Chapter 5
Confined and Unvarying Society
He slept better for having eaten. Indeed, other than occasionally bestirring himself to sip some water, Darcy did little but sleep until the sun was high in the sky the following day.
He still felt sore and weak, but less confused each time he awoke.
With better clarity of mind, however, came the full dawning of the seriousness of his situation, and though his recovery was naturally uppermost in his mind, other considerations soon began to intrude.
Though they had separate rooms, Elizabeth was presumably known by all at the inn to be nursing him unattended.
It mattered not whether it was presumed she was a single woman or somehow entangled with him; either circumstance had the potential to wreak havoc on her reputation.
His own, therefore, was in equally grave danger, for the most obvious solution was to sacrifice it and marry her.
His heart quivered staccato-like in his chest at the prospect, and he ignored it, as he had done many times before.
To marry so far beneath him—into the Bennet family in particular, with its total want of either consequence or connexions—was impossible.
Of this, he had already convinced himself a hundred times over.
He cast his gaze about, unreasonably anxious that Elizabeth should somehow deduce his thoughts from the heat in his face.
She was not there, and his folly made him cross.
Animated by vexation, he heaved himself a little farther upright and reached for the stack of writing paper sticking out over the edge of the nightstand.
The pen rolled off it towards the floor, but he caught it without wrenching his neck quite as painfully as last time.
Stretching to dip the pen in the ink proved less bearable, and he resolved the matter by bringing the well down from the nightstand and wedging it against the pillow atop his shoulder.
Thus armed, he began furiously scribbling questions in the hope that the answers might ease his sense of helplessness—or perhaps melt the snow from the damned roads or banish the confounded feelings that flickered unobligingly in his chest at every other moment.
His efforts were to little avail, for even when an entire page of questions lay before him, he was convinced the answers to all of them would still not provide him with the level of information to which he was accustomed.
Writing the list all but exhausted him, increasing his concerns for his state of health, as did the unrelenting pain in his throat occasioned by holding his head at the angle required to see what he wrote.
Ignorance and weakness were two things Darcy had never tolerated well, and they, along with his growing concern for Elizabeth, began to well and truly sour his mood.
Where she was, he could not suppose. He did not think she was in her room, for the only sounds he had heard since waking were his own hoarse breathing and the odd muffled clatter from below stairs—but even if she were that close, he was powerless to discover it, for he could not call to her.
He could not so much as squeak without succumbing to virulent and excruciating spasms. And if she were farther afield, what then?
He would barely be able to help her were she sitting at the end of the bed—there was nothing he could do to protect her if she had been foolish enough to venture out of the inn.
His concerns were on the cusp of taking a far darker turn when Elizabeth abruptly appeared at the door from the landing. Fuelled in part by relief and in part by the worst of his fears, he dashed off another hasty question at the top of the page.
“Good day, Mr Darcy,” she greeted him, and her tone instantly trebled his concerns.
She was very evidently tired and, judging by the paleness of her countenance, possibly distressed.
Her attire was ruffled and muddied, proving she had ventured out of doors, yet she wore neither bonnet nor gloves.
Any stable hand, vagabond, or potboy could have mistaken her for a serving girl and treated her accordingly.
“I see you are feeling much more like yourself today,” she remarked, walking across the room to put down something she had been carrying.
“Are you in good health, madam?” Darcy demanded, eager to know.
Elizabeth came closer, watching his lips as she approached him. He repeated his question, and, at length, she confirmed that she was tired but not unwell. Glancing at his list, she added, “What have you been writing that has put you in such a fine humour?”
“Questions,” he replied, though he did not feel it was an easy word to lip read and pre-empted her bewilderment by simply handing her the top sheet of paper.
The list might have felt inadequate to Darcy, but it did at least have the immediate effect of returning some colour to Elizabeth’s cheeks. She dropped her hands to her sides with her fists clenched, blithely crumpling that which had taken nearly all his reserves to compose.
“Where ‘the devil’ have I been?” she quoted in an angry tone.
Ruing the hasty addition of such an ill-tempered question, Darcy mouthed an explanation. “I knew not where you were.”
“No, indeed, for I did not tell you. I am afraid you will not find me as complying as some of your other friends, Mr Darcy. I shall go where I please when I please, and I require neither your permission nor your persuasion to do it.”
Puzzling at her meaning, he replied, “Of course you do not require my permission, but you might have informed me. I was concerned for you. For all I knew—”
“I cannot understand what you are saying—and neither do I wish to!” she interrupted, before turning on her heel and striding to her bedchamber, slamming the door behind her.
Darcy instinctively reached after her, despite how it wrenched his neck.
He scarcely managed to lift himself clear of the pillows—only far enough that the inkwell slipped from his shoulder and spilled its contents over his bandages, shirt and bed sheets.
He swore—or tried to. Swearing was much less gratifying when no bloody sound came out.
Instead, he thumped a fist onto the bed—an equally dissatisfying gesture, for the mattress absorbed what little force he could muster.
With a bitter sneer, he tossed all the writing instruments back onto the nightstand and attempted to regulate his breathing, for the more agitated he grew, the tighter his throat seemed to close.
The bandages around his neck felt even more restrictive and suffocating than usual.
The spilt ink pulled the skin of his shoulder taut as it dried.
He felt filthy. He longed for a hot bath or a change of clothes.
To simply get out of bed and walk about the room would be a relief.
He rubbed his hands over his face and said a silent prayer begging for release from his ever-worsening misery.
A door clicked open. Darcy lowered his hands but did not move his head, for it hurt too much. When Elizabeth came into view, he was relieved, if surprised, to see that in place of her previous anger, she now looked rather chagrined.
“I apologise, Mr Darcy. I was in an ill humour, but I ought not to have been uncivil.”
Darcy held up his finger in rebuttal, then used it to point at himself. “Nay, I am sorry. It was an ungentlemanly question.”
She squinted at his lips and shook her head.
“Where is the pen?” she said, more to herself than to him, for before he could answer, she reached directly over the narrow bed to retrieve it from the nightstand on the other side.
She halted directly above him, her arm still outstretched, upon noticing the state of his shirt, whereupon she bit her lips together in an obvious attempt not to laugh, curled her arm back into her side, and eventually straightened again.
It was not a moment too soon, for Darcy had been holding his breath since she leant over him and was in dire need of air.
“Oh dear,” she said with a small smile. “You will have to buy Lieutenant Carver a new shirt.”
He recoiled as her remark sent him spiralling from the heady exhilaration of her form all but laid atop his to the deepest mortification. “Lieutenant Carver?”
“He is a guest here,” Elizabeth explained. “He was good enough to lend you a fresh shirt when we arrived.”
“This is not then my shirt?”
“Yours was no longer fit to be worn.”
He continued to stare at her, appalled, and she grew visibly more displeased.
“You had no luggage of your own. I thought it was very kind of him, but if you th—”
“You undressed me?”
Comprehension loosened the knot of vexation marring Elizabeth’s brow and widened her eyes in embarrassment. “Oh! No, sir!” she replied with a breathless little laugh. “The gentlemen who carried you up here took care of that while I changed into one of Mrs Stratton’s gowns.”
A torrent of relief was followed by renewed concern, which he attempted to articulate with the clearly enunciated enquiry, “Why change gowns?”
“Mine were all in my trunks somewhere under the snow. Indeed, they still are, for by the next morning when Master John said he would return to fetch them, the snow was too deep to pass.”
“But what happened to the gown you were wearing?” It was necessary for him to repeat this twice more before she comprehended.
“Oh, I see. Well, as I said, you bled a good deal.”
Darcy said a private oath. He had, in the past, allowed himself the occasional luxury of imagining lavishing Elizabeth with the very finest gowns. Now he had ruined the only one in her possession—by bleeding all over it, no less.
“I shall replace it,” he promised. He was not convinced she understood what he said, for she did not respond to it directly and continued to look uneasy.