56. LVI
LVI
Forsworn
Georgiana came home a little after two, bright as a struck match, full of it before she was through the door — she had loved Elizabeth, she had known she would, they had got on famously, Elizabeth was everything he had said and more.
They had laughed together, and Elizabeth had teased her and sent her love more times than she could count.
“Oh, Fitzwilliam,” she gushed, “when may I go again? She says she is busy tomorrow, but the next day, perhaps? And soon… when can she come home, Fitzwilliam?”
Darcy stood up from his desk to meet her gladness, and the room tilted very slightly as he did.
It was not the first time today, nor the second that he had felt that odd, swimming lurch.
He had put it down to having eaten too little, worked too much, slept not at all.
Elizabeth in his arms would have made it right, would have made him rest and be sated on something besides work and worry.
But for now, he would have to content himself with his sister’s pleasure.
“I was sure you would like her. Did you meet Mrs Gardiner?”
“No, Elizabeth said she had been indisposed. And something about grief in the household that day. She had been crying, Fitzwilliam. She tried to hide it when she first came in, but she did not manage for very long.”
He stopped just a few feet short of reaching her, and his head gave a little spin when he did so. “Was she unwell? Did she say —”
“She said very little about herself. I think she is very heartsore without you, brother. She made me promise to tell you again and again that she loves you.”
He smiled faintly. “I hope you gave her my assurances in kind.”
“I could not help it. She drank them like honey. Will you not go to her?’
His vision was fogging a little, so he blinked before it could turn into visible sentiment. “Soon. What else did she say?”
“Oh, a very great deal. And she sent you something.” Georgiana produced a sealed packet from her reticule. “She was most particular that you should have it directly I returned. I do not know what it is, but her hand shook when she gave it me.”
He took it and turned it over, and something in him went cold before he had broken the wax wafer.
Elizabeth did not send packets that felt thick like this.
She sent notes that sounded cheerful when they were not, a few lines with words that told more feeling than the simple shapes of the letters could convey.
He bent the wafer, broke the seal, and started to unfold the paper.
The ring fell into his palm.
He stared, and his mind simply refused to make sense of it. It looked… why, it was… He plucked it out of his palm and held it up to the light.
The pinchbeck ring. Her wedding ring. The cheap Estella bit of brass that had sat on her hand through fever and mountains and the whole long road. What was…?
Georgiana gasped, at about the same time Darcy’s heart went out from under him.
“Fitzwilliam, is that…”
He turned numbly away, slipping the ring over the tip of his index finger to finish unfolding the note she had sent with it. No, no, this was not… she could not be talking of ending… The light from the window was suddenly shot through with odd colours, and he swayed.
“Fitzwilliam!” Georgiana was grabbing at his coat. “You should sit, brother. You look as if you have had a terrible shock.”
“She… she…” He let his sister pull him towards his desk chair, but only found it because she pushed it under him. “Elizabeth, no,” he was murmuring, “No, not again. Do not do this…”
His eyes fought him. He noticed distantly, even as the words went into him like blows, that the lines floated and doubled, that he had to hold the paper too close and blink hard to fix each phrase before it slid, that reading demanded an effort out of all proportion to the page.
“Fitzwilliam?” Georgiana kept asking, kept tugging at his arm, trying to peer into his face, but he had no concentration to spare her.
He was turning the paper over now, reading bits of it in horror, skimming the worst words all in one go and then trying to return to the top to make sense of them. How could she claim that honouring their vows meant violating her conscience?
And… and she was not… His breath came fast to read it.
Not with child… for a certainty, not. The matter had drawn on, let her hope once more, but…
well, what had she expected? No one could call that a failing, but it seemed as if she had.
Not only a failing, but an excuse. A wretched, faithless, cowardly excuse to put him aside the moment she discovered she had not…
His eyes had got further down the note, and the blood was thrumming in his head.
Something was wrong. Her grief fairly ripped the page apart — asking him to let her go was cutting the heart from her, this was not something she chose.
Something was the matter with… He rubbed his eyes. With Gardiner? What the devil had gone…
“Fitzwilliam! Oh, I am calling for Mrs Hodges.” Georgiana was up now, across the room, but he was still reading the page, his vision tunnelled to perhaps two or three words at a time now.
And she still thought she could buy back Pemberley by sacrificing herself.
How could she still think he would even want that?
After every hardship they had shared, after owing each other their lives more times than he could count, after a thousand intimacies and promises and tender memories that had scorched his character and his heart down to bare earth and built him over again…
She thought she was doing him a kindness by ripping the heart from his chest.
“Mr Darcy?” Mrs Hodges was coming into the room now, but her face had gone spotty round the hairline, and he truly only caught sight of her apron as she drew near. “Are you well, sir?”
He was shaking his head, still trying to make sense of the stupid horror of it, when he slowed down enough to read the last lines.
She wanted him to go to Lady Honoria. She thought, somehow, that the connexion was there, and the influence was there, and the earl's goodwill might still open every door — the bank, Pemberley, even her uncle’s rescue.
That he must not be too proud. How often on the road had she scolded him for his pride?
For paying off fines she could have very well talked down or had scratched off, simply because he would not reduce her to being stared at by armed men?
Only now, what she called the laying aside of pride would be, to his mind, the very opposite. It would be the abominable supremacy of pride, to put aside the woman he loved to save a piece of dirt and his own arrogance!
Something in him turned to icy tremors, and something in him caught fire, both at once.
She did not know that there was no door to walk back through — that he had closed it himself, two weeks ago, for her sake; that Marchwood had been in this very room two days past and been refused to his face; that the rescue she was tearing her own heart out to send him towards had not existed since the hour he first refused it.
Because I love you.
She actually wrote that. Because she loved him. His chest was heaving now, and a cry was beginning from somewhere deep in the pit of his wretchedness.
“Upon my word! Jeffries, the decanter from the sideboard,” Mrs Hodges was directing. “Pour some sherry. And Sarah, open that window, let in the air. Mr Darcy, sir, we shall leave you —”
“Elizabeth!” he breathed as he clutched the ring in one fist and stared blindly at the letter in the other.
Mrs Hodges was tugging Georgiana away — he saw them dimly. They thought him mad. Or ill, or… or it was all nonsense anyway, and perhaps the letter was only a figment of some nightmare. His hands tore at it, and the folded second sheet fell free and dropped to his feet.
It was the only thing he had seen clearly in the last quarter-hour. The thing they had both carried so many miles, the thing that had got her safely home with him and been consecrated by the most holy moments of his life.
He bent and picked up the marriage lines.
“No,” he said aloud. “No! You do not get to do this!”
He was on his feet now, and dimly, only dimly, noticed the concerned people in the room scattering from his path.
Georgiana crying out. Mrs Hodges calling for the maid and the footman to give Mr Darcy his privacy, and encouraging Miss Darcy to come, only come away, the master will be well enough if left alone.
“But there is something fearfully wrong! I have never seen him like this. Fitzwilliam?”
He crossed to the door and found Jeffries already there, holding it for him. When had the lad got there? Darcy stared for only an instant, then heard his own voice come out wrong, too thick, too loud.
“The carriage. Now.” He was fumbling at the buttons of his jacket — dash it all, already buttoned, where was his coat?
He wanted his overcoat, it was so bloody cold in this house.
By the door, no doubt, and his hat… His hands were clumsy, and the hall had begun to do the same slow, sickening tilt the study had done, worse now, the floor not quite where he put his feet.
“Tell the driver I am going to Gracechurch Street. I am going to —”
Bring her home. Tell her the truth. Undo this. The words were all there in his lucid, furious mind and came out of his mouth in some broken order that no one seemed to understand. “She has got it wrong. She does not know. I have to —”
“Sir.” Jeffries had stopped in front of him, holding up a hand. “Sir, you are — forgive me, sir, but you do not look at all well. You ought not go —”
“I am perfectly well. The carriage, Jeffries!”
That was when his knees blew from under him.
Jeffries caught him by the arm — only just, with the letter and the marriage lines scattering from Darcy’s numb, dazed hand.
He clutched the ring in his other hand; he would not let that go, but he watched the papers fall.
Another footman was under his other arm now, keeping him from striking his head on the floor.
“Fitzwilliam! Oh, what is wrong?” Georgiana was kneeling before him, her hands on either side of his face. “You are… oh, Mrs Hodges, feel how hot he is!”
Yes… yes, hot. No… he was cold. Damned freezing.
He knew it even as she said it — knew it with a grim certainty, because he had felt this exact thing before, riding in the heat of the day on the back of a mule to a town he did not know with his teeth chattering and his dear Elizabeth dying in his arms. The drifting free-fall of his consciousness and the thick tongue and the floor gone treacherous and the first deep bone-cold shudder beginning somewhere under his ribs.
The ague. The fever, come back, come back now, this hour, exactly now, when he had at last a reason to run across a city — his own body rising up against him to keep him from the one place he had to go.
He did not care. He would go feverish. He would go on his hands and knees if it came to that. He got one arm free of the footmen and staggered up on one foot.
“Fitzwilliam, you are ill!” Georgiana had hold of his other arm now, and her voice had climbed into real fear.
She was looking at his face with an expression that frightened him, that told him more plainly than any glass how he must look.
“You are burning, and trembling all over, you cannot — Jeffries, do not fetch the carriage, fetch the doctor, send for the doctor at once!”
“No… the carriage… Georgiana, listen to me —” He caught at her, missed, and caught the door-frame instead.
The cold was already a shaking he could not stop, his whole frame gone to it, his teeth beginning to knock, and the light in the hall had started to pulse, narrowing and twisting.
He fought it. He had a thing to say, and he drove it out through the chattering and the narrowing with the last of his ordered will, because it was the only thing that mattered and he might not have another minute clear.
“Elizabeth. Georgie — I have to — send for — tell Elizabeth —”
The floor came up. He watched it coming, in a distant, lucid way, the tilt completing itself at last. There was Georgiana's cry and Jeffries's lunge and the ring still shut in his fist where he would not, even falling, let it go.
He got out one more thing, or thought he did — her name, only her name — and then the narrowing light drew down to a point and went out.