Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Darcy had never been nursed before. He had been tended, certainly, by paid professionals with clean linen and laudanum, who approached their duties with quiet, detached efficiency.
He had been looked after by Mrs Reynolds after a fall from a horse at sixteen, and by a ship's surgeon after a bout of seasickness on his first Channel crossing.
A London physician had overseen his care during the influenza that took Pemberley's housekeeper and two footmen.
That illness had left Darcy with a cough that lasted six weeks, and a renewed appreciation for his own mortality.
None of those people had truly nursed him. Elizabeth nursed him.
She directed his recovery the way she directed the island: thoroughly, and without consultation.
Her competence was so considerable that objecting to it would have required far more energy than he possessed.
She changed his bandage twice a day using strips torn from salvaged sailcloth.
She boiled water at the spring, letting it cool to lukewarm before cleaning the wound.
Her physical gentleness wholly contradicted the firmness of her instructions, which were delivered strictly as commands rather than requests.
“Sit up,” she would say. “Drink this. Do not move. I said do not move, Fitzwilliam; the concept is not complex.”
She fed him. She had miraculously rebuilt the fire within hours of the storm's passing. She used dry wood she had discovered in a crevice on the far side of the hill weeks ago, having quietly noted it as potential emergency fuel. That foresight was now keeping them alive.
She fed him a thin fish broth, made from the morning's catch boiled with wild thyme and the last of the dried figs. The combination was far from pleasant, but it was nutritious. She delivered it to him in the coconut cup with the firm expectation that he would drink all of it.
He drank all of it.
She had even repaired the tower. She could not manage the upper level alone, but she had swept the lower room of debris and dried the floor with salvaged cloth.
She restored it to a habitable condition in a single day of unceasing work.
He watched her from the pallet where she had installed him, strictly forbidden to stand up without assistance.
He obeyed the instruction; he had attempted to stand on the first morning, and the resulting dizziness had sent him crashing back to the pallet, proving her point immediately.
She was magnificent. It was not a word he used loosely.
He had applied it to Pemberley, to certain views from the hills in Derbyshire, and to his mother's portrait in the gallery.
He had never before applied it to a person.
Yet, watching Elizabeth dry fish on the rocks outside the tower was a revelation.
Her torn dress was tied at the waist with rope, her hair was bound in sailcloth, and her bare feet stood firmly on the hot stone.
She turned the fillets with brisk, cheerful efficiency.
She was magnificent, and the word was well earned.
She had carried them both. For three days, while he lay on the pallet and his body repaired itself with maddening slowness, she managed everything.
She secured the food, the fire, the water, and the tower, performing the daily maintenance of survival quite alone.
She did not complain. She worked, she fed him, and she changed his bandage.
In the evenings, she sat beside him and read aloud from the waterlogged Italian novel.
Her pronunciation bore no resemblance to actual Italian, and her dramatic interpretation was wildly inventive. It was quite perfect.
“The hero has finally stopped proposing,” she announced on the third evening, squinting at the water-damaged pages by firelight.
“Unless this is a completely different kind of proposal. My Italian does not distinguish between a proposal of marriage and a proposal of business, and the context suggests it might be both.”
“In Italian fiction, the distinction is often immaterial.”
“How reassuring. In English fiction the distinction is the entire plot. I begin to understand why Italian novels are shorter.”
He laughed. The sudden movement hurt his side terribly, but the pain was worth it.
Laughing was the first thing that had felt like his true self since the fever broke.
Feeling like himself was a gift she gave him with every dry observation and every badly pronounced Italian word.
Her wit was a medicine no physician could have prescribed.
On the fourth day he was strong enough to walk.
She permitted it, though the permission was highly conditional.
It involved particular instructions about distance, pace, and the exact circumstances under which he was to sit down immediately and not argue.
The rules were delivered with the firm authority of a woman who had spent three days in sole command of a household, and had no intention of relinquishing it simply because the other occupant could now stand.
They walked slowly to the cove. His legs were far weaker than he wanted them to be.
It was a humiliation he bore with enforced patience; Elizabeth had ordered him not to be stupid about his limitations.
She watched him constantly, with the particular, devoted attention of someone who had almost lost him, and refused to look away again.
The cove was fundamentally changed. The storm had rearranged the sand, piling it higher on the south side and scooping it away from the north.
There was new debris on the waterline: wood, rope, and pieces of what might have been a barrel.
The sea had delivered wreckage once again.
Elizabeth was already assessing the debris with the acquisitive eye of a woman who wasted nothing whatsoever.
“Planks,” she said. “Good ones. And rope. The tower's upper level needs a new framework before we can re-lay the stones. These will do.”
“You are planning repairs.”
“I am planning repairs.”
“The repairs will require lifting,” Darcy pointed out. “The lifting will require two people.”
“The lifting will require two people when both are capable of it, which you are currently not. The lifting will wait. The planning, however, does not need to wait. I can plan while you convalesce, and the scheme will be ready when you are.”
He sat heavily on the sand. She had directed him to sit, and he obeyed. Over the past three days, her preferences had acquired the full force of natural law.
He watched her sort the debris. She was efficient and systematic, grouping pieces by material, size, and potential use.
She placed planks in one pile, rope in another, and scraps of canvas in a third.
She worked with a focused, purposeful energy.
She was visibly thinner than she had been five weeks ago, but she was stronger than she had ever been.
“Elizabeth.”
She looked up from a length of rope she was coiling. Her intent, absorbed expression softened the moment her eyes found his.
“You kept me alive,” he said.
“You kept yourself alive. The fever broke on its own. I merely provided commentary.”
“You provided twelve hours of commentary about a bench in Hertfordshire while holding my head in your lap in the rain. That is not merely commentary. That is a sustained act of care that I am not certain I could have matched.”
“You would have matched it. You would have talked about Pemberley, which has considerably more material than Longbourn. You could have talked for days about the grounds alone.”
“I would have talked about you.”
She went completely still, pausing her work on the rope. Her dark, steady eyes rested on his face. He had spent five weeks learning the precise geography of her expressions.
“That would have been a poor approach,” she said. “You would have run out of material in an hour.”
“I would not have run out of material in a lifetime.”
“Fitzwilliam.”
“It is true. I would have talked about the way you hum while you work. I would have detailed the way you sleep with your fist tucked under your chin. I would have recounted how you stood in a stone tower, a mere two months after refusing me, and bravely kissed me. I would not have run out.”
She looked at the rope in her hands, and then back at him. She set the rope down with deliberate care. She was entirely finished with sorting debris, and finished pretending that it was what she wanted to be doing.
She crossed the sand and sat beside him, pressing her shoulder firmly against his.
“I was terribly afraid during the fever,” she confessed quietly.
“I was afraid in a way I have not been since the shipwreck. The shipwreck was rapid chaos, but the fever was so agonisingly slow. I sat with you for twelve hours, terrified for every one of them. I talked because it was the only weapon I had against the silence. Giving into the silence felt like giving up, and I will never give up on you.”
He put his arm around her. The sudden movement pulled painfully at his side, but he dismissed the agony. He needed to hold her. The great need wholly overrode the wound, his weakness, and her strict instructions to avoid unnecessary movement.
She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest. The afternoon sun was warm on the sand, and the sea washed quietly against the shore. The island held them exactly as it had since the beginning—indifferent, wild, and quite present.
“I heard you,” he said softly. “During the fever, I heard your voice. I did not always understand the words, but your voice was a thread in the dark. I followed that thread back.”
“From where?”
“From wherever the fever took me. I do not remember it clearly. It was dark and confused, and I felt as though I was very far from everything. But your voice was a constant anchor, and I followed it.”
“You followed my voice out of a fever.”