58. LVIII
LVIII
One Thing
He surfaced and went under and surfaced again, and could not, for long stretches, have said which was which.
He had got to his room somehow. Or that was Padre Ignacio’s crucifix on the wall, or it was both at once, the two of them laid over each other so that the shadows of one fell across the walls of the other.
The light hurt, and voices came and went.
He was sure for a while the bed rocked as the Prudence took the waves, and then he was in Santander, leaning over that copper tub as the soap turned cold in his hand.
He was shaking. It had come all at once, in the hall — he remembered that much, or perhaps he was still there and only imagining the bed.
The floor coming up… the ring in his hand — was it still there?
Where was the ring? He reached for it, but his fist would not loosen.
His body had been taken by a bone-deep shuddering that no weight of blankets could reach, so that he lay heaped under coverlets and a fire built high enough to roast a lamb on a spit.
Still, he shook as though he were naked on a mountain.
Then the cold would break and the heat would come, worse, a burning that started in his marrow and pushed outward until his skin felt stretched too tight over it, and his head — his head was a hammered bell, a great iron thing tolling behind his eyes with every beat of his heart.
The light from the candles about him was knives, and the room swung on a slow pivot.
Nausea rolled up out of his stomach in long, sick waves until he was retching over the basin someone held, bringing up nothing, bringing up bile, bringing up the bitter draught they had forced into him not an hour before.
The bark. He knew the smell of it. Even in the swimming dark, he knew that smell, but having it on his tongue was another revulsion — harsh vegetable bitterness cut with wine.
He knew he must keep it down, but he kept retching it up.
Had to keep it, because he had measured it out himself once, one precious sip at a time, for someone —
Elizabeth. He had held her and got the bark into her a spoonful at a time between the fits, coaxing, threatening, praying, while she burned and shook exactly as he burned and shook now, and there had been so little of it, so little.
And she had lived. She had lived — he had given her the bark, and she had lived and it had been worth it, it had been the best thing he had ever done, he would do it again a hundred times —
“He had it before, you say. In Spain?” There had been a voice near his bed, had been many voices, but this one had come back twice. Or maybe had never left. “And went untreated? Are you certain of it, Miss Darcy? A man does not commonly walk away from a tertian fever with no bark at all.”
“I… I do not know, he is making no sense,” Georgiana protested. Her hands were wringing in his vision. “He said something about a padre, and quina, whatever that is, that he could not take it, that it was for… for someone else.”
He tried to answer it. He was the one who knew, it was his fever, and they were talking over him about his own body as though he were already gone.
He got his eyes open, or partly open, onto a spinning smear of a room and a dark shape bent over him that resolved, slowly, into a cloudy form of a man feeling the pulse at his wrist.
“I had it,” Darcy said, or tried to; his tongue was thick. “In Spain. In the summer. I was not — there was none for me. I went without.”
“Ah.” The physician's face turned down toward him.
“You are with us, Mr Darcy. Good. Then you know something of what's before you, sir.
You have the ague again — it comes back, this kind, it lies quiet and comes back, there's no help for that part. But you are in England now, and there is bark enough in this house to physic a regiment. We will break the fits with it, in a day or two, or three. You must keep it down, however it turns your stomach, and let it do its work in the clear hours between. Can you manage that, sir?”
“Yes.” He closed his eyes and swallowed. That bigger, gagging sense was still there. “Where is my wife?”
No one replied to that. Darcy got his eyes open again, and the physician was looking at Georgiana, who was staring at the far wall.
“Rest, sir,” the physician said, and turned away to murmur to someone, and Darcy lost him, lost the thread, went back under into the shaking.
Time did not run properly. It pooled and skipped.
Hands stripped the soaked shirt off him, sponged his brow, but they were never hers.
Sometimes the room was bright, and sometimes there was but one candle, and he could not account for the sounds beside the bed.
Sometimes there were several people and sometimes one; and always, when he could find the surface at all, he came up asking for her.
“Elizabeth.” He said it into the dark, into the light, into whatever face was near. “Elizabeth? Is she come? Send for — tell her I —”
And there was one face that was almost always there, when he could fix on anything, fair, wet with crying — Georgiana, his Georgiana, sitting by him with her hands twisted together and her eyes red and frightened.
He could not spare the strength to comfort her; he had only strength enough for the one thing.
“Georgie.” He got his hand out from under the blankets and it found her arm, gripped it, too hard perhaps, he could not judge his own grip. “Georgie, listen. Bring her. Bring Elizabeth. I need her, do you hear — I need —”
“Fitzwilliam, please, please lie still, the doctor said you must lie still.”
“Bring her!”
“I cannot! I cannot bring her, Fitzwilliam. She… she does not want to come. She lied to me. All that time yesterday she was so kind, she sent you her love a dozen times over, and all the while she had that — that letter in her room, she was going to — she does not want to be married to you, she said so, it was in the letter, was it not? That is what has done this to you. Why would I bring her? Why would I fetch the person who has —”
“You do not understand.” He hauled at the surface, dragged himself up through the mire of darkness toward her, because this mattered more than the nausea, more than the cold, more than anything, and he had to make her see it before he went under again.
“She lied to you because she loves me. She sent you her love a dozen times because it was true. The letter — the letter is wrong, Georgie, it is all wrong, she has got it wrong, she thinks — she thinks she is saving me, she is throwing herself away to save me and she has got every particular of it wrong and I could not — I could not get to her to tell her —”
“Fitzwilliam, please…”
“She is my wife.” He held her arm and made her look at him.
“She is my wife, and I love her and she is sitting in Cheapside this minute believing she has done me a kindness, believing I am — God knows what she believes, that I have gone to that girl, that I am glad to be free — and she does not know I am ill, she does not know anything, and if I — Georgie, if I die of this —”
“No!”
“If I die of this and she is not sent for, she will spend the rest of her life believing I let her go. I cannot… I will not have her believe that. Bring her. Whatever she said to you, whatever she thinks she is doing, bring her to me.”
His sister was crying too hard, or he was slipping too fast; the room was tilting again, the cold coming back up through him in its long shudder, the nausea cresting toward another fit, and her face was blurring, and he lost her.
She got the carriage door open before it had fully stopped and was out and up the steps almost at a run. If she could only reach her room, only get the door shut behind her, she could be sick in private, and fall apart in private, and no one need see the miserable fool the morning had made of her.
She had given him up. She had given up the single most precious thing she would ever hold, had cut him out of herself with her own hand and sent him away, and she had gone this morning to spend what that sacrifice had bought her…
and it had bought her nothing. A willing enough man who could not help.
A letter to an embassy that would do nothing.
A lovely girl in a good hat, very much looking forward to an afternoon drive with a gentleman.
She had ruined her own life, and her uncle was no nearer saved, and it had all come out to nothing at all.
She was going to be sick with the hatefulness of it, right here on the stairs, if she did not —
“Lizzy?” Her aunt's voice called from the parlour. “Lizzy, is that you?”
She stopped with her hand on the banister and shut her eyes. She could not face her aunt just now. She had not the strength to bear her aunt’s grief as well as her own.
“Lizzy?” her aunt called through the door again. “Lizzy, come, please. There is a caller for you.”
A caller? What a cruel trick! Just when she was least presentable, she had to go and make herself welcoming to… to someone. Who the devil would bother to call on her just now?
She went back down, smoothing her face as she walked. She set her hand to the parlour door and opened it.
Her aunt was sitting very upright on the sofa, and beside her, straight-backed and pale, with her gloves still on and her chin up in a way that did not quite hide that she had been crying, sat Georgiana Darcy.
Elizabeth could only gape stupidly for an instant. Why… why would she have come back? Darcy would have stopped her, would not have let her interfere… would he? Or had he sent her to plead on his behalf?
And then, another horror slid round her heart. Her aunt knew the Darcy name very well. Was even now looking bewildered, but also terribly, heart-breakingly suspicious.
“Elizabeth, this young lady has been waiting above half an hour. I told her she was welcome to call again, but she said she must wait and see you. She is —”