II. “Are you well, Lizzie? You look flushed—are you fevered?” Fitzwilliam asked, reaching out to take her hands in his before she had a moment to answer, unwilling to wait for her reassurance. Her breath came quickly and her dark eyes shone, perhaps with the glossy blankness of an imminent delirium.
“I’m fine, you needn’t worry,” she replied quickly.
“You must know by now that a remark of that nature will only stoke my fears,” he said.
“Truly, I’m in perfect health,” she said. She squeezed his hands and smiled, a sweet confiding smile he had learnt was his alone.
“If you’re certain—”
“I am,” she said.
“Still, your cheeks are so red and it seems you cannot catch your breath, but there is not the slightest hint of dust at your hem and you are wearing slippers and not your half-boots,” he said.
“You study me so closely, sir!” she exclaimed.
“What subject is better suited to my observation than my beloved wife?” he said.
“La, you shall make me blush even more, I’ll resemble a ripe love-apple,” Elizabeth said.
“What has put such a color in your cheeks then?” he said.
When she was silent, his wonderfully eloquent and witty Lizzie, the anxiety which had begun to recede returned with all the force of a rogue wave about to capsize a battleship.
“Tell me the truth, Elizabeth,” he said.
“You’re frightened and you mustn’t be, for it’s only that I’m embarrassed. I don’t want you to think less of me,” she said.
“You are my other half. My dearest girl. You may tell me you have engaged in the most tremendous depravity and I should only wonder at your untold depths,” he said, using the serious, near-aloof tone of their first courtship, certain she would purse her lips in exasperated amusement; she would not believe he had spoken in utter candor, though he had.
“Fitzwilliam—”
“Tell me,” he repeated.
“I saw something I didn’t mean to,” she said.
He waited, knowing it was best to allow her to speak as she would, without interruption.
“Randall was tired, out-of-sorts, she didn’t secure my hair as she ought, so I had some back to fix some loose hairpins. I was before my looking-glass, becoming rather put out with myself for being unable to keep the curls from tumbling down and a little ashamed for being short with Randall when it was clearly not an easy task. I might as well have been an acrobat for the contortion I required and it had not occurred to me that I might see something in the glass beyond my own reflection,” she said.
“How did that happen?” Darcy asked.
“I hadn’t shut the door properly,” she said.
“And so you saw—”
“I saw Mr. Hollander and Lord Rozanov in the looking-glass. The angle, the light, I suppose it was a trick of fate that made it possible,” she said, beginning to color again.
“All this because you glimpsed two gentlemen?”
“They were embracing, Fitzwilliam. Most…ardently,” she replied.
“Ah,” he said.
“I had no expectations of Lord Rozanov, we hardly know him, but Mr. Hollander has always been so prudent, so discreet, so sensible of himself and his surroundings, to see him in such a state of complete abandon, such obvious and unfettered desire, was shocking,” she said. Her hands trembled in his but now he was not distressed by his wife’s response.
Not in the least.
“Shocking? Or something else?”
“I had not meant to see, but still I watched. I may pretend I did not wish to alert them by shutting the door, but the thought never crossed my mind until this moment,” she said softly. She was shy, a rarity for her, and her eyes were filled with a recalled wonder.
She was adorable and he had never wanted her more, his hunger for her feral, obliterating.
Still, he was a gentleman and she was his gentle-born wife.
“It was nothing to do with their similarity,” she said.
“No?”
“Their affinity for each other, their tenderness, their ferocity, to see something like that—I could not look away,” she explained.
Fitzwilliam considered what she said and then tucked a loose curl back behind her ear, silently blessing Randall for her deficient hairdressing.
“To regard such intimacies is an intimacy itself. One we might embark upon. If you wished it,” he said.
“If I wished it?” she repeated, a hint of her usual sharpness making this unanticipated interlude something real.
“We’ve only to shut the door. And change the angle of the looking-glass,” he said. He had studied with men at Oxford who might write papers about the complexities of angles and light, pages of equations and asides about the application to the celestial spheres, but Darcy had been a mediocre student of the sciences and would not make such a fuss.
“So simple,” she said.
“I should make sure the bed is properly reflected. I don’t fancy the hallway and according to you, it is often quite crowded. I have not the same predilections as Mr. Hollander and Lord Rozanov. I should not like to be observed by anyone other than you, my dear,” he said.
“But you should like that,” she said. It was not a question.
“Exceedingly,” he replied.
“Fitzwilliam, please shut the door,” his wife said.
Written for @janeuary-month Day 12 prompt "looking-glass"
ALL things that pass
Are woman’s looking-glass;
They show her how her bloom must fade,
And she herself be laid
With wither’d roses in the shade;
With wither’d roses and the fallen peach,
Unlovely, out of reach
Of summer joy that was.
All things that pass
Are woman’s tiring-glass;
The faded lavender is sweet,
Sweet the dead violet
Cull’d and laid by and car’d for yet;
The dried-up violets and dried lavender
Still sweet, may comfort her,
Nor need she cry Alas!
All things that pass
Are wisdom’s looking-glass;
Being full of hope and fear, and still
Brimful of good or ill,
According to our work and will;
For there is nothing new beneath the sun;
Our doings have been done,
And that which shall be was.
