Chapter 3 #2
“Perhaps you ought not to attempt to say anything for now,” Elizabeth said, frowning. “I daresay I shall scarcely notice the difference, and your voice will no doubt return more quickly if you allow your throat to heal first.”
“What has happened to my throat?” he mouthed urgently, wild to comprehend why he had no voice.
She pulled an apologetic face and shook her head. “Could you say the words more slowly? I cannot understand you.”
He held out both hands in as close an approximation to a shrug as he could manage without moving his shoulders and mouthed, “What happened?”
Elizabeth frowned at his lips, silently mimicking their movements with her own as she attempted to comprehend his meaning. When she did, she transferred her frown to his eyes. “You do not remember?”
Darcy forgot not to shake his head and winced at another wave of pain.
“Forgive me. No more yes or no questions. Mr Darcy, you have been kicked by a horse.”
God help him, he was still delusional! “What?” he mouthed, fierce despite his muteness, for his incomprehension terrified him. “How can that be?”
“You were attempting to cut it free.”
He continued to look at her, still none the wiser.
She took a deep breath, then exhaled and shook her head decisively. “It is not a brief explanation. Allow me to attend to your wound before this water cools, else I shall have to heat more. After that, I shall explain everything.”
Darcy would have groaned had he been able, for everything Elizabeth said confused him more. Why was she heating her own water? Where were they that there were no servants to even boil a kettle? Why, in God’s name, were either of them there?
“Attend to my wound?” he repeated stupidly.
“I need to change the bandages, or it will fester.”
“No!” Darcy was not sure to what he was objecting; anything touching the monstrous rawness at his neck, it being Elizabeth who would do so, or simply having been injured in the first place. His breathing had grown too fast; it was hurting his throat and making an unearthly sound.
“No?” Elizabeth repeated, not unkindly but with a hint of impatience. “Mr Darcy, I am aware that you are very unwell, but please try to understand me. Your wound is unstitched. It was in need of redressing even before your ill-advised attempt to get out of bed. Now, I should say it is essential.”
The thrum of alarm pulsed mercilessly in Darcy’s ears. A wound severe enough to require stitching, but which had not been—what manner of hell was this?
“Should you like some brandy before I begin?”
He blinked her countenance back into focus.
He had meant to say something of it being too much to ask that she perform the task, but befogged with pain, his mind had wandered again, and she had taken his silence for consent.
Unable to think of a sensible reason to refuse, he nodded yes to the brandy, quailed as pain ignited under his chin, opened his mouth to cry out, choked before any sound escaped and mouthed a thoroughly uncivil imprecation.
Elizabeth raised both eyebrows, but if she recognised his incivility, she was good enough not to mention it, and said instead, “We must devise a better way to communicate. One that does not require you to nod or shake your head. Perhaps you could blink once for yes and twice for no?”
A simple solution—he blinked once.
“No?” she replied dubiously.
He frowned and blinked once again.
“Yes? Stop blinking!”
He lifted his hands in another shrug.
“Just blink once if you agree,” Elizabeth said again, very slowly, as though speaking to a child.
Doing his best to conceal his exasperation, Darcy squeezed his eyes closed overlong, then opened them again—one unmistakable blink.
Elizabeth smirked. “You keep blinking again after you have said yes.”
Panic and pain melted away as Darcy beheld her expression.
It felt an awfully long time that he been longing to see her eyes gleam with mirth in that manner.
He reeled at the intensity with which he felt the effect, having thought to have reasoned himself out of any susceptibility to her charms weeks ago.
“There is no need to look so cross. You cannot help blinking. It is evidently not a sound suggestion. Why not extend your forefinger to say no?”
Darcy did as she suggested.
“Aye, that works well enough. I cannot mistake you when you look so much as though you are scolding me. And for yes, you could—"
He dipped his extended finger to touch the back of his other hand.
“That will do well enough.” She twisted away to collect something from the table.
“Now, to avoid the necessity for any more answers of any sort, I intend to spoon this brandy into you until you stop glowering at me.” She held the bottle up to the window and squinted at it. “I do hope we have enough.”
He smiled at her teasing, but stopped again directly, for he had no intention of worsening his plight or undoing weeks of struggles by being drawn back in at the very first hint of Elizabeth’s playfulness.
Darcy spluttered and choked down as much brandy as he could then pushed away the next spoonful Elizabeth brought to his lips. His pain had not much abated and certainly not enough to compensate for the sting of attempting to swallow the acrid swill. God, but he was tired!
“Are you ready?” Elizabeth enquired then immediately added, “Do not nod! I ought not to have asked. You will just have to accustom yourself to being told what to do.” He heard her dip something in the water and wring it out. “It will make a nice change from you directing everybody else’s affairs.”
He frowned over her meaning until something hot touched his throat and crawled in every direction over his skin. He gasped—a painful and noisy affair—and attempted to pull away from it but succeeded only in hurting himself more.
“I know it pains you,” Elizabeth said, “but I must soak these bandages, or I fear I will reopen whatever has begun to heal when I take them off.”
He looked in dismay at the bloodied cloth in her hand.
She looked from him to it and back. “I shall not lie to you, sir—there was a good deal of blood.”
He wondered vaguely whether having bled a lot would account for the tingling warmth that was presently blooming in his fingers and toes.
Elizabeth reapplied the damp cloth, and the crawling heat returned as water soaked into the bandages.
Her brow contracted as she applied herself to the task, and her gaze flicked frequently to his as though to gauge his condition.
Being even less certain of that than she, Darcy was able to offer nothing by way of encouragement and could only watch her silently as she worked.
Her hair was different, pinned simply and escaping from its confines in a dozen places.
One wisp, hanging by her temple, bounced hypnotically each time she leant over him.
Her touch was soporific in its gentleness.
Every point at which his distress grew too great, she paused and waited for him to recover himself, her gaze steady and her smile encouraging.
He had lied to himself; she was far prettier than his memory had allowed her to be.
When she wiped her brow with the back of her hand and inadvertently smeared his blood across her face, he groaned inwardly.
This was too gruesome a task for so respectable and genteel a woman. “Why you?”
He had meant to mutter it only to himself, forgetting Elizabeth was poised to read his lips, and he started when she said, heatedly, “There is nobody else! I suppose you would rather avoid the indignity, but the alternative is that I leave you to moulder, perchance to die, and I refuse to believe there is not somebody, somewhere in the world, who would care if you did.”
She had mistaken him, of course, but he was diverted by her feisty retort, so reminiscent of their every exchange at Netherfield.
He extended his forefinger to contradict her and gave the silent explanation, “That was not my meaning.” He could easily perceive she had not managed to catch his words, and he tried again.
“I am sorry for you.” On a whim, he reached up and wiped the blood from her forehead with his shirt cuff.
He pointed at her and mouthed, “Lovely.” Then he pointed at his injury and mouthed, “Not lovely.”
She pulled a sceptical face and pointed at him. “Drunk.”
He could not help but laugh and, hence, gag.
He sucked in a slow, rasping breath and held it until the risk of coughing, sniggering, or indeed suffocating passed.
When it had, he gestured for her to continue and squeezed his eyes closed in readiness.
He began to suspect she might be right when the world began to spin in slow, nauseating revolutions.
Still, he supposed that above four-and-twenty hours without food would leave a man susceptible to two or three dozen spoonfuls of cheap alcohol.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.
The patches of mildew swirled and bloomed into patterns. One was shaped just like a pineapple.
“Mr Darcy? I have finished washing it. Sir? Are you well?”
He rolled his head back to squint at Elizabeth but was unsure how to answer. He was in a vast amount of pain, devilishly confused, prodigiously drunk, and very much enamoured of the woman responsible for most of these misfortunes. He wrinkled his nose in ambivalence.
Elizabeth’s mouth twitched, and her eyes shone in that way they always did when something diverted her. “A little less brandy next time, perhaps.”
“I would prefer less horse.”
It took Elizabeth a moment of studying his lips before she comprehended him.
Her delayed burst of laughter surprised and delighted him, though he was rather distracted when she abruptly split in two, and each version of her drifted a foot apart from the other before snapping back to not quite line up. Both of her smiles were sublime.
“Perhaps I ought to give you nothing but brandy if we are to survive this predicament. Inebriation suits you rather better than hubris.” She selected a strip of clean cloth from the table, explaining to him as she did that she would now re-dress his wound.
Darcy held up a hand to forestall her and mouthed, “Mirror?”
She hesitated, evidently unwilling to comply.
Naturally, that begged the question, “Bad?”
She held his gaze and replied gently but without preamble, “Yes, it is quite bad.”
“Show me?”
“Why not wait until it is better healed? There is no advantage in distressing yourself.”
“You are not distressed.”
She frowned over his words, repeating them herself until they were familiar enough to recognise. “I am…not…distre— ’Tis not my throat!”
He had forgotten her obstinacy, though he ought not to have done, for he was well acquainted with it.
The dogged manner in which she had harried him at Bingley’s ball for details of his dispute with Wickham, with the evident purpose of exonerating the fiend, had haunted him for many weeks now.
Nevertheless, her obduracy was no match for the recalcitrance of a drunkard.
He fixed her in his gaze and persisted, mouthing, “I would see.”
Elizabeth sighed and squared her shoulders. “As you wish.” She left his side and returned with a modestly sized table mirror that had a spider’s web of cracks spreading out from one shattered corner. She hefted it onto her forearm for support and obligingly held it above him with both hands.
Never had Darcy beheld such a sobering sight.
His heart pounded and his head cleared of fog—and pretty much all else—as he stared in horror at his reflection.
A day’s worth at least of beard covered his jaw, but the rest of his face was pallid and drawn.
His throat was bruised indigo and swollen to well beneath the collar of his shirt.
A peculiarly straight laceration ran from under the right of his chin to the hollow above his collar bone.
With his every rasping breath, the whole ruinous mess shifted and wept.
He understood now why he could scarcely breathe and no longer wondered at the torment of every trifling movement of his head.
He was fortunate to be alive. How long he would remain so with such an injury was not something on which he should like to wager.
“It ought to be stitched, but there is no one to do it. The best I can do is hold it closed with bandages.” The impatience had gone from Elizabeth’s voice; her tone was all compassion, though it scarcely penetrated Darcy’s dismay.
“Be reassured, at least, that your collar prevented any dirt from getting into the wound. As long as we keep it clean, and you do not try to overexert yourself again, I see no reason why it should not heal well enough.”
She said nothing about the recovery of his voice, though Darcy supposed it wisest to concern himself with surviving over and above being able to talk about it.
Nevertheless, he could not help but stare at the wreckage of his neck and attempt to guess where, exactly, his vocal cords might be located and thereby how badly damaged they might be.
The longer he stared, the greater grew his revulsion.
It was a relief when Elizabeth lowered the mirror to the floor. He mouthed his thanks.
“It is well, sir. It is not as though I am going anywhere. Besides, I spoke true when I said I was concerned for those who care for you. I could not bear the thought of Miss Darcy losing her brother on account of his trying to help me.”
Darcy frowned in puzzlement; the fog was returning. “Help you?”
“Why, yes.” She leant over him with a clean linen with which to bind his neck.
He tried in earnest to listen to what she said, but her voice was so dulcet and his mind so hazy that her words all ran into one another.
His eyelids grew too heavy to keep open and not even the pain of having his wound pulled closed with bandages could prevent him slipping into the encroaching torpor.