Chapter Four
Georgiana's fever broke on the third night, then returned worse before dawn, and Darcy sat beside her bed through both, his hand wrapped around hers, counting her breaths because counting was the only thing that kept his own from coming too fast.
"You mustn't leave," she whispered once, half lucid, her small fingers tightening. "Don't go to the meeting. Don't leave me."
"I am not going anywhere."
He had said it to Hargreave's messenger that morning too, in language considerably less gentle. The committee could wait. Everything could wait.
The physician came and went, spoke of crisis points and the next forty-eight hours in a tone that gave Darcy nothing to hold onto, and left him alone with a basin of water and a cloth and a sister too weak to lift her own head.
He wrote the letter that night, at the small writing desk pulled close to her bed, because he could not sit still and do nothing, because his hands needed some task or they would shake.
Elizabeth,
He crossed it out. Started again.
Miss Bennet, if you receive this, know that I write it not from any hope of pardon, but because a man watching his sister fight for breath learns quickly what is worth risking and what is not.
He told her everything. The codicil. The committee.
Lady Catherine's letter and its likely author.
He told her that his silence on the terrace, his coldness in the bookshop, had been fear wearing the shape of indifference, and that he had let her believe the worse thing because the worse thing had seemed, at the time, safer than the truth.
I do not ask you to wait for me. I ask only that you know I have not been indifferent. I have been afraid, and there is a difference, though I grant I have given you little means of telling them apart.
He sealed it near dawn, his eyes burning with lack of sleep, and could not bring himself to send it. Not yet. Not while Georgiana's breath still rattled in her chest, not while every ounce of him was needed here.
He tucked it beneath her pillow instead, meaning to retrieve it once the crisis passed, once he could think of anything beyond the next hour.
Colonel Fitzwilliam arrived on the fourth day, summoned by a note Darcy barely remembered writing, and found his cousin grey-faced in a chair by the sickbed, unshaven, his cravat long since discarded.
"You look worse than she does," Fitzwilliam said, low, and pulled another chair close.
"She is improving." Darcy did not look up from Georgiana's face. "The physician says the fever has turned."
"And you? When did you last sleep?"
Darcy did not answer. Fitzwilliam studied him a moment longer, then reached out and took the cloth from his cousin's slack hand, dipping it himself, wringing it out, laying it across Georgiana's brow with a gentleness that surprised them both.
"Go and sleep," Fitzwilliam said. "An hour. I will not leave her."
"I cannot."
"You can, and you will, because you are no use to her collapsed on the floor." Fitzwilliam's voice gentled further. "Darcy. She will not thank you for making yourself ill on her account."
Darcy went, eventually, more from exhaustion than persuasion, and slept four hours in a chair in the adjoining room, and woke to find Fitzwilliam still there, and Georgiana's colour, for the first time in days, something closer to her own.
"The fever has broken properly this time," Fitzwilliam said quietly. "The physician was here while you slept. He is cautiously hopeful."
Darcy's knees very nearly gave out with the relief of it.
The relief, however, did not extend to the committee, who had heard nothing from Darcy in a week and drew their own conclusions.
Your continued silence, Hargreave wrote, in a hand grown even tighter with irritation, does little to reassure Lady Catherine of your seriousness regarding the terms of the trust. I would urge you to respond at your earliest convenience, and to consider carefully how your absence from London may be construed.
Darcy read it standing in the doorway of Georgiana's room, watching her sleep, her breathing finally even, and felt something in him go cold and hard.
"They think I have been in Hertfordshire," he said, half to himself.
"Have you been," Fitzwilliam asked, folding his newspaper, "at any point during the last week, in Hertfordshire?"
"No."
"Then tell them so."
"They will not believe a denial without proof, and I have no wish to drag Georgiana's illness before that committee as evidence of my conduct. She has suffered enough without becoming an exhibit in Lady Catherine's tribunal."
Fitzwilliam's expression sobered. "Then what will you do?"
Darcy thought of the letter beneath his sister's pillow, unsent, its ink long dry. He thought of Elizabeth's face in the bookshop, the concern she had offered him and the coldness he had returned for it.
"Nothing, for now," he said. "Georgiana needs me here. The letter will wait until she is well enough that I can leave her side without fear, and then I will send it, and whatever comes of that will come."
He did not go to retrieve it that day. Nor the next. Georgiana's recovery, though real, remained fragile enough that he could not bear to leave her long enough to sit at a desk and think of anything beyond the sound of her breathing.
The letter stayed where he had left it, forgotten beneath a pillow that would not be properly turned out for weeks yet, while its author convinced himself, hour by hour, that a little more waiting could do no further harm.
He was wrong, though he would not learn how wrong for the better part of a year.