Heat #3
“A wife does a great many things she was never told she would do.” She was already moving to help him, giving him nothing to be ashamed of by refusing to be ashamed herself.
“Lean on me. There. I have wrestled you out of a wet shirt twice just since yesterday, and thought nothing of it, and I shall think nothing of this either, and in the morning we shall neither of us remember it. Lean on me, Fitzwilliam. I have you.”
He leaned on her. Afterwards, he turned his face to the wall and would not look at her.
She thought she even heard a muffled sob before the fever dragged him under its veil once more.
All she could do was stroke the hair off his face, keep the sweat from beading at his lip, and watch for the moment when he began to shiver again.
He surfaced more often now. Ignacio called this a good sign, but it frightened her more than the stupor had, because what surfaced was not always Darcy.
Sometimes it was. Sometimes, his eyes would open and find her and go soft with a recognition so affectionate, so entirely alert, that it stopped her breath.
He would speak of things she knew, and she would spoon broth into him — three swallows, four, and then he was gone again, sliding back down mid-mouthful, the spoon clicking against teeth that had stopped working.
But sometimes he came up into the fever instead of out of it, and then he was somewhere else entirely.
“Father, you are mad!” he told the ceiling once, with terrible clarity, as if the person he was speaking to was before his eyes.
“A hundred thousand? You will bankrupt — what happens when the note comes due and the war is still… Five years is not —” His hands moved on the blanket as though sorting papers that were not there.
She took them in her own, stopping them from flailing.
He gripped her hard enough to bruise her hands, and did not know her.
Another time, it was a brother defending his sister.
“How dare you come near her!” he cried in a loud voice.
He threw the blankets off, trying to rise.
“Georgiana, he is lying to you! Come with me — you must trust that I know —” Elizabeth had lain over his chest then, embracing him, and he had cried and shaken with fear, stroking her hair and saying, “My sweet sister, it is my fault. I should never have let him near, should never have sent you…”
All she could do was soothe him, assuring him that she was well, that Georgiana was well and safe because he had saved her from something so monstrous, it still haunted him.
And once — only once, in the deep of the worst night — he wept.
His eyes were open, but he did not know her, or perhaps he knew some ghost of her.
He turned his burning face into her shoulder and said, “I could not — I never could have afforded you. I knew it when I first saw you, and so I left. I could not stay… could not watch. I would have married you ruined, I would have —” The rest slid away into fever-nonsense, numbers and his sister's name and the word ‘sorry’ three times over.
Elizabeth sat with his weeping head against her and her own tears running silently into his hair.
She began to watch his water, because Ignacio had told her to, and because it gave her fear a thing to measure.
He passed almost none. What there was came dark, scant, wrong, though she had got cup after cup into him.
She did not know entirely what it meant, save that there was something terribly amiss with a body that took water in and gave very little back.
She got more water into him. She counted the swallows.
It was the only thing her hands could do for him, and she did it through the night like a rosary.
On the fifth day, Padre Ignacio entered bearing the gold cross she recognised from Estella.
He wore it on a chain about his waist, with a stole over his shoulders, and in his hands, he carried a jar of water.
He bowed to Elizabeth, said something about Spiritus Sanctus, and sprinkled several drops of the water on Darcy’s chest.
“Wait, wait,” she said in Spanish, holding up a hand. “He is not —”
But Ignacio only shook his head and told her this was necessary. He must. He then drew out a little vessel of oil from within his cassock and touched it to his fingertips. He bent over Darcy and swiped the oil gently over his eyelids.
“Per istam sanctam unctionem,” he said reverently.
Elizabeth was shaking her head. “No, Padre, no, no…”
He rested his hand on hers and said, in Spanish, “I anoint for prayer and healing, not death. If God wills.”
Not death… If that were so, this still looked a good deal like Last Rites. She watched in dazed horror as Ignacio continued, touching the oil to Darcy’s ears, nose, hands, and even his feet.
“He is too sick to confess,” the padre said as he finished. “But I lift his sacrifice to God and pray that to be his confession.”
“He has nothing to confess,” she murmured as she stroked his sweat-streaked hair. “Whatever you are asking God to forgive, you may tell Him He is mistaken in the case. He is the best man alive.”
Ignacio made the sign of the cross over Darcy, then he rose from beside the bed. “Then you must pray to God that he remains so.”