Chapter 15 #3
“Are you still feeling the effects of the poison?” she asked. “You saved me that night as certainly as you did at Epsom. I would have drunk a cup to be polite, never suspecting it had arsenic in it.”
“I am better.”
She held back her impatience with this stoicism. Was she not insisting she was better too? “I have been so worried about you. You must tell me how you are recovering.”
“My diet is light and sparing, and I go early to bed, yet the activity of my mind is too strong for my constitution. I find it tiresome to be doing nothing, a feeling you must sympathise with if you are defying your sister and Mr Hunter to roam the passages at night.”
Her heart clenched for him, although he would not want her sympathy. The poisoning must have been excruciating. “You must have felt like death on Saturday.”
He swallowed and looked at the table. She wondered if that was where the poisoned tea had been.
“Yes and no. I had to find you, and that drove away every other thought.” When he saw she insisted on hearing more, he huffed and described the symptoms and the fatigue that remained.
It sounded agonising, but he listed them carelessly.
Perhaps he was like her, not wanting to dwell on how he was, since he was improving.
“You will be glad to be recovered enough to leave Woodcote,” she said, to change the subject.
“It will be good for your spirits. I have been trapped in my room, so it little mattered to me where I was. I would have resented it regardless of what bed I was trapped in. But if I can regularly see you, I can better accept being trapped here.”
“It has been hard not seeing you,” he admitted. “I am relieved Julia is gone, though. I was always fearful of what she might say or do to avenge her mother or her own wounded feelings. Her leaving has made it more tolerable here.”
He explained that some relative came for Julia, but their support would not last long. Once they knew her condition, she would be sent away or married off to someone under a cloud of shame. They could not afford another scandal in addition to the travesty of her mother’s trial.
“What will happen to Lady Metcalfe?”
Darcy muttered a vulgar epithet.
She could hardly disagree. “She has lost use of her senses to think that you would immediately move your affections to her daughter if I were dead.”
“Or that Mr Travers would marry her after all this time if only Julia was settled without disgrace. He is the most selfish, heartless man I have ever met, trifling with that woman for her entire life.” His voice dripped with contempt.
“As for Lady Metcalfe, the magistrate said it will be hard to prove the vase or carriage incidents. But the cook saw Lady Metcalfe in the kitchen stirring something into the tea, and there was no mistaking what she did at Epsom. She does not deny that she took you and wanted to kill you. The magistrate is certain that the jury at the summer assizes will return a guilty verdict.”
“And will she be declared insane at the time she attacked me?”
“Very likely. She will then be detained at His Majesty’s pleasure.”
It was a relief, and yet tragic that Lady Metcalfe’s sanity was lost. Her life and her family’s lives were ruined partly because mother and daughter conceived children out of wedlock and faced a scandal.
Darcy had been right all week that she was in harm’s way, and the person who was supposed to love him best had thought him suffering from suspicious delusions.
If she had not been injured, he would have been angry with her for not believing him.
“I am sorry, Fitzwilliam,” she whispered.
Darcy tilted his head. “For coming to my room?” He grinned, and she was eager to come to his room under different circumstances. “I am very glad to see you. I had not realised how much I needed it.”
“I won’t apologise for that,” she said, meeting his smile with one of her own. “I am sorry for not believing you when you thought something wicked was happening.”
His smile faded, but there was more lightness in his eyes than before. “Like you said, who could have imagined such an end as this? I simply came to Epsom to keep my friend’s brother from wagering too much.”
“And I was sent to find a husband, so it was a successful race week for both of us. Wait until you tell Lady Catherine.”
“I will write to her from Longbourn. Surrey is too close to Kent. She might come in person to make her feelings known, and we need our full strength for that.”
Darcy stood and crossed the room and opened a box on his shaving stand. He came back holding the love token he had made for her. “It was found in the dirt by the stables. We think you must have lost it in the struggle with Lady Metcalfe. I had the chain repaired yesterday.”
He leant to fasten it around her neck, but she shifted across the bed away from him and patted the space next to her.
His eyes narrowed, but he sat by her and fastened the clasp.
Darcy made to stand again, but Elizabeth tugged his arm.
He huffed, but stretched out next to her but atop the bedclothes, crossing one ankle over the other.
She moved against him expectantly, trying to put her head on his chest, and he raised an arm to put it around her as she wrapped her arm across his waist.
Instantly, the tension left both of them as Darcy settled her against him. A more generous person would have stayed silent, but she whispered, “This is better, is it not?”
He hummed a satisfied sound. “Perhaps I was hasty in agreeing with the surgeon and your sister.”
Elizabeth brought a hand to the token, tracing her thumb over the inscription on the obverse.
She had not even realised it was missing, and that saddened her.
But Darcy would be the first to tell her she had far greater concerns that day and the four days since.
“You will be sorry you defaced a half-crown for my sake when I tell you what I owe Mrs Collins.”
“Playing high at the parsonage, dearest?” he asked before pressing a kiss to her head.
She laughed. “I bet a crown that I would not find a husband before Saturday, and she wagered the same that I would be engaged before the Derby Stakes. How will you afford me?”
He traced his hand up and down her arm. “Perhaps Mr Collins and I can settle your debt like gentlemen. You ladies have been reckless gamesters and need your husbands to manage your wild spending.”
“You do have considerable patronage in the church; I am certain you can come to an agreement.”
He rested his chin on her head and sighed. “I was terrified for you, Elizabeth. When I stared across the course and realised what she was going to do…”
“I am safe now; we both are.”
“When you fell off the carriage and I told you if I was to be sent for a surgeon in a panic on your behalf, that you ought to make it worth my while—I was only joking.”
She laughed, glad that he was at peace enough to be glib with her.
They were silent and happy, and Elizabeth felt herself drifting toward sleep when Darcy said, “You ought to return to your own chamber before it grows late.” He ignored her groan of protest. “Jane will be worried if she wakes to check on you during the night.”
“Why, though naturally not infirm, must I be satisfied with everyone assuming I still have a sickly state of health?”
“You were so poorly on Saturday, dearest. It was horrifying for all of us.”
She squeezed him tighter. “But I am not poorly now. I improve every day. And what about you? No one is demanding that you rest, and you drank arsenic,” she said, choking a little on the word. “But you may do whatever you feel capable of.”
“I am a man, and people are more inclined to listen to me and less inclined to tell me what to do.”