Darcy and Elizabeth
by Mark Aster
with apologies to Miss Austen

Chapter 60 (Volume III, Chapter XVIII), continued

All these burdens on Elizabeth's grace and good nature at last
had an end, and she found herself almost without knowing it
to be a wife.  Her immediate pleasure in the ceremony she
sacrificed almost wholly to her mother, who compensated herself
for Lydia's distressingly plain and simple wedding, by most
generous provision of servants and attendants, and by
quantities of wedding clothes enough for three brides, each
of much greater girth than Elizabeth.

The couple were to set out the next day for ---, and thence
finally onward to the Lakes.  Family and guests took their
leave, Mrs. Bennet so pliable in her joy as to linger only
part of an hour after the rest, exclaiming over the furnishings
and fixtures of Pemberley, for there the wedding had been laid,
and allowing herself eventually to be led off by her husband,
whose joy was no less deep for being so much quieter, and
whose soft farewell to his favorite daughter touched her most
sensibly.

With the departure of the celebrants, the great house grew
quiet.  Elizabeth, attending to herself in what was now her own
bedroom, felt the quiet settle tangibly around her, and slowly
became aware of herself, having first known herself to be happy,
and then having felt herself to be happy, and now feeling
something else entirely, and once again unknowing just what
it was.  Her quiet wondering was interrupted by a soft
footfall, and a gentle voice speaking her name.

"Elizabeth," said Mr. Darcy; for he it was.  She turned to
face him, uncertain, holding her hands unaware to her breast,
waiting for him to continue.  But he said no more; only stood
and gazed at her.

"Mr. Darcy," she said, and then laughed at herself, "I find,
sir, that I do not know how to address you, in our new state
of existence.  Shall I call you Fitzwilliam?"  Her husband
was so pleased by the sound of his name in her mouth that he
owned that she could call him by it twelve hours in the day
if she wished.  His own happiness spilling for a moment into
unwonted frivolity, he suggested as well a host of other names
as lovers are supposed to use with each other, as sweet-pea,
and honey-pie, and dumpling.  These lively epithets appearing
doubly comical to her as they issued from so serious a source,
Elizabeth found herself almost overcome with laughter, until
in a lower and more earnest voice, he concluded, "or, naturally,
you might call me Husband."

This stopped her laughter, and meeting his eyes very directly
with her own, she felt suddenly and strangely that he was
her husband indeed.  She felt it all the more a moment later,
when he took her into his arms and kissed her, and his body
pressed most deliciously against hers.  Something within her,
some font of feeling yet unopened, swelled as if it would
burst, and she was quite breathless, her eyes closed, her
thoughts scattered and dispersed by the touch of his lips,
and his hands holding her through her clothing.  At the height
of this, Darcy stepped back from her suddenly, and stood almost
scowling, looking down.

"Elizabeth," he said upon her natural inquiry, "I find in
myself something that quite astonishes me, and I know you
will forgive me if it distracts me for a moment even from
you, for you are its cause and root."

"What is this thing, Husband?" Elizabeth asked, feeling in
her joy that it could be no large thing, and very much enjoying
the occasion to call him Husband again.  Her breath was yet
unsteady, her hair and her clothing now a little disheveled,
her color high.

"I know not how to name it.  It is something that threatens
to burst through the most proper and necessary restraint, to
overcome my control of my self.  There is no ill-will in it;
quite the contrary in fact, but I fear it is best described
as a ferocity."

The thought of her husband's ferocity flowed through her in a
warm wave of feeling, and she was especially sensible of those
places that his hands had touched a minute before.

"Your restraint becomes you, sir."  An arch smile lit her face,
and hearing its tone in her voice he looked up.  "I see that it
is my task here to tease and cajole that ferocity, until it
quite overwhelms your propriety, and emerges into the light,
that we may both appreciate it."  With that Elizabeth began
undoing the fastenings of her gown, and shortly there started
a rain of muslin and calico all around her.  Darcy, his eyes
quite captured by the scene, coughed in his throat.

"Elizabeth, I believe that it is conventional for a wife to
divest herself of her garments in her own closet, rather than
under the eyes of her husband.  Or at least so I have been led
to believe."

"Convention, sir, has its place," she replied, "Where it
contributes to the placidity and good grace of human relation,
it is to be cherished and respected."  Here another yard of
good London fabric fell to the floor.  "But where it interferes
with that relation, I think it may safely be put aside.  Do
you expect, Husband, that there will be much of convention about
this marriage into which you have entered?"

"Perhaps not," he breathed, losing as it appeared the power of
speech with Elizabeth's descent from a frilled and begowned
bride, to a slender girl in a thin white shift and underclothes.
In the next moment, she felt her husband's ferocity once again,
this time all the more intensely for her comparative undress,
and for being borne by him backwards onto the bed.  His hands
revisited their places on her clothing, and ventured onwards;
his fingers touched and squeezed her, his lips kissed her,
and again she felt that inward swelling, this time accompanied
by a most urgent warmth deep within, and by the same
breathlessness, and an ever stronger beating of her heart.
She felt she would burst in truth; but just at the crisis
of her feelings, her husband's hands and lips removed
themselves from her, and he quit the bed.

She lay for a moment there after he arose, her eyes closed and
her lips parted, still feeling the imprint of his mouth upon
her, and the raging joy within herself.  Then she opened her
eyes and looking upon him she found him quite as she expected,
standing by the bed, his face that of a man all at war in
himself, and she found herself only a little surprised to
see how well this pleased her.  She straightened her shift,
smoothing the fabric down over herself.

"I see that your ferocity, while admirably quick, is not
altogether steadfast once aroused.  A wife's work, it seems,
is never ending!"

"You must think me quite an idiot," her husband said, taking
a turn or two about the room as she sat upon the bed watching
him, "to be yet struggling with myself at this occasion."

Elizabeth could not allow him to go uncorrected.  "Sir, I
feel for you only the warmest regard and admiration, and
the deepest gratitude that the man upon whom my love has
descended is also one that I can so admire!  Your restraint
does you only credit; although," and here she rose from the
bed, "although I know you will forgive me if I continue in
my determination most impudently to batter it down."

They stood together for a moment, man and wife, in a silent
understanding of what it was that bound their two souls, so
disparate yet so fit, one to the other.  Then Elizabeth, her
heart again leaping at her own brashness, put her fingers to
the ties and buttons of Mr. Darcy's clothing, and began to
undo and to open, first admonishing him that he should for the
moment INCREASE his own restraint, and not move to touch her
in either aid or hindrance as she went about this project.

The wife's fingers having some skill with male garments from
having so often had the care of her little cousins, these
much larger garments were quickly off, and scattered wantonly
among her own upon the carpet.  Elizabeth's arch and teasing
manner faded gently into awe and wonder; the material size and
strength of her husband's body, now quite naked before her,
was a thing new to her, not considered before, beyond that he
was a handsome man.  But the vision of his uncovered self,
and more especially the feel of it beneath her hands, was
quite another thing, and she felt herself yet again warm
and breathless.  The new wife lost herself for a space, in
the touching and kissing of the body of her husband, and
her mouth and lips proved as impudent as her mind, in their
attention to things that convention might not entirely
sanction.

She was brought back to herself by his hands under her arms,
lifting her lightly up into his embrace, and his kisses again
on her lips.  "I think, my Lady, that you have quite triumphed
now in your ambitions.  Prepare yourself, therefore, for the
emergence of that ferocity of whose aspect you declare yourself
so curious."  With this Mr. Darcy's kisses became hotter and
even more intoxicating.  Elizabeth found herself wholly
caught up by him, helpless and moaning in his arms, her
shift taken off and tossed aside, her other smallclothes
quickly following.  Then, as entirely unclothed as he, she
was again borne backwards under him, by that welcome and
much-beloved ferocity.

There was much of kissing, and stroking, and the whispering
of tender names.  Elizabeth quite forgot Elizabeth, finding
herself surrounded only by Darcy, and covered by him, and
made breathless and helpless by him, and finally penetrated
by him and full of him.  At a sudden tearing and a small
but very sharp pain between her legs, she opened her eyes,
and gasped in a manner discernibly different from the
multitude of her former gasps.  His ferocity was in an
instant all tenderness.

"Have I hurt you, Elizabeth?"

"Yes, sir, you have hurt me, a little.  In recompense for this,
I require that you do once again that thing that you did to
engender the hurt.  And do it at once!"

Her husband complied, and as Elizabeth felt that the repetition
no longer caused her any pain, but rather much the contrary,
she required him to do it again, and yet again.  Presently the
lovers were overcome by that quite ordinary and conventional
but equally indescribable flame of feeling that accompanies the
act, and with glad cries they felt themselves merged together,
body and soul, as Darcy's ferocity most tenderly both emptied
and fulfilled itself within her.

Elizabeth found herself curled against her husband's chest,
weeping like a child, happier than at any time in her memory.
She breathed deeply, moved herself more closely against him,
and for a long space they lay thus, enveloped in each other's
warmth.  Then the bride laughed, and the husband softly asked
her the reason.

"I have just thought, and you will of course think me absurd
and scandalous, whether we have been loud and ferocious enough
to have provided any entertainment to the servants."

"You will forgive me, my love, if I observe that this is
Pemberley, not Hertfordshire.  Good Mrs. Reynolds will have
the others in hand, and there will be no listening at doors
to-night!"

"No doubt you are correct, husband; and if Mrs. Reynolds
herself should happen to have been near enough to hear any
thing, I would not begrudge that good woman her satisfaction
at being confirmed of your happiness."

Mr. Darcy expressed his belief that such a thing was impossible;
Elizabeth replied that, as a woman herself, she might be the
superior judge in this case.  This exchange led to a degree
of amorous playfulness, and this in turn led to the discovery
that Mr. Darcy's ferocity had returned.  Elizabeth's pleasure
at this event was extreme, and after a few minutes of most
rewarding activity, she and her husband again gave voice to
those sounds of which they had been debating.  She found the
second unleashing of his restraint to be even sweeter than
the first, and quite without pain, and again she felt herself
entered and filled and washed away in bliss.  After this, the
two pulled the blankets up over themselves, and in the course
of a quiet earnest conversation about nothing at all, Elizabeth
drifted into slumber.

Deep in the night, she awoke, in the strange but familiar bed,
still wrapped in the strange but beloved warmth of her husband,
still quite naked.  Listening to his breath, and feeling its
soft sussuration against her skin, it came to her that the
unknown emotion within her breast was happiness, and that all
that she had named with that name before was but something
lesser, a pleasant but pale precursor of this happiness that
his love had brought her.  In thinking this, and stroking her
husband's hair, she caused him to stir and awaken, and his
ferocity once more bestirred itself.  Kissing and laughing,
she found herself once more kissed, touched, entered, and
once more washed away and quite out of herself.

And thus they spent the first evening and night of their
marriage, and thus the next night, and every night of their
holiday to the Lakes, and in like manner the greater part
of all of the nights for many years after.  And thus, with
those variations to fit each individual nature, may we all.


Darcy and Elizabeth
by Mark Aster
The End