Chapter Seven #2
He reached the study door before the second call ended.
Across the passage, at the parlour door, he knocked once softly and waited.
Nothing. Mrs Marsden did not stir—he knew without checking, for the steward’s office lay between and any movement from her would have sounded.
She had been awake… well, he did not know how long, but the dark circles under her eyes when he saw her in the kitchen told their own tale.
She was beyond rousing by cries in the night.
From beyond the parlour door came the cry again. Ragged. Distressed. The voice of a woman whose body slept while the mind did not, or whose mind was asleep while the body rebelled, laudanum holding her under while some dark presence—pain, memory, or whatever else the drug summoned—rose.
He opened the door.
The fire had sunk low. The room was dim, lit by embers’ orange glow and thin moonlight through an uncurtained window. She was restless. Her head turned side to side on the pillow, repetitive, insistent, as if shaking free of some unseen burden. Her hands clasped the blankets. Her lips moved.
He crossed and knelt by the bed. Her face in firelight was flushed—not health but heat, a wrong warmth from within. He brushed the damp hair from her forehead. The skin beneath burned.
Fever.
Aldridge had warned—Watch for heat, redness, discharge.
If fever does not break within a day, send for me.
The fever had taken hold. The wound, the filth, fragments of stocking in flesh, the mere’s water bringing its limestone burdens—all working beneath clean bandages and competent dressings, doing what Darcy feared when first seeing bone through skin.
She cried out again. Her eyes opened—not waking or seeing. Pupils dilated, irises reduced to a thin ring beneath laudanum’s mark. She looked at him without recognition, through him at something behind that belonged to the drug’s dark country, filled with unseen terrors.
“No—I cannot—the papers!—”
Words fractured, tumbling without syntax. He leaned closer. Her breath hot with a sweetish taint he had smelled at the mere when her body failed—the scent of a system at siege.
“You must not—they will—Jane, I could not carry it, it is too—”
Her hand found his. Not reaching, but sweeping blindly until fingers met his on the mattress’s edge.
Her grip closed with the same strength he recalled from the mere, when she seized his forearm as he pressed the wound—five fingers locking as though his hand were her only solid thing in a dissolving world.
“No! I cannot swim! Cannot—Jane, do not let go!”
He did not recoil. Her grip was iron. Eyes open, seeing nothing, tears running down into her hair, the crying now silent—worse than screams or cries, the mute weeping of a woman whose body wept while her mind wandered in laudanum’s dark.
She writhed against the bedclothes as if to escape what was in her body, and every move took her deeper into it. The pain that moved her was past speech. Her cries were not words. Some had the shape of names. None of them was his.
He had counted the drops twice into the spoon. His hand was steady. His throat was not. The bottle sat on the small table. He bent to her.
"Miss Bennet."
She turned her face from the spoon as from a thing struck at her.
He set his hand below her collarbone and pressed her back into the pillow.
It was the lightest weight he could manage and still hold her.
She fought it. He brought the spoon to her mouth, and she fought the spoon also.
Her head jerked. The cloth at her throat slipped wet against his knuckle.
The spoonful went mostly to her cheek and her hair.
A little of it reached her tongue. Her throat worked once around it.
Then she coughed—a hard, broken sound—and his hand was off her chest at once and behind her head, lifting her by an inch so the cough could go where it must, and the spoon was gone, dropped to the table, and his other hand was at her jaw to be sure of what she had taken in.
She breathed. She breathed.
He set the bottle down. The spoon stayed where it had fallen. She had taken what she had taken. It would have to do.
He wetted a cloth at the basin and laid it to her forehead. He drew it down her temple. He cleaned the laudanum from her cheek, from her jaw, from the strand of hair where it had caught. The bedclothes were stained at her shoulder. He turned the coverlet to bring a clean fold over her.
Her hand was reaching.
It found the air, and then his sleeve, and then his hand. Her fingers closed around three of his and would not be persuaded to let go.
He let it stay.
"Miss Bennet." His voice was level, low, as one speaks to a frightened horse. It was the only comparison his experience offered. "You are safe. You are in the house. Not in the water."
She did not hear him. Or she heard only the sound without the words—tone reaching her, meaning lost. Her grip tightened.
Tears moved sideways into her hair. Her lips worked on broken pieces of speech: names he did not know, places real or drug-wrought, urgencies from whatever had been chasing her before the mere found her.
He should wake Mrs Marsden. Knock at the steward's office until he had her, hand the crisis to the sister whose right this was.
He was a stranger, a man at a lady's bedside in the dark, holding her hand without chaperone or claim—present only because she burned with fever and gripped him and wept in sleep.
He could not leave her so. He could not unclose her fingers and walk out of the room. He had done that once already, the day before, when Mrs Marsden had come and taken the broth from his hands and shut the door for good reason. He had sat in the hall and accepted it.
He did not accept it now. His hand stayed in hers. Propriety could go hang.
He brushed damp hair from her temple. His fingers traced the burning brow in the dark, slow.
She quieted by degrees. The tears continued, and the grip continued, but the thrashing left her.
Her head went still on the pillow. Her breath deepened.
Tears moved through tangled hair, and beneath them the broken urgency yielded.
Her hand locked in his with a strength that should have been past her—her fever climbing, her wound turning.
He must send for Aldridge at first light.
If the fever held past morning, Norton must carry the message; Thomas would not do—Norton knew Aldridge's house and could convey what was needed.
He must inform Mrs Marsden. He must turn back the dressing and look at the wound for what Aldridge had described: the redness, the discharge, the smell of rot.
All of that must wait for the morning and for Mrs Marsden beside him.
Her grip slackened. Her fingers curled and released, no longer iron, easing as a fist eases when there is nothing left to hold against. Her breath fell into a longer rhythm.
The fever remained, throwing its heat off her skin, but the dark that had ridden her—the laudanum's dark—let her go into something nearer sleep.
He did not move. The house was quiet but for the creak of timbers in the cold, the drip of meltwater from the eaves, her slow breath, and the faint clasp of her fingers in his.
He sat down on the floor by the bed, his back against the mattress, his legs outstretched before him, her hand still entwined with his.