Chapter 37 A Miracle
A MIRACLE
Outside Longbourn, I stopped as I passed the draca house.
The coach horses were blowing and stamping, cooling in the night air. My uncle had accepted my plea and hired four-horse teams. That made for a grueling but fast two-day trip home—days that passed in fear for Jane and Lydia, and in my own confused, lonely haze.
In the sparse light of the coach lanterns, our firedrake glistened, motionless on his perch, his eyes glinting like black jewels.
I cast my awareness to him.
This time, there was no wild squawk or retreat. Just sullen resistance. A crystal wall, gentler than the red fury when the tyke threw me out, but still a wall.
The drake began to hiss.
“Why do you fight me?” I whispered. I remembered the images he had shown before. Cages and traps.
“Lizzy?” asked my aunt, stopping beside me. I resumed walking to our door.
We had arrived as my family prepared for bed, and it was a reunion in nightclothes, happy and relieved and tearful and fraught. I hugged everyone and deferred questions about my hurt face while my uncle greeted my father in serious tones.
Mary hugged me tight, then murmured, “Mamma is retired with nerves.” I heard my mother call from upstairs, demanding I attend her. “But you must see Jane first.” Jane had not come down to greet me.
“Let us go.” I already held the bottle of medicine. I had dug it out a mile from home, clutching it like a talisman.
In our room, Jane lay curled under the bed covers. I stroked her hair. “Jane, darling. I am back.”
Her face turned to me, and I stifled a gasp. Her bones stretched her skin like paper, gaunt and fragile as a bird. The sunken skin under her eyes was as dark as soot.
Like feathers, her wasted fingers traced my bruised cheek, which had turned a mottled purple and ugly yellowish-green. “You are changing,” she whispered. “You will be a dark fairy, with black wings.”
I held her. It was like embracing a bundle of sticks.
Mary had read the paper tied to the medicine, and she sat down beside us.
“Lizzy has brought medicine for you.” She held out a teaspoon full of white liquid.
Jane dutifully swallowed, then made a child’s disgusted face.
I laughed, and then Mary laughed, and then we were all laughing in one desperate embrace.
My aunt and I visited Mamma. I tried to be patient while she rattled on about the agonies of her nerves. Then I went down to my father, who was in his library with my uncle.
“Papa,” I said from the doorway, and he beckoned me in. He had aged twenty years, his eyes red-veined, his white hair unkempt.
“Your uncle and I are discussing the recovery of Lydia,” he said. “Or whatever remote chance of that remains.”
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“Colonel Forster is ashamed to have failed in his protection of my daughter and has expended great effort to track them. First to London, where we feared they had remained. But they proceeded farther.”
“To Scotland?” I asked with a spark of hope. Maybe they had married.
“He has reason to suspect Derbyshire. Wickham had gambling debts in London, and so fled. But he grew up in Derbyshire and has nefarious acquaintances to shelter him.” He added dryly, “Doubtless my freshly nefarious daughter will be welcome.”
“Then they have been together, unmarried, for more than a week.” My hope was gone.
“Yes. Rumor already spreads amongst our neighbors.” My father steepled his fingers. “Lizzy, you warned me of the dangers of permitting Lydia such freedom, and you have proved most wise. The blame is mine.”
“I think the blame is Lydia’s. Or Wickham’s.”
“Lydia is a child who should have been protected. For once, let me feel the blame I deserve. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass soon enough.” I reached out, and we held each other’s fingers.
He exhaled a long, uneven breath. “I am thankful you have returned. It frees me to go after her.”
“You are not well enough,” I protested.
“I must be well enough. This is a father’s responsibility. I will not shirk it.”
“Let me go with you,” my uncle said. That made me wince. I had just dragged my uncle through a strenuous sprint from Derbyshire, and he offered to reverse that.
“I will meet Colonel Forster there,” my father told him. “That is sufficient. You have children of your own to love and care for.”
My father shifted his hand to hold mine firmly, as if we were two gentlemen. As if we were equals. “Lizzy, your mother is distraught. Jane is ill. I rely on your courage and good sense. You must be the rock of Longbourn until I return.”
I swallowed against a lump in my throat and nodded.
The morning dawned with a miracle.
“Lizzy!” Jane’s voice was concerned. “What has happened to your face?”
I blinked groggily. Exhaustion and my own bed had provided my first proper sleep in days. “That is a long story. I am most happy to be home.”
“Your hair is frightful.” A brush pulled. But the stroke trembled.
Remembering, I sat up in bed, astonished.
Jane was frowning at my tangles. “Had you no maid?”
Her face was more shocking by daylight. Her cheeks clung under her cheekbones. Only her lips remained full, suspended too prominently by her teeth.
But her eyes were focused and loving, and she held a brush, just as we sometimes brushed each other’s hair when we were younger.
“It is good to see you more yourself,” I said. After Mr. Darcy’s warnings, I was intoxicated by relief.
“I feel much better,” Jane said. “It was gray while you were gone. There was mist even in the house.” She brightened. “Shall we see if breakfast is out?”
Our cook, who scowled until noon, cooed and fussed over my bruised cheek. When Jane suggested—with no mention of fairies—that I must be hungry from my trip, she vanished toward the kitchen, crying, “It’s grand to have our two eldest down for breakfast again!”
“I believe we shall be served more than toast today,” I said. A tremendous pounding of pots and scolding of scullery maids had risen.
“Good. I am hungry,” Jane said.
After crumpets, soft boiled eggs, sausage, and strong tea, Papa departed north by hired coach to meet Colonel Forster in Taddington, the town that the Gardiners and I had planned to visit before we were turned aside by the sandy-haired man wearing a slovenly militia uniform.
That was another mystery—French spies in the center of England seeking books on l’enfant du lac, the child of the lake. But I had enough puzzles without speculating about the war between England and France.
I touched a finger to my cheek. Seconds after he struck me, the sandy-haired man was dead, killed by Mr. Darcy. The last mark of a man’s life was a fading bruise on my cheek. That seemed sad.
At luncheon, I opened a jar of water from Pemberley lake, poured some in a teacup, and gave it to Jane. She drank it.
“How does it feel?” I asked breathlessly.
“Like water?” she offered, eyeing me like I was mad.
Days ticked by in the settled routine of home. I played my role by rote, unconvinced any of this was real. Layers of worry cocooned me—for Jane, for Lydia, for Papa—and beneath that, buried as deep as I could force it, there was a canker of selfish loss.
Mamma kept to her bed, raving of her nerves and ranting of Mr. Wickham “who was so handsome in his red coat.” Kitty, chagrined and sad, sat with her often. Kitty had been profoundly reprimanded by my father after she confessed knowledge of Lydia’s plan from their private letters.
On the third day, Jane became frightened by the shadows under the laurel hedge and ran inside to hide.
On the fourth, she cried that fairies were spitting foulness on her food.
On the sixth, she refused to come down for meals, and ate a slice of toast in our room, crushing it into a mass she hid in her hands while her eyes darted.
Mary and I cajoled and begged for a quarter hour to have her take her spoonful of medicine. I convinced her by saying Mr. Bingley had sent it as a gift. A minute after she swallowed, she collapsed into a moaning slumber.
Mary left and returned, settling herself in our room and stacking three books beside her chair.
“Lizzy,” she whispered. “Go and rest. I shall watch her.”
I had been staring blankly.
As I went down the stairs, a letter arrived from my father.