59. LIX
LIX
Here
He was in the bed, heaped over with blankets, and even from the door she could see him shaking — the whole bulk of the coverlets trembling with it, the deep helpless shudder of the cold stage.
He was in the thick of a fit, teeth clenched against the chattering, his face — his face turned her over completely, because it was grey and sunken and clammy and wrong, the marks of Spain come back on him twofold, the man she had watched nearly die once wearing that same terrible mask again.
A tall, lean gentleman stood at the bedside with a watch in his hand and a manservant beside him, and both of them turned as she came in.
“Madam —” the physician began, startled.
She went straight past him to the bed.
“How long has this fit been on him?” She had Darcy's wrist already, her fingers at his pulse, fast and thin and galloping under her hand exactly as she had feared.
“When did the cold come on? Has he been shaking a quarter hour, half an hour, how long?
And the last fit, when did it break — yesterday's, when did he sweat it out? I must know the hours, I cannot judge the dosing without the hours.”
“Madam, I do not know who you —”
“Have you given him the bark in the intermission or in the fit?” She had turned back one of the blankets to feel his brow — burning, the fever climbing under the cold, exactly the treacherous duplicity of it — and was tucking it back at once, because he needed the heat kept in while the cold was on him, whatever a fool might think of piling wool on a man whose skin scorched.
“If you have been dosing him at the height you have wasted it, he cannot hold it down at the height, no one can, it must go in during the hours between. Has he kept any down in the last hours?”
“Elizabeth?”
He had got his eyes open. They were glassy and did not quite find her, roved and came back and roved again, but he had heard her voice, and he was reaching for it. “Elizabeth. You are here?”
She bent over him, brushing the hair from his brow with her fingertips. “I am here, Fitzwilliam. I am here.”
His hand caught at hers and pulled it back to his chest, where he clutched it like a crucifix to his heart. His eyes clenched again, and the breath was hissing between his teeth during the shudders.
The physician came round the other side of the bed now, as he could not press in between Elizabeth and his patient.
“Madam! I do not know by what right you have come in here, but this is most irregular — a lady, a stranger, in a gentleman's sickchamber? I must ask you to withdraw at once and let me tend my patient. If you are some connexion of the family, you may wait below with the —”
Elizabeth looked up at him, her hand still trapped in the cave of Darcy’s chest. “I am his wife, sir. I will thank you to let me comfort him, and then you may tend your patient and I will tend my husband and we need not quarrel again.”
The physician looked across to Miss Darcy, who had come to crouch beside Elizabeth and to touch her brother’s face. “She is his wife, Mr Samuels,” Georgiana seconded. “This is the Elizabeth he has been asking for.”
“I… I’d no idea that Mr Darcy had married,” Mr Samuels said slowly.
“Nor had most, and the fault for that is mine,” Elizabeth replied. “Sir, I was there when he took the marsh fever before. I had it at the same time, but I had medicine and he did not. It was only by a miracle that he survived then, and you must… you will do all that can be done for him now!”
The physician looked uncomfortable, and glanced at the manservant nearby.
“Madam, I appreciate your concern. Indeed, we are doing all that can be done for Mr Darcy, and I am confident of his eventual recovery, but you must not… well! You see, it is hardly a dignified suffering. Not four hours ago, he was most wretched, indeed, and his valet was obliged to bathe him and change the linens. After that came the nausea, which was an unpleasant business. I cannot countenance a lady —”
“I do not think you understand, sir. There was no valet or store of bark or copper bathtub the last time this was on him. There was no army of maids with fresh linens at every turning of the hour, and no line of footmen carrying up firewood to build a blaze fit to burn down the house. He had but one good priest and me, and I was still sick with it myself while I lay beside him to nurse him. Blush all you want, but the embarrassment will be yours, not mine. I ought to have been here before, but I am here now, and here I stay.”
The physician frowned rather gravely, then turned his attention to the man in the bed who had subsided under her hand and was watching her obsessively with his unfocused eyes, as though she were the only fixed thing in a spinning world
He cleared his throat. “I am afraid I was a bit wrong-footed, Mrs Darcy. I… well, I had been trying to make out the history of his illness, but in such cases as these, the patient is often the one whose intelligence is most needed and yet most difficult to obtain. When was he last ill?”
“Two months ago. He was taken with it in the last week of July, and was a little more than a fortnight in recovering enough ride to Santander.”
Samuels blinked. “Forgive me, Mrs Darcy… Did you say ride? After only a fortnight with no treatment? I presume you mean in a carriage?”
“On the back of a mule. From Burgos to Santander, and for much of it, we were not afforded proper accommodations. We slept under the stars more than once, and thanked God it did not always rain.”
The physician was rubbing his jaw now, his eyes still round with awe. “Well… Mrs Darcy, I no longer wonder at your familiarity with his illness. I wonder that he survived at all.”
“I believe he was too stubborn not to. Sir, please. You say he will survive this fit? Can you be sure of that?”
Samuels cast about him, and, finding a chair nearby, lowered himself to speak to her evenly, across the bed.
“If he can keep it down, yes. It is already in his blood, but as you must know, Mrs Darcy, even with treatment, the ague does not lie down quietly. An initial bout survived without the bark leaves the thing rooted deeper. It explains the violence of the return. If you survived it as well, then it may come back for you one day, but possibly not as badly. But your husband, I think, has not seen the last of this illness, nor may he for many years. Mr Darcy would do well to keep a store of medicine laid by at all times.”
Elizabeth almost laughed at the simplicity of that statement. Laid by… How easy it all seemed from a comfortable house in London!
“I will see that he does,” she murmured as she gazed into her husband’s face. The paroxysm was fading now. His eyes drooped, only a slit showing where one had failed to close entirely, and she soothed it closed with her hand. “He will start thrashing soon. You ought to —”
“Now, hold a minute, Mrs Darcy. I will withdraw my objection to a lady nursing in this… situation. But you will take my direction on the physic.”
“I suggest you give it, then,” she said. “How much bark, and in what, and how long since the last —”
“Elizabeth.” Darcy's fingers had turned in hers and gripped, with a sudden startling strength.
He was looking at her, and for a moment his eyes cleared, truly cleared, found her and held her.
“You came back. You are… you are really here. I was afraid —” The fever dragged at him, his eyes beginning to cross each other already.
“I thought you had… the letter — you gave me back the —”
“I know.” She bent close over him, both her hands around his one now, her forehead nearly to his, and did not care who gasped about it or what Samuels thought of her as a wife and caretaker.
“I know, my love. I was wrong. I got it all wrong, every part of it. I mean to eat my words and spend the rest of my life recanting them, but not now. Now you are only going to lie still, and take what this good man gives you, and let me help you fight it, exactly as you helped me. Can you hear me, love? You brought me through this. Now it is my turn, and I am not going anywhere, not this time, not ever. I am here. I am staying. Lie still and let me stay.”
His hand was clamped around something soft, and warm, and breathing.
For a long while, all he knew was the comfort of it, with no thought for what he held or how it had got there. He had her body along his, a brace for his chest to roll against and a pillow for his cheek to rest on and a place for his hand to clasp that comfort near, so that it might never leave.
Skin. His hand was directly on skin, not linen.
Skin that dimpled when his fingers flexed, and smoothed when his hand shifted.
He lay some time in the groggy fascination of it, his mind still given to blackness, dreams and shards of reality coalescing and splitting until he thought…
he was fairly certain… he could pick one from the other.
At last, he found the part of his mind responsible for opening his eyes.
He had her.
Elizabeth had come to him… yesterday, he was sure it was yesterday.
Bowed over him with the ferocity of a lioness and stroked his head in the night and put cool hands on him when he was on fire and held him while he shook.
He was shivering still, a fine, constant tremor that ran through him and into her.
And somewhere in the lost hours, his body had done what his fevered mind had wanted past everything and had wrapped itself around her — his chest curved along her back, his knees behind hers, his hand cupped without any decency at all over the soft warmth of her breast, and his face pushed into the fall of her hair at the back of her neck, his beard against her skin, so that he breathed her in with every shallow breath.
It was dark, but for the low red light of the hearth. That was a small mercy — the candles and lanterns were not there to pierce his eyes. The room had stopped its slow, sick turning, and he could think, in a weak and drifting way, could hold a thought for more than a moment before it slid.
She was in his bed, in his arms, and she was real.
He must have made some sound, or moved, or gripped her more firmly, because she stirred. She drank in a breath and turned over in the circle of his arms to face him — and there she was, close in the red dark, her face inches from his, her eyes finding his and going soft.
“There you are,” she whispered.
“I was about to say the same thing.” He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I thought I dreamed you. I have dreamed you so often.”
“Not this time.” She lifted her hand and laid the back of it against his forehead, his cheek, his throat.
He let her satisfy herself, too weak and too content to do anything but be handled.
“You are cooler. The fit has passed and you are cooler and you are here, you frightful, foolish man, you are still here.”
“How…” He was obliged to clear his throat a little from too much disuse. “How long have you been here?”
“Yesterday afternoon. I was such a fool, Fitzwilliam! Such a fool. I should have been here, should have come straight from the ship with you and never left your side for a moment. Instead, I did the cruelest thing imaginable, and you nearly— you nearly—” She choked on a sob, turned her face into his hand, and he felt it wet.
“Hush,” he managed. “You will make yourself ill, and then who is to nurse the pair of us?”
“Do not tease me! I cannot bear it, not tonight.”
“I can think of no better time.” He was too weak to reprove her as she deserved, too weak to do anything at all but lie in the dark and hold her.
“I shall make you pay for it, though. Be warned. I mean to be a very great deal of trouble, and to make you nurse me most cruelly, for weeks — months, perhaps — before I am well enough to forgive you properly. Now you will never be let off.”
Her chest broke with half a sob and half a laugh. “You will have no luck trying to frighten me away, if that is your threat. None at all. I have nowhere else I mean to be.”
“I knew you could not resist a challenge,” he murmured.
She caught his hand and clasped both to her heart. He caressed her fingers a little, drowsily, as his eyes fought to drift closed again. But then his thumb crossed something hard and cold, and he opened his eyes once more.
“That is…” He picked her hand up, out of the shell of the blankets and into the firelight, to be sure of it, turning her hand with his clumsy fingers. The pinchbeck ring. On her hand again, where it belonged. “You are wearing it.”
“I am. Georgiana told me they had to pry it out of your fist when you fell. That you would not let go of it, even senseless, even carried up the stairs — that it took two of them to open your hand.” She turned her fingers so the little ring caught the red light.
“So I put it back on. And I will tell you now, Fitzwilliam Darcy, that you shall never get it off me again. You may try. You will not succeed.”
“I shall buy you a better one,” he said it drowsily into her hair. “My wife ought to have a gold ring with a stone in it.”
“You shall do no such thing, because your wife does not want a better one. I want this one. It has been on my hand through every dreadful and every wonderful thing that has happened to me since you first put it there, and it is worth more than anything you could buy in all of London. This one, or none.”
“This one, then,” he sighed, letting his eyes close as his mouth pressed against her brow. “This one, always.”
He was drowsy now, the little strength the clear hour had given him running out, the dark and the warmth and the nearness of her pulling him down toward sleep. He gathered her closer, or tried to, his arm heavy and weak over her.
For a few seconds though, he clawed his way back.
Back, long enough to know what he must. “Elizabeth,” he murmured, “are you sure this time? Truly sure? For I warn you, if you mean to change your mind again, I shall have to marry you a second time, properly, in a church, in daylight, with your name read out three Sundays running, so that you cannot unwrite it with a letter. I am too tired to do it this week. But I shall. Do not think the fever has made me forget.”
She leaned in and kissed his eyes closed, one and then the other, softly, and he felt her mouth curve against his skin.
“There is no need to marry me again,” she whispered.
“My name is Mrs Darcy. It has been Mrs Darcy since June, and it will be Mrs Darcy until I die, and I will thank you, sir, to remember it.” She settled down against him, her head beneath his chin, the ring hand over his heart.
“Now go to sleep. I am not going anywhere. Go to sleep, my love, and let me be the one who comforts you for a change.”
“Good.” A long breath left him, and by the time he had got to the bottom of it, he was asleep.