THIRTY-ONE
Netherfield
Darcy
Dr. Pemberton arrived on the first of December.
He came from London at Richard’s arrangement, a quiet gentleman of middle years with a calm countenance.
He spent the greater part of two hours examining Darcy’s legs for sensation and strength, asking questions which Darcy answered with careful precision.
When he finished, he said the condition of Darcy’s limbs, though significant after so long a period of disuse, was considerably more responsive to treatment than he had anticipated.
The nerves appeared to have recovered some measure of function naturally during the interval.
The muscles presented the greater difficulty — weakened severely by long inactivity and wholly unaccustomed to bearing weight — but muscles, he observed, generally answered to work.
They would begin on the third. He wished Darcy to rest on the second.
Darcy did not find the second of December particularly restful.
He had expected pain when the exercises began, and there was pain.
Considerable pain on some days, the grinding protest of a body being asked to perform actions it had long forgotten.
What he had not anticipated was the exhaustion.
Not merely the exhaustion of exertion, though that too was present, but the deeper weariness of sustained effort directed toward something which had once required no effort at all.
Movement. The simple act itself. The precise negotiation between intention and limb, performed a thousand times each day without thought, which Darcy must now undertake with his entire attention and no small exertion of will.
After each of Dr Pemberton’s daily exercises he found himself more spent than a morning’s ride at Pemberley had ever made him.
The physical strain was matched by the sudden and rigorous demands made upon his appetite.
Dr. Pemberton had regarded Darcy’s lean frame with distinct disapproval and ordered an immediate end to the sparse, indifferent meals upon which Darcy had subsisted for the better part of two years.
If the muscles were to answer to work, the surgeon declared, they must be supplied with proper nourishment.
Suddenly Darcy’s days were measured not only in exercises, but in substantial dishes continually pressed upon him by Dr. Pemberton’s strict decree.
Netherfield’s kitchen was set to constant labour, producing roasted mutton, thick beef steaks, restorative broths, and plates of poached eggs each morning.
The effect proved almost startling. For two years Darcy had eaten merely to sustain life, scarcely tasting what was placed before him out of a quiet and lingering apathy.
Now, compelled to eat with deliberate abundance, he realised with something approaching discomfort that he had forgotten entirely what it felt like to be properly nourished.
The rich meals did more than strengthen his exhausted frame.
They awakened something within him which had lain dormant a very long time and reminded him, with uncomfortable clarity, how completely he had neglected his own well-being.
Progress during the first week was measured in seconds rather than steps, and the floor remained entirely out of reach.
The first time he attempted to raise his right leg unassisted, with Marsh beside him and Dr. Pemberton observing, it required concentration so absolute it left him dizzy.
He stared at his linen trousers, willing the dormant muscle into obedience until perspiration gathered across his brow.
He managed to hold the foot perhaps two inches above the carpet for ten seconds before the thigh failed and the limb dropped heavily again.
He lowered his eyes without comment. Marsh handed him water.
Dr. Pemberton pronounced it a perfectly reasonable beginning.
Darcy did not find the word reasonable particularly encouraging and kept that opinion to himself.
The second attempt lasted longer. The third longer still. By the close of the first week, he could raise the leg and hold it clear of the floor for forty-five seconds unsupported. Dr. Pemberton described this as encouraging.
The hardest part was not the pain.
The hardest part was the guilt.
Not guilt regarding recovery itself — that had changed since the conversation in the library, since Elizabeth had spoken as she did and he had at last allowed the truth of her words to reach him.
The guilt which remained was quieter and more particular.
It arrived most reliably in moments of small progress — the first true flexing of the ankle, the first unassisted lift, the first morning he woke and felt something in his legs beyond mere heaviness — and each improvement carried with it the sharp ache of a thing occurring too late.
He could not reclaim the lost two years.
He could not restore to Georgiana the brother he had withheld from her.
He could not undo any part of it. He could only continue forward. Most days, he found that sufficient.
Outside, winter had settled fully over Hertfordshire.
The first snow came during the first week — not sufficient to render the roads impassable, but enough to alter the quality of the light and patches of white early in the morning.
Word came from Richard during that same week that Wickham had been sighted twice — once near Essex border and once further south, the reports inconsistent enough to suggest deliberate movement rather than blind flight.
He had not yet been caught. The militia continued searching.
Darcy received the intelligence rather more calmly than he might once have expected. Wickham was running, and men who ran with debts behind them did not generally run either far or well. Darcy found he could now hold the matter without the cold fury which had consumed him during the previous weeks.
Darcy and Bingley called at Longbourn on severally.
On their first visit on the fifth, Mr. Bennet and Darcy played their first game of chess.
It lasted two hours. Darcy won the first game.
Mr. Bennet won the second. The third ended in a draw by mutual and entirely unspoken agreement.
They conversed throughout. Darcy recognised at last from whom Elizabeth had inherited her intelligence.
It was after this game that he formally requested permission to court Elizabeth.
Mr. Bennet granted it with a dry observation suggesting he believed the courtship had been underway for some time already.
Darcy considered the interview a success.
Elizabeth came with Jane on the eighth. Bingley, who had lately discovered an increasing number of reasons for Jane Bennet to visit Netherfield, taken extra precaution to ensure the roads remained passable.
They arrived in the afternoon and stayed two hours.
Darcy received them alongside the household in the drawing room.
Elizabeth said little regarding his treatment beyond encouraging him quietly to continue.
They spoke chiefly of ordinary things. She gave him a book she believed he might find interesting with no ceremony whatsoever.
He read the first chapter that same evening.
The second and third weeks brought exercises which lengthened and deepened as Dr. Pemberton guided him through the carefully ordered course of treatment.
Marsh remained present for all of it — steady, silent, precisely where he was needed at every moment.
There were days which went well and days which did not, and on the days which did not, Darcy endured the frustration without permitting it to become a reason to stop, which itself constituted a form of progress.
The first supported stand did not come until the end of the second week.
It was an agonising and trembling effort, his knees buckling almost immediately before Marsh and Dr. Pemberton caught his weight and held him upright for less than a minute.
But by end of the third week he was attempting actual steps for the first time.
Marsh on one side, the back of a sturdy chair upon the other, Dr. Pemberton watching closely.
Three steps across the room and back again.
Darcy lowered himself heavily afterwards and looked at the short distance he had covered and felt something he could not immediately name.
He thought perhaps it was the beginning of something.
Elizabeth called again on the fourteenth, this time without Jane and with Sarah accompanying her instead.
The snow had returned and lay heavier upon the grounds.
She sat with him in the library for an hour and a half, and when he admitted the progress was slower than he wished, she replied that two years was a considerable span of time to undo and he was not required to undo it within a fortnight.
Darcy found this considerably more encouraging than anything Dr. Pemberton had yet said upon the subject.
By the close of the third week he was managing short distances with the aid of two walking sticks.
Not gracefully. Not without effort, nor without the occasional morning when his legs refused him altogether and Dr. Pemberton altered the treatment accordingly.
But he was moving. The bath chair remained necessary for any distance beyond the immediate rooms of Netherfield, and Darcy used it without embarrassment — he was not restored, merely in the process of becoming so, and the distinction mattered.
The walking sticks stood as outward proof of it.