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