Heat #2
She was lost. She had been lost for weeks, and she had promised to give him back to another woman at the end of this road. But now, he would never reach it.
“No,” she said aloud. Then, in Spanish, she spoke to the priest. “He has to live. He must! What can be done?”
He looked regretful, but kindly as he smiled and passed her the cloth. But she was too weak, he told her. She could not care for him herself.
“The water,” she insisted in Spanish. “Give it to me. Tell me what to do for him. Tell me everything you know, and then go and find more of the bark if you have to walk to the sea for it. Money — we can get you money! Enough to build another church, if you wish, but help me save him.”
The priest studied her for a moment. She knew what he saw — wrung-out, barely alive, desperately delusional enough to beg and make demands from her sickbed with her hand still fisted in her husband's shirt.
And he smiled. “Sí, senora.”
Elizabeth’s strength was a fickle thing, sometimes rising up in her with a fullness that made her think she was could carry Darcy out of there on her own back, and sometimes abandoning her utterly, simply because she took a breath that was too deep.
The priest’s name was Padre Ignacio. He had come to this town, to this church, twenty-three years ago, and had shepherded its people through war, sickness, poverty, and even a British siege two years ago that had left the town decimated but triumphant.
After all that, she could hardly comprehend why he would take such pains with an English couple who could bring nothing but trouble to his door.
Whatever Elizabeth could not do, or did not know how to do for Darcy, he provided. He brought porridge, chicken broth, diluted wine, and water. A constant supply of water. For Elizabeth, he brought bread soaked in broth until she could eat something more substantial.
And then, he made her eat liver. Mary always loved liver, and so did Mama.
Papa did not, and Elizabeth had taken up with his notion of the matter.
But once she could keep down solid food, Padre Ignacio told her she was too pale, and she would eat liver.
He brought it fried in its own fat, dark and strong and faintly dreadful, and stood over her while she got it down.
She supposed he had buried enough people to know what a woman rebuilding blood from a fever needed.
She ate it because he would not otherwise let her past him to the bed.
She ate it as a toll paid towards Darcy — chew, swallow, and be permitted nearer to him.
By the third day, she had stopped gagging on it.
Darcy was no better. He was not worse, but he could not have got much worse and still been breathing.
There was the cold hour, when the shaking took him — great wracking shudders that rattled the bed and knocked his teeth together, and he burned to the touch the whole time he begged to be warmed.
She would pile every blanket in the house on him and then climb in beside him and hold him through it.
Then the shaking would stop, and the heat would win, and he would fight the very blankets he had pleaded for, throwing them off, arching away from the wet cloth she laid on him and then turning his face into it like a man dying of thirst. And then, at the end of the cycle, the sweat — sudden, total, drenching, his shirt and his hair and the sheets under him soaked through in minutes, as though the fever were being wrung out of him by a hard hand.
The sweat was where the real work began.
She could not leave him in it, because a man left wet went cold, and cold brought the shaking back the sooner.
So, with Ignacio’s help, she learned to half-roll his heavy inert shoulders, to work the sodden shirt up off his chest and over his head while his arms hung useless and enormous, to sponge him down — his chest, his throat, the hard planes of him she had watched across a dozen firelit rooms and never thought to touch.
Now, she touched him a hundred times a day, every inch of him, with a cloth and with her own bare hands.
She knew his body now in ways he could not have himself.
A month ago, the notion would have undone her, sent her fleeing the room with her cheeks aflame and her heart racing.
Now, it was merely a matter of what must be done, and she did it with her sleeves shoved up and her hair falling into her eyes, and her mind entirely on helping him.
Shame, like strength, was a luxury for healthy people, and she had spent the last of hers somewhere on the road.
Not entirely. There was one help he needed that she had flinched from, the first time, and made Ignacio do.
The second time, the priest was at the church and there was no one. Darcy surfaced far enough to understand what his own body wanted, and to understand who was in the room. Horror had crossed his fevered face, and he tried to rise on his own and failed.
“El — Elizabeth, no — the padre, get —”
“There is no one. It is only me. Be still and let me help you. It does not signify.”
“It does.” His eyes, when they found her, were wet, and it was not the fever. “You should not — a wife should not —”