Chapter Ten
She woke in darkness, the taste of salt on her tongue.
The fever had not broken—she knew this before she moved, before she counted herself beyond the first awareness of the bed—but it had loosened its grip.
The heat that had consumed her from within had retreated from its peak, leaving her soaked with sweat, the shift clinging to her skin, the blankets heavy with damp.
Her hair lay wet against her neck. Her mouth was dry, cracked, tasting of bile and the bitter residue of laudanum and something mineral—clean, cold, like water from deep underground.
The leg was still there. She knew before she tried because the pain remained, enormous and local, radiating from below the knee with the same grinding insistence it had carried since the ice.
But its nature had changed. The pain she recalled—from the bone-setting, from the fever’s worst—had been a white wall, obliterating everything behind it.
This was different. Bearable, barely, by the thinnest margin, but bearable—a ground she could stand upon rather than one that swallowed her whole.
She turned her head—cautiously, testing.
The pain flared with bright sparks across her vision, but the sparks thinned and faded as she lay still, the first time since the fall that motion had not sent her into white nothingness.
She lay breathing, and the breathing was hers to govern, which meant she was lucid, which meant her mind had returned from wherever laudanum and fever had taken it.
The room was dark. The fire had burned low, reduced to embers’ orange glow and the faint grey of moonlight through the curtain.
She could not tell the hour. The quality of the silence—deep, complete, the house still around her—suggested late.
Past midnight, perhaps. The small hours, when the world contracted to bed and walls.
She parted her lips. “Jane.”
The word came as a rasp, barely voiced, her throat too dry to carry it. She swallowed and tried again. “Jane—”
A shape moved in the dark.
Not from the door, but within the room—from the chair, the hard-backed chair at her bedside. A form resolved from the deeper shadow of the corner, rising, crossing toward her with a tread she recognised before her eyes confirmed it. Heavy. Deliberate. Not Jane’s.
She drew back against the pillow. The movement shot a bolt from the leg she subdued by locking her jaw rather than crying out—but the instinct was older than the pain, the instinct of a woman alone in a dark room with a man she could not see.
“Miss Bennet.” His voice was low, immediate, bearing the care of a man who knew he had startled her.
“It is Darcy. Your sister sleeps upstairs tonight—I would not have her on the cot again. I came an hour ago to build the fire and check the fomentations and found you shifting in your sleep. I sat down to watch. I did not intend to alarm you.”
The words assembled slowly in her mind. Darcy. The man who had found her. The hands, the splint, the carrying. The name she had given from the mere when pain had stripped her wit to lie. He was in her room. In the dark. While she slept.
“You are in my room, Mr Darcy.”
“I am aware of the impropriety, Miss Bennet. Your sister is upstairs resting, and she would come if I called her, and I will call her if you wish. But she has been awake for two and a half days on four hours of sleep, and I have allowed her rest because she would collapse otherwise, and the fomentations require watching through the small hours regardless of who watches. I do not think you wish me to call her.”
“I do not wish you to call her.”
“Good. Then you may continue to rest, and if you permit it, I will return to the chair.”
The honesty disarmed her before she could construct a defence.
She had been waking alone for the better part of a fortnight—in strange inns, coach stations, rooms paid for with coins designed to leave no impression.
Waking alone was the condition she had chosen and purchased at every stop between Longbourn and this valley.
She had not expected it intolerable until the alternative spoke in a man’s low voice in the dark, telling her she was not alone.
“I would… be obliged if you would stay.” The word surprised her as it left her lips. “Please.”
She heard him sit. The chair creaked under his weight—the same creak she had heard through the fog of fever, through the laudanum’s dark—a sound woven into the fabric of whatever half-world had been hers for the past day and night. He had been in this chair before. For a long time.
“How long have I been—” She did not know how to finish the question. Asleep was insufficient. Lost came nearer.
“The fever began night before last. Mr Aldridge returned yesterday afternoon. He examined the wound. Mrs Bannon—the housekeeper—gave instructions for treating it with water from the mere. We have been applying fomentations since yesterday evening.”
The mineral taste in her mouth. The mere’s water. They had been washing her wound with the water that had broken her leg.
“Has it helped?”
“I am not qualified to judge. But the discharge has changed, and the swelling decreased. Mrs Marsden has monitored it through the day. Mr Aldridge will return at first light.”
He was careful. Every sentence measured, every fact delivered in order, nothing omitted but nothing volunteered beyond her question. She recognised the discipline—the management of information, the art of answering without answering the question behind it.
“Mr Darcy. In the morning. The surgeon. He means to take my leg.”
He did not deny it.
The silence told her enough. It was not cruelty. It was worse. It was the silence of a man who would not give false comfort because the hour for it had passed.
Tears came before she could master them.
Not the blurred leaking of fever, not the weak helpless tears that had slipped from her half conscious all day, but tears with judgment in them, tears that belonged to a mind fully awake at last and forced to reckon with the morning.
Her leg. Her own leg. The one that had carried her over muddy lanes and frozen ruts, up inn stairs, across market squares, into coaches and out again.
The leg by which she had danced half the night at Meryton and walked off temper in gardens and fields when home grew too small for bearing.
They meant to cut it from her body as if the loss were a problem in carpentry.
Dancing was gone first. Not because it mattered most, but because the thought came swiftest. No reel, no turn, no stepping out with music under her feet and laughter near at hand.
Then walking. Proper walking. Not crossing a room with a cane while people praised her courage, but walking because one wished to walk, taking a lane for no reason beyond the lane itself, choosing speed, distance, solitude.
No climbing a hill simply to see farther.
No striding away from a disagreeable room under her own power.
No running down steps because Jane called.
No careless standing at a window for an hour because the evening was pleasant and the world below it worth watching.
And if they did not take it, fever might yet do the work more slowly.
His hand was there.
She did not remember him crossing the room, or reaching for his hand when he arrived.
She remembered only that her fingers had closed upon his with desperate violence, and that he let them.
She crushed his hand as if bone and tendon in another body could hold her together when her own body had turned traitor.
He neither flinched nor withdrew. He sat beside the bed and let her hurt him while she wept.
“I shall never dance again,” she said into the pillow, the words broken by breath. “Never walk where I please. Never go up a hill for the sake of being contrary. I shall be led about like an aunt in a family anecdote.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know enough.”
“Enough for fear. Not enough for certainty.”
“That is a distinction for healthy people.”
Another wave of weeping seized her, thinner now and more exhausted, but it left her shaking worse than before.
Sweat cooled on her temples. Her injured leg burned with a heavy, sickening throb that came up out of the mattress itself.
Her whole body had become a battleground of heat, chill, pain, and the queasy rise and fall of laudanum.
Rest was impossible. So was wakefulness of any unbroken sort. She wanted to sleep and could not bear to close her eyes. She wanted silence and could not endure it when it came.
At length, the crying passed through her and left her hollow.
She came up out of sleep into pain rearranged. It was still in her, but it had become a thing that could be borne rather than a thing that bore her. The light at the curtain was grey. The room was the same room.
Her hand was around his.
She knew it before she knew the rest of where she was. Her fingers were closed on his—three of hers around three of his—and he had let it stand. She did not know for how long.
She loosened her hand. Releasing him proved harder than clutching. Her fingers had to be persuaded. They unbent slowly, joint by joint, as if they had taken on the shape of his while she was somewhere else.
“I am sorry.”
“Do not apologise.”
She looked at his hand where it lay on the coverlet, just clear of hers now. It was unmarked. She had been certain there would be marks.
“I have injured you.”
“Less than you suppose.”
Her throat was thick. Tears had come up while she was still gathering herself, and she had not been quick enough to stop them. Two of them moved already down the side of her face. Speaking would steady her. Speaking always did.
“You are very polite,” she said, “for a man whose bones I have ground together.”
“I save my complaints for real grievances.”
She tried to laugh.