Stay
XXXV
Elizabeth’s hours had become a relentless circle that never covered new ground, save when it expanded or contracted.
After seven days, Darcy’s shivers were no longer as deep and aching, and the sweats no longer soaked the entire bed.
He had gone an entire day without delirium, and was now sleeping in what almost looked like peaceful recovery.
She had not taken her eyes off him since dawn. It had come upon him suddenly, and she was trying not to permit herself to believe it, but the fact was plain. His brow was cooler. His stomach had not protested when she made him drink the broth with bread soaked in it.
Today, for the first time, there was nothing for her to do but watch him sleep.
Padre Ignacio found her thus — sitting with her hands empty in her lap, watching Darcy breathe as though watching could keep him doing it. He stood in the doorway a moment, and then he went away and came back with a small, untidy bundle of papers under his arm.
“You read English,” he said in Spanish. “You write — you are educated, yes?”
Elizabeth roused to her feet and came to meet him halfway across the room. “Yes, very well,” she replied in his own tongue. “What are these?”
He put them into her hands and ran his fingers through his thinning hair.
He shook his head and gestured at the papers, telling her that many of them were to do with his clerical duties, while others had been brought to him because he was one of the few men in the town with an education, but speaking English had never been a part of that.
He told her, somewhat ruefully, that apart from Spanish, he had only his Church Latin and a bit of French.
Elizabeth returned to her chair by Darcy’s bed and laid the papers on the little table.
Letters. Some in a laborious, blotted English that looked like the work of someone trying to answer previous documents but who only understood the cognates, not the words or the proper structure of a sentence.
She sorted through them and the texture of his clerical life and duties came up off the pages: appeals for grain, for blankets, for the return of a requisitioned building; a dispute over a wagon; a careful, dignified, badly-worded request that a Captain White of the British commissariat might see his way to releasing a portion of stores for the sick and the orphaned of the parish, of whom the padre had — she turned the page — a very great many.
“You must ask the British for all this?”
He held up his hands. “First the French, now the British. They have what I need — the medicine, the flour, the beds. They answer letters, if the letters are written so a busy officer will read them and not laugh. Mine, they laugh at, I think. And then they are slow.” He tapped the blotted page. “They would not laugh if you wrote.”
“Not at my grammar, at least.” She spread the requests over the table and began grouping them, sorting them by the date at the top. This would only take her a few hours, but by the look of the padre’s letters, she might gain for him supplies worth a month of prayers.
“I will write so he could not decently refuse and would be a little ashamed of himself if he tried. Give me a pen, Padre. I shall earn our board yet. God knows we cannot pay it at the moment, but when we return to England —”
“You have paid it.” His hand went to the cross at his hip. “This will buy the flour for a month and the medicine I had none of. It will bury some and feed more. You owe nothing.”
“But you have fed us, nursed us and cared for our mules. I saw you out the window this morning, Padre, giving them hay and oats, and all of that has a cost.”
He smiled gently and put his hand on the letters. “Who knows? You may save another life, Senora.”
He left the room and returned a moment later with pen, ink, and more paper. “You watch him so hard, he might burn from it. Rest your eyes on something else, Senora. Worry makes a person sick. Work makes a mind easy.”
“What makes my mind easy is him,” she said, looking up at Darcy. “He is better today.”
Ignacio followed the direction of her eyes. “He is resting. Let him rest, Senora.”
She moved the little table by the window where the light was better, turned it so she could see the bed, and she began to work.
It was extraordinary, how the work made her feel a little more like herself, gave her mind the diversion it needed to cease the exhausting cycle of worry.
Translating the priest's blunt, earnest Spanish into the smooth, deferential, faintly steely English that would command respect was a thing she had done a hundred times at her uncle's elbow.
She could do it without much concentration, which was well, for she had only a little to spare.
The undersigned begs leave to represent to Captain White…
She kept glancing up to be sure that Darcy was still sleeping, still breathing without the feverish tossing, and each time it was still true.
His breathing had actually gone deeper and slower, and it was losing that reedy snag that had frightened her for days.
The paroxysm she had braced for at midday had not come, or had come so faintly she had missed it.
Once, she looked up to find his eyes on her. He must have been watching for a minute or more, and he smiled when she saw him. “Good afternoon, Mrs Darcy.”
She chuckled a little, then rose to sit beside him on the bed. She brushed the hair off his forehead with her fingertips. “I told you not to call me that,” she whispered.
“Right. I will try to remember that, Senora Darcy.” His eyes closed, but the faint smile remained. A moment later, his face was slack once more, and he had gone under again.
She stayed there, her hand testing his brow. Still hot, but not as hot as yesterday. Perhaps Ignacio’s prayers had not gone unheard. Perhaps Darcy would see Santander, and Pemberley again, after all.
“He is better today,” she said, when Ignacio came to collect the first of the fair-copied letters. “You see it? He is cooler. He has slept properly, and kept the broth, and he is quieter. The worst of it is passing. Is it not?”
Ignacio crossed to the bed. He put the back of his hand to Darcy's face, to his throat, and stood a moment. Elizabeth watched his face and waited for it to give her the reassurance she was craving.
It did not.
“He is cooler now,” the priest said. “This is good. Rest is good. Broth is good.” He straightened.
“But I have seen a fever be kind in the afternoon and cruel again by dark. It goes and it comes. It lets a man rise up far enough to be glad, and those who love him grow easy, and then —” he made a small gesture, a hand turning over.
“I do not say it will. I say only do not put the whole of your heart on one good afternoon. I have seen good afternoons before.”
Her face fell, and her heart with it. “You are very bracing, Padre. One might almost think you had no faith.”
“Faith costs more than fear, when it is disappointed. Fear, you are braced for. Faith, you are not.” He gathered the letter she had written. “Thank you. The captain will be ashamed of himself and will send the flour.”
“You have not yet read it. It may contain little more than fluff and nonsense.”
He shook his head. “Not by your hand. You have a gift for making men do right against their inclination.” He looked from the letter to her, and to Darcy, and back. “It is a useful gift in a wife.”
He left her with the pen and the papers, and Elizabeth turned back to the bed, where Darcy slept on.
She tried to heed the priest's caution and could not, quite, because he was better, she could see that he was better, and after a week at the floor of the world, a person had to be allowed to hope for one afternoon.
She bent back to the letters. She wrote. Every few minutes, she looked up, and he was still breathing slow and deep in the good light, and she let herself, against all counsel, begin to believe that they were through the worst of it.
It came for him in the dark, the way the priest had said it would, and it came worse than anything the first days had taught her to fear, because this time she had let herself believe.
She woke with a start. When had she fallen asleep?
She had meant only to rest her eyes — she had been so easy by evening, so lulled by the long good afternoon, that she had let herself lie down beside him, her hand resting over his beating heart, and her guard, for the first time in a week, all the way down.
The bed frame was knocking, a hard, arrhythmic banging against the wall that, for only an instant, recalled another room, a warmer room in Vitoria.
Before the terror, when there was only heat and forbidden desire between them.
Now, the heat was an inferno, and his body the only thing being consumed.
His teeth were clattering like iron hooves over cobblestones.
His breath was sawing, and the whole great length of his frame shook the bed on its legs.
She was across the room before she was properly awake. She had the door open, shouting, “Padre! ?Ven rápido, me temo que se está muriendo!”
She never waited to find out if the padre heard her. He often burned candles at midnight in the church, and why would he hover over one sick Englishman? Darcy had been better this afternoon!
She raced back to the bed, her hands sprawling over his quaking form.
He was rigid and shuddering both at once, which should not have been possible, his jaw clamped and juddering, his hands fisted in the blanket she had shared with him only moments ago.
He was cold to look at and burning to touch, worse than before, hotter than her hand could easily bear, the fever come back up through him like a tide that had only gone out to gather itself.