Chapter Ten #2
It started as a laugh. It broke into a sob before she could stop it, and she closed her mouth on it. Too late. He had heard.
He stood up.
It was a kindness. He was giving her the room—moving, doing something practical, so that she would not have to be looked at while she failed to stop crying.
“May I bring you broth?”
“Not yet.”
The word came out steadier than she had any right to. She reached for steadiness again before he could ask anything that required more.
“Water, then.”
“Yes. Water.”
She turned her face away from him, toward the window where the grey was. She pushed the tears off her cheek with the heel of her hand, hard, as if she could press them back into wherever they had come from.
More came.
He crossed to the table and poured. The sound was small and domestic, absurdly gentle against the violence of the room.
He returned and held the cup while she drank.
Cool water, stone tasting, from the same cursed spring with which they had washed her wound.
She swallowed twice, then once more because he waited.
When she turned her head aside, he set the cup within reach.
“Mr Darcy?”
“Yes.”
“Do not let me lie here and think.”
He sat again. “I had not intended to encourage it. You need rest, Miss Bennet.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. The motion alone cost her. She had to wait through what followed it before she could speak. “That is impossible. Please… will you… talk to me?”
“Upon what subject?”
“Any. A stupid one, if you please. I cannot bear my own thoughts.”
His thumb moved once across her knuckle. The marks of her grip were on the side of his hand where the candle reached it. He had set himself to find an answer for her: a sensible man at one in the morning, with a woman half-fevered and wholly miserable to talk down from her thoughts.
“Very well. Tell me where you learned to dance so much that the possible loss of it presents itself before all other losses.”
The question caught her off guard. “What?”
“You spoke of dancing first. Therefore, you must once have liked it.”
“I did.”
“There. We have established one happy fact. Where?”
“In assembly rooms, chiefly.” Her breath came short on it. “Where else does anyone learn such things?”
“I was taught at home, to my permanent disadvantage.”
“That explains a great deal.”
He made a small huff of amusement. “Does it? Then I regret the confession.”
The corner of her mouth altered. A shape of smile gathered there and went no further. Pain did not allow.
He saw it vanish and pressed on at once, as if silence would let the tears come back.
“Country town or large one?”
She hesitated. “Country.”
“With tolerable music?”
“Occasionally.”
“And tolerable partners?”
She gathered the air. “Much less often.”
“Then your standards are severe.”
A weak laugh broke from her. It spent her at once.
“My standards are merely awake.”
The fever returned to the front of everything. Her skin was too tight. The sheets offended. The pillow offended. Her own body offended worst of all.
“I cannot do this properly. I cannot talk as if I were well.”
“I have no expectation of it.”
“No. You have only kindness, which is worse.”
“A charge I shall contest in the morning.”
She shut her eyes against a fresh rise of tears. The pillow under her cheek was too warm, the throat of her nightdress too tight, and her hand under his too aware of the bruises she had put there. “I should not tell you anything. I have told you too much already.”
His answer came at once, very quiet. “Then tell me nothing.”
Her eyes opened again. “Nothing?”
“Nothing you ought not say.”
“You speak as though silence were easy.”
“Easier than falsehood.”
She lay looking at him through the dimness, her breath unsteady. “There are questions you might ask me that I cannot answer.”
“Then do not answer them.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is not simple. It is only preferable.”
The room had gone very still. Even the fire had drawn back and left them the dark between its breaths.
“Mr Darcy,” she said, “if I remain in your house, I cannot promise to explain myself.”
He moved in the chair. Something crossed his features that she could not read, and was gone almost at once. “I do not ask it.”
“You ought.”
“I ought a great many things. I ask only this. If there is something you cannot say, say that. Do not invent in place of it.”
She watched him. “You hate lies so much?”
“Yes.”
The single word had more in it than any history would have given her.
“And silence does not offend you?”
“Not half so much.”
She gathered what she had left. “Then I can promise that much. If I may not answer, I will say so. If I can answer, I will answer truly.”
He inclined his head. “That will serve.”
“It is a poor bargain for you.”
“On the contrary. I begin to think it an unusually good one.”
“You cannot know that.”
“No. But I live in hope of being surprised.”
A breath escaped her that might, under kinder circumstances, have become a laugh. The effort spent her at once. Her lashes drooped, then lifted again with visible annoyance, as if her own body had presumed too much.
“You should rest, if you can,” he said.
“I cannot.”
“Then close your eyes at least.”
“And think? Certainly not.”
He made as if to answer, but she was already gathering herself against another inward plunge.
“No.” Her voice came out with more force than her strength permitted. “Do not stop. If you stop, I shall begin again.”
“Begin what?”
“Everything. The surgeon. The leg. Morning. All of it.” She gathered the air for the last of it. “You said I might have a stupid subject. I claim it.”
The line of his mouth altered. A shape of smile gathered there, and stayed long enough for her to borrow calm from.
“You claim it very despotically for a woman in bed.”
She drew the breath the answer required. “I am extremely ill. It excuses much.”
“So I am learning.”
He waited, as though still hoping rest might overtake her if he gave it room. It did not. Her eyes remained open, fever bright and resisting.
“Very well,” he said at last. “One trivial subject, then. Was there, in this country town of yours, any musician worth the name?”
“One.”
“A triumph.”
“She played too fast.” The next breath caught at her ribs.
“A fault I can forgive in youth.”
“You are very indulgent all at once.”
“Do not spread the report. I have a character to maintain.”
Her eyes closed again. “Mr Darcy?”
“Yes.”
“Do not go yet.”
“I had not intended to.”
“Good.”
Her hand moved a little over the blanket, searching without strength. He took it before the effort could wake her fully again. The restless line of her brow eased by a fraction.
“Now,” he said, in the tone one might use with a child too weary to know it is safe, “you may sleep a little. I give you leave.”
“Mr Darcy.” She gathered air for it. “I will not take the laudanum tonight.”
“I will not urge you.”
“The dose Jane measured earlier has worn off. I would rather lie here with pain I can bear than return to the country the drug took me to last night. I suspect that country is not a safe one for me.”
“Laudanum has peculiar and uncomfortable effects.”
She swallowed. “It… was not that.”
His brow creased. “What did you see there?”
“I cannot tell. It is covered by the silence.”
He frowned and looked down at his bruised hand once more. “Would you like me to read to you?”
The question surprised her. She turned her head to look more fully. The motion sent a small ache through her shoulder and she closed her eyes against it, then opened them. “Read to me?”
“There is a book in the study. I was reading it before I came an hour ago. I could fetch it.”
“What is the book?”
“A volume of Cowper. His letters, the ones my father favoured. I have been rereading them in the evenings.”
“I should like that very much.”
He left. She heard him cross the passage, the study door open and close, his footsteps return, then he was back with the volume in hand.
He built the fire a little higher—enough for reading without waking her—and drew the chair close to the bed, opening the book at a marked page.
His voice was low, unhurried, the reading of a man who had read this to himself and now let another hear what he had heard.
She closed her eyes but did not sleep. The pain was still there, the leg was still there, the morning was still coming, the surgeon was still coming, the bone saw still in its case eight miles away in Bakewell.
But the room contained the sound of Cowper’s letters read aloud in the small hours by a man who had asked her not to lie and had offered her, in return, the strange gift of not requiring her to speak.
Her hand was near his on the bed’s edge—not touching, but near—and she did not move it, nor did he, and the reading went on until the fire was low again and the first grey of dawn crossed the curtain’s edge.
When he closed the book, she remained awake. He looked at her.
“Miss Bennet. The surgeon will be here within the hour. Your sister will wish to be with you when he arrives. Shall I wake her?”
“Yes. Wake her.”