CHAPTER 14
The inn, when they reached it at last, was a solid, unremarkable house of grey stone called the Crown. And, fortunately, its yard was not entirely busy, Elizabeth observed, as she climbed down from Thatcher's cart into its courtyard.
Soon Darcy, helped down from the cart by young Thatcher and Reeves both, joined her. He could no longer conceal how the journey had strained him, for his steps were unsteady in a way that had everything to do with the fever now plainly written across his countenance.
Elizabeth noticed he had a high colour along his cheekbones; a color that she did not like the look of at all, and a glassiness about the eyes that made him seem, for the first time since she had known him, uncertain of his own footing.
Elizabeth took command of the situation instantly, before either man could think what to do, her voice carrying an authority.
She marched into the inn and went straight to the innkeeper.
"A room, the best you have, and a fire in it directly. And send for a physician if there is one within reach.” She added, “For my cousin has taken a wound that wants proper attention, and I do not like the look of him at all! "
The innkeeper’s wife, a stout, capable-looking woman, understood the panic in Elizabeth's eyes and voice, and went about ordering commands to ensure the lady's wishes were met with vigor.
Within a few moments Darcy was got up the narrow staircase, which proved more difficult than any of them had imagined it to be.
He was such a tall man, and so unsteady now, and the stairwell had not been built with such a burden in mind.
Nevertheless, he was settled at last into a bed that Elizabeth, following close behind, thought looked entirely too small to contain the whole of him.
However, she was pleased when he was laid on bed to rest.
She called at once for a basin of cool water and clean cloths. Once they had been brought to her, she went about dabbing his face and neck to try to cool him. She labored over him for a half an hour, trying her best to reduce the fever that she felt was growing considerably.
By and by, the physician, a Dr. Ashworth, summoned from the nearby town, arrived and pronounced, after a rapid examination, that the wound had indeed taken a turn for the worse.
While it was not gangrenous, not yet at least, it was inflamed enough, and the fever had risen high enough, that he deemed it prudent to have careful nursing, over the next few days before anyone could safely relax. The doctor was grateful that Elizabeth was present and could support him.
"He is strong," Dr. Ashworth reassured Elizabeth, packing his instruments, "and the wound itself, properly cleaned as it has been, is not so very grave a thing in a man of his constitution.
But fever is a chancy business, Miss…Bennet, was it?
And, I have seen stronger men than this taken worse by less, when the fever is allowed to run unchecked.
He wants cooling, and quiet, and someone by him who will notice at once if the fever climbs rather than breaks.
Can you manage that, or shall I send word for a proper nurse? "
"I can manage it," said Elizabeth, with certainty, and Dr. Ashworth, looking at her a moment with an assessing eye appeared satisfied enough with what he found to leave his instructions and depart with no further argument.
Reeves, still weak himself but insistent upon making himself useful, took up a post in one of the room's chairs by the door, declaring that between himself and Miss Bennet they would manage well enough between them to watch through the night.
Young Thatcher, having seen them safely to the inn, took his leave to return to his own worried family with Elizabeth's gratitude, and a note for the innkeeper to see him paid handsomely for his trouble, pressed into his hand.
It was, by the time all this was accomplished, well past noon, and Elizabeth, sitting at last in the chair drawn close beside the bed, found herself alone; Reeves having succumbed, despite his own protestations, to an exhausted doze in his corner, with nothing before her but the low, laboured sound of Darcy's breathing, and a basin of cool water, and a cloth she pressed, with hands that had long since stopped trembling from fear and begun, instead, to move with the steady purpose of genuine occupation, against his fevered brow.
The afternoon passed in this manner, and the evening after it, the fever climbed slowly and terribly, despite every remedy Elizabeth and the innkeeper wife’s own experience could bring to bear, until Darcy, some hours past dark, began to speak.
He did not address Elizabeth, not with any awareness she could discern at least. His speech was disordered, and it sounded as if it came from a fragmentary mind that was loosened by heat and pain.
"Elizabeth!" The name came from him with a rawness that startled her. "Elizabeth, I did not mean! I did not mean it as it sounded!"
She wet his brow, her hand not quite steady now, and replied to his cries gently, as one might to a startled child. "Shh, Mr. Darcy. I am here." She did not know whether he heard her. But, she said it again regardless. "I am here. You need not explain anything to me tonight."
He did not seem to hear. His head turned restlessly against the pillow, and his good hand closed, for a moment, as though reaching after something only the fever could show him. "I should have told you. Should have told you from the beginning, before I ever… "
The sentence did not finish. He drew a breath that caught and shuddered, and was still a moment, and Elizabeth found she had stopped breathing herself, waiting to see whether the stillness would hold or break.
Eventually, he did settle, and Elizabeth pressed the cool cloth once more to his forehead. Her hand began to shake, feeling something crack open in her own chest, feelings that she had been holding close and deep.
She knew it was fear, not the fear she had felt from the highwaymen, nor even the fear of the fever's danger, but the specific, particular terror of a woman who understood, all at once and far too late to be of any comfort to her, exactly how much she stood to lose should this man's health not find its way home again.
"Do not," she whispered, to him, or to herself, or to whatever silent power might be troubled to listen, "do not you dare leave off finishing that sentence to me properly, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Whatever quarrel remains between us, you will live to finish it in your right mind, and not slip away from me in the middle of a fevered sentence I cannot even be certain you meant. "
It was the first time she had used his Christian name, and she had said it willingly.
Despite her quiet pleas, the fever did not break.
Instead, it climbed past midnight and on toward an hour Elizabeth had stopped troubling to guess at, to a height that brought Reeves fully and abruptly awake in his corner, his own face gone grey with alarm at whatever he read in hers; and it was somewhere in the deepest, most frightening part of that long night, with the candle burned low, and the fire wanting tending that she had not the heart to leave him long enough to give it.
His voice fell at last into a silence that Elizabeth thought was more frightening than any of his fevered words had been. She understood exactly how much of her own heart she stood to lose should the coming dawn not bring the turn Dr. Ashworth had promised her it might yet do.
Not surprisingly, Elizabeth did not sleep that night.
She sat with the cloth in her hand laboring to keep his brow cool, and her eyes fixed on the rise and fall of his chest, counting each breath as it came.
She did not permit herself, not even once, to consider what she would do should she find that the next one did not follow.
Fortunately, his breadth continued, without the stop that she feared. Although ragged and wet, it labored into the morning.
When morning’s dawn came, it was grey and brought with it no turn at all, only the same fever, banked slightly from its worst height of the night but nowhere near broken, and a silence from the bed.
He had stopped speaking somewhere in the small hours, sliding from restless muttering into a stillness so complete that she had twice laid her hand flat against his chest merely to ensure to herself of its rise and fall.
Elizabeth was relieved to hear a knock on the door, and when it opened, to see Dr. Ashworth had returned.
It was early, and he was eager to discover how his patient was doing with the first proper light.
He first examined the wound, and then checked the fever.
The doctor, after his examination pronounced himself neither pleased nor alarmed.
"It is not uncommon," he told her, wiping his hands on a cloth the innkeeper provided, "for a fever of this kind to hold for two days, even three, before it commits itself one way or the other.
I would not have you alarmed by the holding, provided it does not climb further than it stood last night.
I would have you considerably more alarmed if it does. " He studied her a moment.
She was aware of what she must look like, having neither slept nor changed her gown, her hair coming loose from its pins and likely puffy eyes from crying earlier in the morning.
His voice gentled. "You have not slept, Miss Bennet. You look quite worse for the wear because of it. I would beg you to rest a little, and allow Mr. Reeves to watch over your cousin for a few hours. He is not likely to change drastically while you slumber."
She gave him a slight smile and a shake of her head. "I have not liked to. And I do not think I could, even if I lay down this moment and tried; my nerves have been wound too high since he tossed and spoke so last night to be easily persuaded into rest."
The doctor shook his head and issued a ‘tsk tsk’ before stating, "You will do him no good collapsed in a chair yourself, whatever your affection for your…
cousin." The pause before the word was very slight, and entirely deliberate, and Elizabeth met his eye and did not trouble to correct him, nor to confirm his statement.
Dr. Ashworth said, "Sleep in turns with your man there. I will call again this evening."
She did not sleep, not properly, though she allowed Reeves to persuade her, some hours later, into an hour's doze in the chair with her head fallen against its wing, from which she woke with a start and a crick in her neck and the instant, sick conviction that something had changed for the worse in her absence, a conviction that soon proved to be nothing more than the ordinary cruelty of waking afraid.
However, she found that Darcy lay as he had lain, his breathing still laboured, and his colour still high. He was no better, she made herself take proper stock of his care and cooling.
At least he is not markedly worse, she reflected, tiredness laced across her face, and limbs still painfully aware with a persistent soreness that reminded her, how recently and how violently she had been thrown from an overturned carriage.
The day passed in small tasks that gave her hands occupation, cloths wetted and wrung and pressed to his brow and throat and wrists, broth made and cooling untouched at the bedside because he could not be got to take it, the fire tended, the shutters adjusted against a sun that seemed, perversely, to have chosen this of all days to shine with some vigour.
She talked to him, sometimes, in the long stretches when Reeves slept and there was no one else to hear her do it.
Of course, she did not say anything of consequence, only small things, the state of the room, an account of what Dr. Ashworth had said, a description, once, of Longbourn's garden in the height of summer.
They were only little things to say because she had nothing else with which to fill the silence.
Darcy surfaced only twice that day, and neither time fully.
Once, near noon, his eyes opened and moved about the room that told her he saw nothing in it he recognized, not even her, though his gaze passed over her face without pausing; and once again toward evening, when he said something she could not make out at all, low and urgent, before sinking back under before she could lean close enough to catch it.
Each time she felt her heart lift with a hope she then had to watch fall again, and found the falling harder to bear, by the second occasion, than the waiting had been before either.
By the second night the fever had not broken, but neither, Dr. Ashworth allowed on his evening visit, had it climbed, "which is not victory, Miss Bennet, but I will own I had feared worse by now, and I did not find it," and Elizabeth, hearing this, discovered she had reached the particular species of exhaustion that lies past ordinary tiredness altogether, a state in which her hands continued their work with perfect steadiness while some other, more essential part of her seemed to have gone very far away, watching the room from a great distance and waiting.
Reeves, watching her from his chair as she wrung out yet another cloth with hands that no longer quite felt like her own, said quietly, "You ought to rest properly, miss. He would not thank you for wearing yourself to nothing on his account."
"He is not presently in a condition to thank anybody for anything," said Elizabeth, more sharply than she intended, and then, more gently, seeing his face, "Forgive me, Reeves.
I know you mean it kindly. I find I cannot leave him.
I do not entirely know how to explain it beyond that, and I find I have not the strength tonight to try. "
Reeves said nothing further, but offered a submissive nod; she saw him watching her a while longer with an expression she was too tired to properly read, and did not have the heart, that night, to address.
Hence, the second night passed much as the first, save that he did not speak again, and Elizabeth was left to sit through the dark hours with nothing to mark the passage of time but the guttering of the candle and the small, constant labour of his breath, wondering what she would say to him, what she would let herself say to him, should he wake, at last, and be well enough to hear it.