CHAPTER 60 #2
“Mr. Darcy is better than when Willis left, sir. That is all I dare say.”
It was a mercy and not enough.
“The physician?”
“Still in the house. Mr. Grant has seen him twice today and will see him again before evening. He says the first violence of the attack has passed. Mr. Darcy has more command of his senses than was feared at first. But he is very weak. His speech is much affected. He tires almost at once. Mr. Grant says there is hope, sir. He will not say certainty.”
Hope. The word, because it did not promise, was almost worse than despair.
Mrs. Reynolds continued, “Mr. Darcy has asked for you. Mr. Grant wished to speak with you first.”
“And Mr. Latham?”
“Below, sir. He has secured what he could. He says the papers will keep until morning if Mr. Grant will allow no business tonight.”
That was sensible. It did not feel bearable.
“And Mr. John Wickham?”
“No, sir. He has not been found, nor has any word come from him.”
A silence followed. It was brief, but every person in the room seemed to understand its weight.
Mrs. Reynolds looked once toward Elizabeth, then back to Fitzwilliam. “There is another matter. Mrs. Wickham has called twice, and sent once besides.”
The room altered around the name.
“What did she want?” Fitzwilliam asked.
“She offered herself as the nearest female connexion at hand, should Mr. Darcy’s care require a lady’s attendance. She said she had known the family many years, and that dear Lady Anne would not have wished an old connexion to be excluded in a time of distress.”
Georgiana lowered her eyes.
Fitzwilliam felt anger rise so swiftly that for a moment it was almost welcome. Anger, at least, knew where to go.
“And was she admitted?”
“No, sir. Mr. Grant has admitted no one beyond those appointed. Mr. Darcy himself, when he could make his meaning understood, would have no additional visitor.”
Elizabeth did not move from Georgiana’s side. She said nothing. That silence was not passivity. Fitzwilliam knew it now well enough to be almost sorry for Mrs. Wickham.
Georgiana set down her cup carefully. “Did my father ask whether I had come?”
Mrs. Reynolds turned to her. “He did, miss.”
Georgiana swallowed.
Fitzwilliam leaned slightly forward. “You shall see him, if you wish it. But when Mr. Grant says he is rested enough. Not before.”
Elizabeth added, more gently, “A visit should comfort him, not spend him.”
Georgiana nodded. She did not look happy. She did look steadier for being given a reason to wait that was not cowardice.
A footman entered with the physician’s request that Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy would attend him in the adjoining room.
The name struck oddly. In that house, it had once belonged to his father’s son and heir; then, for years, to a man whose place could be mentioned only with discomfort. Now servants offered it to him because crisis had no patience for old evasions.
Elizabeth rose then, crossing to him only when there was reason to move. Her hand touched his sleeve once, lightly enough for the room and firmly enough for him.
He steadied.
Mr. Grant was a spare, serious man with a professional manner made neither colder nor warmer by the rank of his patient. Fitzwilliam liked him at once for not offering comfort before fact.
“My father’s condition,” he said, when they were alone.
“Grave,” said Mr. Grant. “But not without hope. He has survived the first attack better than I feared when I arrived. The left side is affected, though not wholly deprived of motion. His speech is impaired. His understanding is present in intervals and, I believe, clearer than his speech can show. But he is liable to fatigue, agitation is dangerous, and a second seizure cannot be ruled out.”
The words were clean and pitiless enough to be useful.
“Will he recover?”
“I cannot answer that honestly.”
“Can he speak safely?”
“For a few minutes. Not more, and not if contradicted or distressed.”
A bitter answer almost rose in Fitzwilliam: then he should not have sent for me. He suppressed it. Old injuries had no place in a physician’s report, however much they had furnished the sickroom.
“And Miss Darcy?”
“I would advise that she not be brought to him until he is more composed, unless he becomes much worse and asks for her with particular urgency. A short visit later may do them both good, if he is rested and she is prepared.”
Fitzwilliam inclined his head. “Then I will see him.”
Mr. Grant studied him for a moment, perhaps measuring whether the son was as dangerous to the invalid as the invalid might be to the son.
“At the first sign of distress, I shall end the interview.”
“Do.”
The physician seemed satisfied.
When Fitzwilliam returned to the small drawing room, Elizabeth was standing near the window. The light showed the fatigue in her face more plainly than the carriage had done, though she held herself as if tiredness were a fact belonging to other people.
“You may see him?” she asked.
“For a few minutes.”
She took one step toward him, then stopped. She understood before he asked.
“You wish to go alone.”
The word alone should have been easier. It had been the shape of so many years. Now it seemed less like fortitude than habit.
“For the first interview,” he said.
“Of course.”
“I will come back directly.”
“I shall be here.”
His eyes moved over her face. “Rest, if you can.”
“I shall sit down,” she said. “That is the concession available at present.”
“Elizabeth.”
Her expression softened.
“Go,” she said. “I shall be here when you come out.”
He carried that with him up the stairs.
Pemberley’s stairs had not changed. He knew the turn of the banister, the long window, the portrait at the landing, the faint give in one board near the upper corridor.
He knew the passage to his father’s rooms, the place where servants lowered their voices, the door before which he had once stood as a boy after some offence and waited to be judged.
Mrs. Reynolds opened the door.
The room was shaded against the afternoon light and too quiet.
Illness had altered its proportions. The bed, large and dark, seemed to have drawn the whole chamber toward it.
A tray stood nearly untouched on a side table.
Medicine bottles, folded linen, and a basin had made a practical invasion of the master’s room.
Near the window a chair had been set for the physician; another stood nearby for Mrs. Reynolds.
The signs of care were everywhere, and so too was the evidence that care had arrived after disorder.
George Darcy lay propped among pillows, his face changed.
That was the first shock.
Fitzwilliam had not expected him unchanged.
He had thought himself prepared for weakness.
He was not prepared for the particular humiliation of seeing a man who had filled rooms reduced without being made gentle.
The harsh line of his father’s brow remained.
The mouth was drawn strangely at one side.
One hand lay useless upon the coverlet; the other moved restlessly once, as if the will in him had not yet learned the body’s rebellion.
His eyes opened.
For a moment there was no recognition.
Then his gaze fixed.
The hand that could move gripped the sheet.
“Fitz—”
The broken syllable crossed the room and struck him harder than accusation could have done.
Fitzwilliam went to the bedside.
“I am here, sir.”
His father’s eyes searched his face with an urgency that had no dignity left to spare.
“Georgiana?”
“Safe,” Fitzwilliam said at once. “In the house.”
His father closed his eyes.
“She is not hurt,” Fitzwilliam added. “Frightened, but safe.”
The hand upon the sheet tightened.
“Wickham—” His father drew a difficult breath. Anger came into his face, not strong enough to restore him, but strong enough to show the man beneath the damage. “Did not sanction. Never.”
Fitzwilliam’s throat tightened.
The words were not enough. They were years too late. They did not return Georgiana’s peace, or his own name, or all the rooms he had been made to leave. Yet some hard, miserable knot in him answered them all the same, because Georgiana had been made to fear that her father had given her away.
“I will tell her,” he said. “When she can bear it.”
His father’s gaze sharpened, or tried to.
“John.”
“Mr. John Wickham?”
The hand moved again.
“Lied.”
The word was ugly, roughened, almost spat out by force of will rather than speech.
Fitzwilliam stood very still.
His father’s breath came harder.
“London,” he said. “After—Mrs. Darcy. Asked. Reports—did not agree.”
Fitzwilliam understood then that Elizabeth’s visit with him in Portman Square had not convinced his father. Nothing so simple. But it had disturbed him. It had sent him to papers, men, witnesses, answers that did not fit the story he had preferred.
His father forced another breath.
“Her letter.”
“Georgiana’s?”
His father’s eyes closed. “Ended it.”
The physician’s hand moved, warning.
“Enough for now, sir,” Mr. Grant said.
But George Darcy had not finished. His eyes fixed on Fitzwilliam with such angry desperation that stopping him seemed its own cruelty.
“Latham,” his father forced out. “Papers. Provisions. Wickhams—removed. What I could.”
Every question in Fitzwilliam seemed to rise at once: what papers, what provisions, what had been false, what had been altered, what had John Wickham said, what had his father believed and why had he chosen belief so eagerly?
But the man in the bed could not answer all that now, and perhaps the father who had stood whole before him years ago had chosen not to.
“Mr. Latham will come to me in the morning,” Fitzwilliam said. “I shall hear him then.”
His father’s eyes searched his face again.
There was no apology in it. Not yet. Or if there was, it had no strength to become language. There was command, fear, shame, pain, and a terrible impatience with the broken machinery of his own body.
“Georgiana,” he said again.
“She will come when Mr. Grant permits it and when she is ready.”
“Afraid?”
Fitzwilliam did not soften the answer.
“Yes.”