Chapter Eight #3
Poor Sally was busy scrubbing the counters, but she gave Elizabeth a friendly smile, and Elizabeth returned it.
Elizabeth just had a quick conversation with the cook, to ensure that there would be milk available and the fire kept up so it could be warmed without difficulty when it came time to change the poultice overnight.
She added instructions about not letting the bone broth for Mr. Darcy get too rich, and then Elizabeth agreed with the cook that everything was, in fact, under excellent management.
Elizabeth had not experienced such a thing since she left Longbourn.
Even when she and Mr. Wickham had money, they had not ever tried to keep the large establishment that an estate of two thousand a year could support. They only had kept two female servants, and Elizabeth often needed to help in the kitchen or with serving when they had many guests.
That made it easier for her when there were no servants at all.
When she first married Wickham, Elizabeth had done that work with joy in her heart: She had married the man she loved.
They were both exceeding young, and when he established himself in his career these difficulties would disappear.
Also, Elizabeth always knew that even when her husband had fully established himself, his position would never be so great as that of her father.
Marrying a gentleman with the large lands and substantial income of her father had not been her aim.
As a child, Elizabeth often ran about with the children of the servants, far more than Jane or Mary. Perhaps the memory of her childhood companions helped her settle her spirit when she realized that she would not be able to live as a gentlewoman was expected to.
The afternoon passed pleasantly.
Mr. Darcy engaged George in faux serious conversations, and Elizabeth liked to watch that. For her own part, after changing Mr. Darcy’s bandage once more, Elizabeth went upstairs to nap with Emily.
The room was unpleasantly hot, but the sea breezes through the open windows relieved the oppression somewhat. Elizabeth found that despite her fatigue, she could not sleep at all for worrying.
At times she tried to tell herself that she had every right to be a burden still on her parents.
After all, she had received nothing of her portion of her mother’s fortune.
The income from a thousand pounds was a great deal of money.
After the difficulties she had lived through since Mr. Wickham had left her, she had nothing but disdain for the attitude that thought that was nothing.
With forty pounds a year, one could rent a tiny house, afford food and clothes for two growing children, and even hire a girl for half days to help with cleaning once or twice a week.
Elizabeth felt sick at the fact that her mind was insistently arguing that she could ask Papa for money now. It made her miserable. She would not let this temptation to ask something win.
Papa had told her: “When you realize that you have made a mistake, I promise that I will help you.”
If he’d told her that he despised her and he would never do anything for her, she wouldn’t have sick guilt gnawing at her guts. If he had told her that, she might have even been able to say that she had made a mistake and beg for forgiveness now.
She could think of no good solution.
When the time for bed came, Colonel Fitzwilliam looked askance at Elizabeth’s plan to remain in the drawing room with Mr. Darcy for the whole night.
“No, no. That is more than half the distance to a scheme,” he said.
“Do not be ridiculous. No one could imagine anything salacious,” Elizabeth said. “He is recovering from gunshot, and I am a recently widowed woman. A respectable creature.”
Mr. Darcy offered, “I truly think, Mrs. Wickham, that you would be more comfortable upstairs, and now that we have so many servants, one of the manservants can sleep on a cot in here.”
“A man whom none of us know?” Colonel Fitzwilliam replied. “No. I’ll sleep with you. I can care for any wounded man. It will not be the first time.”
“If that is your preference,” Elizabeth said. “Then have me woken to change the bandage.”
“It is my preference,” Colonel Fitzwilliam replied.
Mr. Darcy’s expression suggested to Elizabeth that he would have preferred for her to remain, and that his suggestion that she sleep in her own room had been made from duty, rather than preference.
Elizabeth did not know if she should trust Colonel Fitzwilliam to wake up if the patient needed anything—or Mr. Darcy to clearly ask his cousin for help if it was necessary.
What was odd to Elizabeth was her own decided reluctance to abandon the post of nurse.
She had a vague feeling around the role, one that she suspected was romantic, girlish, and that should be completely despised.
Elizabeth went upstairs and soon both George and Emily climbed into the bed with her, and they all fell asleep in a big heap.
Some hours later Elizabeth started awake.
It was time to change Mr. Darcy’s bandage again. During the times that she had worked as a nurse, she had developed a sense of when the clock would tell her that it was time to awake.
Less than half a minute after she had started awake, as Elizabeth was mentally readying herself to groan to her feet (carefully so as to not wake either of the children), there was a soft knock on the door, and then it was slowly opened.
Elizabeth stood and went to the door.
Sally’s voice said out of the dark, “Ma’am, it’s time to change the bandage. I’ve heated the milk to the proper temperature.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. She was pleased by the servant’s initiative, though she worried that the milk would be far too hot and scalded by the time that she got to the kitchen.
In fact, the milk was fine, only a little too hot, and quickly Elizabeth prepared another poultice.
As she waited for it cool to the point it would not harm the skin, Sally chattered about the things that she had been made to do, but also how much cleaner and better run the place was now that there were other servants.
“Are you to go to bed now that you’ve woken me?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Brown wants me to wake Sarah next, to be the one to wake everyone in the morning, and to be available if Mr. Darcy should need anything, him being an invalid—I volunteered to stay up.
Mrs. Brown worried that I might fall asleep, but I assured her I never would do no such thing, and I haven’t. ”
“No, and you were quite punctual.”
Elizabeth went to the drawing room. Colonel Fitzwilliam neatly slept on the sofa in his shirtsleeves and breeches, rather than a night shirt.
Elizabeth wondered if the gentleman could possibly be comfortable.
But he was a veteran campaigner, and she had heard enough from such men to never doubt their capacities in the matter of sleeping in uncomfortable situations.
She softly touched Mr. Darcy on his shoulder.
He startled awake with a half shriek, and he looked at her in the low candlelight with wide eyes.
They stared at each other for almost too long. Something about his face made Elizabeth’s heart beat harder. One of the men whom Colonel Fitzwilliam had hired had shaved Mr. Darcy, and the clean face made him look the haughty gentleman.
“I had such a dream.”
“I can well imagine,” Elizabeth replied as she undid the bandage on his chest. The intimacy of being so close to a gentleman while changing the dressing had never affected her before. Even with Mr. Denny, when she cared for Wickham’s gunshot friend, it had been a joke and awkward.
She had certainly not felt anything of attraction or a desire to touch him further.
It annoyed her. That Colonel Fitzwilliams slept on the couch, not snoring, made that worse.
“It was of the duel.”
“Your dream?”
“I do not know if it was dream, or a truth that goes deeper than the reality of our lives,” Mr. Darcy slowly said. “I think it was such a thing.”
“Did you dream that you were the one shot through the heart?” Elizabeth asked. “The terror of such a thing will be revisited by the fevered mind again and again.”
“No,” Mr. Darcy said. He caught her hand as she pulled the poultice soaked with blood and pus away. His hand was hotly fevered, yet soft and strong. “It was worse by far. You should despise me.”
“Mr. Darcy, I begin to think this is your ordinary late night mood. Have we not already established that you despise yourself enough for both of us?”
“He deloped, and then I shot him.”
For a moment Elizabeth was confused by this statement, for it was the opposite of what she had been told had been the course of the duel. “That is what you did within your dream?”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. She could not stop herself. “Mr. Darcy. You would not have done such a thing.”
“How do you know? I do not know. I think my cousin,” he gestured towards Colonel Fitzwilliam’s sleeping form, “would have.”
“Your cousin has many virtues. I can already perceive them. But an excess of the quality of mercy does not seem likely to be one.”
Mr. Darcy grunted.
Elizabeth placed the new poultice and tied it. She smiled at him, “Let me see if I can remember the line, ‘I have passed such a miserable night, so full of ugly dreams and ugly sights, that I as a Christian man would not spend another such night.”
“What is that from?” Darcy asked.
“Richard III, when the Duke of Clarence is waiting his execution.”
“Oh, yes, yes. I remember now. I memorized part of the speech also—'ah, keeper, keeper, I have done these things that now give testimony against my soul.’ Quite proper for my situation. I wish…I wish beyond anything else that I could make it to have never happened.”
“And that is why I know that you would not have shot him if my husband had deloped.”
“It nearly was so. I think I would have preferred had he killed me.”
“You would not have. You would not have been able to prefer anything, being dead.”
“Do you not believe in heaven and in hell?”