Chapter 21
It was in the carriage, with the house behind her and Darcy’s hand in both of hers, that Elizabeth’s body at last understood it was safe, and began, without asking her leave, to come apart.
It started in her hands. She had held them so still in her lap through every visit paid by Lady Catherine and Anne, flat on the table through every long afternoon, steady on principle, steady as a discipline. But now, safe with Darcy, there was no need for caution.
The shaking came up her arms , and her teeth went, and she could not have spoken if she tried and she was distantly amazed at it, at the violence of it, at how much she had been holding and how hard.
She had not wept in the barred room except at the appointed hour, and she did not weep now. She was past weeping, deeper than weeping, the body spending in ten minutes the terror it had been forbidden to spend for all those long and lonely days.
Darcy did not try to still her. He had the sense not to say you are safe now or it is over, not to press her hands flat or hold her too tight, but only to let the thing run its course, the way one lets a fever run, because it had to come out and there was no out but through.
“I have you,” was all he said, once, low, when the worst of it shook her. “I have you. You need not do anything at all. I have you.” And the carriage carried them east through the early dark toward Gracechurch Street.
Mrs. Gardiner was on the steps. She had been on the steps, the maid said afterward, for the better part of an hour, since the first runner had come ahead with the word that they had Elizabeth at last and were bringing her home.
She had stood out on the cold steps without a shawl, watching the corner, and Mr. Gardiner unable to make her come in, and not trying very hard, because he understood that his wife was owed her vigil on the steps.
And when the carriage came, and the door opened, and Elizabeth was handed down still half-shaking into the lamplight, Mrs. Gardiner moaned and sobbed again, and came down the steps, and the two of them met at the bottom and held on.
It was Elizabeth who spoke first, into her aunt’s shoulder, because there was a thing that could not wait, a thing she had carried in the room alongside the count and the cold and meant to say the instant she could.
“It was not your fault,” she said. “You are going to tell yourself it was, for the rest of your life, every time you look at me, that you let me out of your sight, that you gave me the minute. I know you. So I am telling you now, before another hour goes by and it sets, that it was not your fault, that it was hers, only hers, that she would have had me out of a hundred rooms you watched as easily as the one you did not. I will not have you spend one more day of the long happy life I mean for us all to have now believing you handed me to her. You did not. You handed me a glass of water at a fitting, like the good aunt you are. Do you hear me?”
And Mrs. Gardiner wept then, on the steps, in the lamplight, with her niece holding her up instead of the other way about, which was, Elizabeth understood, the only medicine in the world for what ailed her, and the one no one but she could administer.
Then the household closed around them and drew her in out of the cold.
Jane was there taking Elizabeth’s face in both hands as soon as she could, and looking and looking as though to be sure of every feature, and then simply holding her without a word, sister to sister, the way they had stood in a hundred doorways their whole lives.
Mr. Bingley hovered with a great uncomplicated gladness that was its own kind of welcome after so many awful days. Mr. Gardiner got the door shut and the cold out and quietly took command of the practical salvation of his niece.
The fire was built up, the doctor sent for, broth set to warm, a hot brick wrapped for the bed, and being a man who loved by doing, and who had days of helpless love stored up, he meant to spend the whole of it tonight with blankets and broth and brandy.
They did not have her talk much that first hour, and she found she was glad of it. The telling could wait, all of it, the third floor and the locks and Anne on the stairs, it could keep for daylight and strength.
What could not wait was the simple restoration of Elizabeth to their midst, and the women of the house saw to it, Mrs. Gardiner and Jane and a devoted weeping housemaid, with a thoroughness that brooked no argument.
A bath before the bedroom fire, hot as she could bear, the awful days of that house soaked and scrubbed out of her skin; her hair washed and combed and dried at the hearth; clean warm linen that smelled of lavender and home and not of the grey blanket she would never have to lie under again.
The doctor came and was gentle and brief and pronounced her, to the great and visible relief of the doorway full of faces, unhurt in any way that would not mend, worn very thin and badly frightened and wanting nothing in the world that food and warmth and rest and time would not restore.
He left a draught, which she did not mean to take, having had her fill of draughts, and he went and they put her into her own bed in the small back bedroom, banked the fire, and would have dimmed the lamp and left her to sleep.
“Where is Mr. Darcy?” she asked.
There was the smallest pause, the pause of a respectable household arriving all at once at a question of propriety it had not, in the rush, thought to settle.
Mrs. Gardiner looked at Jane, and Jane looked back, and some swift wordless conference passed between them and resolved itself, as such things did in that house, on the side of love over form.
“Downstairs,” said Mrs. Gardiner. “He has not gone, and I do not think wild horses could take him. He is standing in my front parlour wearing a track in the carpet and refusing every chair. Do you want him?”
“I want him where I can see him,” Elizabeth said, “or I shall lie here all night listening for locks. I am sorry. I know what it is to ask. But I have spent days learning the sound of that door, and I find I cannot yet be in a room I cannot see him in, and I would rather scandalize your house than lie awake afraid in it.”
“You will scandalize nothing,” said Mrs. Gardiner, with sudden decision, “that I do not give you full leave to scandalize. You are to be married within the month, you have both been through hell, and any creature who would make a tale of a frightened girl wanting her betrothed in her sight tonight may make it to my face and see how far it carries. The door stays open, and I shall look in when I please, and that is propriety enough for any house I keep.” And she went down herself to fetch him.
He came up still in his coat, he had not so much as taken it off, in three hours, as though to sit and be tended would have been a desertion of his post, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at her, clean and small in the white bed.
Her hair was loose and drying and her face scrubbed back to the girl he knew under the worn days, and something went out of him all at once that he had been holding since the cordial first entered the account.
Darcy did not say anything. He came and took the chair that someone had drawn up beside the bed, and sat down in it, and took her hand off the counterpane in both of his, and bowed his head over them and stayed.
Elizabeth slept, and woke, and slept. That was the whole of the night, and he kept it with her.
She would go down into sleep gratefully, greedily, as into warm water and then some while later come up out of it all at once with her heart slamming and the dark wrong around her.
For one terrible instant, not knowing where she was, certain only that she was in the room, that the locks would turn at any moment, that it was not over and the carriage and the steps and the lavender linen had been the dream and this, the dark, was the truth.
And every time, through the whole long night, before the terror could close over her head, there was his voice.
“I am here,” he said into the dark the instant she stirred.
“I am here. You are at Gracechurch Street. The door is open, and the lamp is by the wall and your aunt is down the passage. I will not leave you.”
The room would resolve itself and her heart would come down out of her throat, and she would go back down into sleep knowing he would be there at the next surfacing, and he was, every time, all night, the steady voice and the unmoving hand, holding the dark off her by patience the way he had held the search together by it.
Toward morning she slept at last without surfacing, a long deep dreamless sleep, the first true sleep in all those days, and somewhere in it his own exhaustion took him, the bone-deep arrears of sleepless nights coming due all at once.
His hand stayed closed around hers on the counterpane, the two of them anchored to one another across the edge of the bed.
That was how Mrs. Gardiner found them at first light, when she came down the passage in her wrapper to look in, as she had said she would, as she had done quietly four times in the night and found him each time awake and watchful.
This time he was asleep. They both were. Elizabeth turned toward him in the bed, her face wholly at peace, and Darcy fallen back in the chair with the grey dawn coming up on the unmistakable, unguarded, undefended look of a man who has set down a thing he had carried past the limit of his strength.
Mrs. Gardiner stood in the doorway a moment and looked at them, and did not wake them, would not have woken them for the world, and only fetched a blanket.
She came in on stocking feet, and laid it gently over Darcy the way a mother covers a child who has fallen asleep where he sat and stood one moment more with her hand resting on the back of his chair, looking at the two of them safe and asleep.
Then she went out as quietly as she had come, and drew the door to its appointed inch, and left them to the morning, and went down to begin a day that had something other than dread in it.