroughness that was, he had to admit, quite impressive.
He thought of Elizabeth. It was an involuntary reflex, and he despised himself for it—that even now, even here, his mind reached for her the way a hand reaches for a wound. She was months and miles away, and she did not know any of this. She would not have cared if she did, and still the thought of her was the first thing that surfaced when the silence closed in.
He pressed his palms against his eyes and breathed.
And then, from the cradle next to the fireplace came a sound—thin, furious, unmistakably alive—a cry.
Darcy lifted his head.
The babe.
Two
March, 1818
Elizabeth Bennet surveyed her surroundings, taking in the grey. The room was grey, the sky outside the window was grey, and the people next to her were grey. Not only wearing grey, drab, serviceable gowns, but even their faces were grey, indifferent, and indistinguishable. Grey upon darker grey, like a drawing made with coal on a cheap scrap of paper.
“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” she thought, acutely aware that this was exactly the colour that ruled her own existence these days.