Stay #2
“No! No, no — Fitzwilliam!” She dragged the blanket up over him and reached for the others, the ones she had folded away that afternoon in her foolish certainty that he would not need them, and could not find them fast enough.
She threw what she had over him and then did the thing that worked, the only thing, climbed up onto his chest and clung to his shaking body.
She put her lips on his brow and held him, held the shuddering down with the whole of her weight, and felt his teeth knock and his frame heave and his heat pour into her.
She murmured at him, nonsense, I have you, I have you, be still, I have you, the way she had for a week, except that before, she had half believed it, and now she did not.
Because she had been reckless enough to trust to faith, and been made a fool of, and the fear she had put aside that afternoon had come back for her with interest.
The cold hour broke, at last, into the hot one, and that was worse.
He stopped shaking and went taut and began to fight her.
Fought the blankets, fought her arms, lurched away from her and threw the covers off with a strength she had not known was still in him, muttering, then talking, then — she had thought she was past being frightened by his voice and she was not — crying out.
In a voice that was at once perfectly clear and terribly abstract, he shot half up with his eyes open, seeing nothing, “Where is she?”
She strained at his flailing hands, trying not to let him hit her and yet let him find her.
She could not say for whom he searched. His sister, perhaps.
She had heard him call for his mother once.
Occasionally, he had said her name… more than occasionally…
but sometimes, he seemed to be searching for someone else altogether.
Someone he had loved intimately and lost, she knew not how, or what woman had gone so deeply into the heart of Fitzwilliam Darcy that he would sob for her in his nightmares.
When he had been like this before, she had been able to comfort him, to placate the terror in his mind with her touch, with the feel of her hair and her body under his hands, and he would imagine that whoever he sought was her, and be soothed.
She could not lie over him and force him down when he was fevered, so she captured one hand, stroked a cool cloth over his head, and whispered, “Shh, I am here, I am here, I am right here.” She put her hands on his burning face and turned it toward her own. “I am here.”
He looked straight at her, straight into her eyes from a hand's breadth away, and said again, ragged, lost, “Where is she? She was here, where has she— you have to find her! She needs me… Elizabeth… please.”
She let him tug his hand away, let him keep searching the empty air with it until it came to rest on her face, and let it remain there. She could not decide if he were searching for her, or begging her to search for someone else, but whichever it was, he was past hearing her reassurances.
“I am here,” she said again, uselessly, her voice breaking on it.
“Fitzwilliam. It is Elizabeth. I am here, I have not gone anywhere, look at me.” But he had already slid sideways off the question into fever-babble, numbers and the road and his father’s name, and then, worst of all, quiet — a sudden dreadful quieting, his eyes falling shut, his head going heavy in her hands.
For one hideous instant, her own heart stumbled to a stop. No! He could not be…
She shot up and put her ear to his mouth, her hand over his heart.
He was breathing. Quick and shallow, so light that his chest did not move, and the dragging rasp she hated had returned with every breath.
But he was breathing. She had not lost him in that instant. Only nearly. Only enough to teach her exactly how the losing would feel when it came.
She did not call for Ignacio again. There was no bark for the priest to bring, no broth that would heal him, no incantation that would bring back the good afternoon that the night had stolen away.
There was nothing anyone could do that she was not already doing, no cure to send for, no dose to give, only water and cloth and her own arms and the long odds of his own body.
The only thing Ignacio could add to the room was his company, and she did not want company.
She wanted to love the man in the bed with the only thing she had — her silent prayers, her tears, her hand in the dark when he wanted it, and she could not bear letting another person see her despair.
So she fought it alone, through the black middle of the night, the way she had fought it every night, except stripped now of the lie that it was working.
She got water into him between the ravings, a few drops, a mouthful, counting the swallows like beads.
She stripped the blankets when he burned and piled them back when he froze and stripped them again, the maddening reversals coming faster and closer now, the fever cycling him through cold and heat and cold with no mercy and no rest. When the sweat came — and it came, at last, near the low ebb of the night, drenching, total, wringing him out — she changed his soaked shirt and the soaked sheet beneath him with hands that had stopped, days ago, finding any of it strange.
She did not let herself feel the relief the sweat used to bring, because the afternoon had taught her what relief was worth.
And somewhere in the worst of it, kneeling over him with the cloth, with his fevered head against her arm and the whole endeavour feeling suddenly, unbearably, like trying to hold water in her two hands — somewhere in there, the tide of feeling she had been holding off for a week finally reached her.
She put her face down against his hot, wet hair and shook, silently.
That should have been her, raving in the blind dark.
If the world lost Elizabeth Bennet, only a few would mourn, and no one’s life would be damaged beyond repair.
It was not as if she could save her uncle from his present fate.
Her aunt would receive news of her passing in Spain, weep, and carry on.
Her mother would lament the loss as she lamented her father’s, and demand her salts and keep to her rooms, but her life would not materially alter.
Jane would cry, but Jane, she was sure, cried anyway.
But Fitzwilliam Darcy was a man with perhaps hundreds of souls in his keeping.
If he died in this bed, in a land that barely knew how to mourn him and would not send his body back, everything would be lost. The bank would foreclose on Pemberley — it would not pass to Miss Darcy or some cousin who might keep it in good faith.
It would be sold off, farm by farm if necessary, until the estate was a ruin and the lands that were once its pride could hardly afford to sustain the families that lived on them.
Georgiana Darcy would lose the brother who had saved her from a rake — Elizabeth still had never heard all the details, but she knew enough to sense that it had been a near thing.
The sister would one day walk down the aisle on a cousin’s arm, or an uncle’s, and would turn at the altar to face her new husband with no father or brother standing behind her to bless the union.
There would be others, too. Those Elizabeth did not have the scope to imagine.
Servants who, she was sure, would never find as good a place anywhere else.
Friends who likely looked up to him as Mr Bingley had.
There might even be a dog, waiting somewhere in Derbyshire for his master’s touch that might never now come.
And he had given up the hopes of hundreds for her.
If he died, it would be because he chose that she should not, and she never even got to be angry at him for it. Never even got to tell him…
She stopped. She would not finish it, not even in her own head, not with him unable to hear it, because to say it to a man who could not answer felt like theft, like taking a thing he had not offered.
She lifted her face and wiped it on her sleeve.
She dipped the cloth again and wrung it out and laid it cool against his burning throat, and she leaned down close to his ear, and she said the only thing she would let herself say.
“Do not you dare leave me here in Spain alone. You always want to be so noble, so indispensable that the sacrifice must come from you and no other, so I demand it of your honour one last time. You will stay! You will be angry with me tomorrow for making you, and I will laugh at your anger because I refuse to weep at your grave. You may be as insufferable as you like about it afterwards, but you will stay! You have never once done what I told you without argument, but you will do this. Do this one thing for me. For your Elizabeth.”
His breath went in and out, and the fever burned on unopposed, with nothing left to fight it but a starved and frightened woman and whatever, in the ruined furnace of him, was still refusing to go out.