Chapter Four
By the second morning, Elizabeth could have told the surgeon—had the surgeon been within five miles of reaching them—exactly how Jem Holt had passed the night.
Badly. In fits, his small face too hot under her wrist, and then not hot enough, which frightened her more.
The leg sat as it should. It was the rest of him she did not trust, and there was no one within a day’s travel who knew better than she did what to do about it, which was a thought to keep a person humble at four in the morning.
Mrs. Holt had finally slept an hour, upright in the chair, and woke now with the particular guilt of a mother who has closed her eyes. “He’s no worse?”
“He is no worse.” It was even nearly true.
From the far bank, faint across the broken water and the morning, came a man’s voice. It came at intervals, all night and into the day—Jem. Jem, lad—not expecting an answer now, only refusing to stop. Mrs. Holt’s mouth tightened when it came, every time, and then she made it still.
She did not thank Elizabeth in words, which Elizabeth much preferred to the alternative.
She brought wrung strips of cloth. She held the boy’s hand when he thrashed in his sleep and said nothing about her own.
Whatever she felt she had folded down small and sat upon, because her son was in the bed and watching her even with his eyes shut, and a mother of her sort does not come apart where a child can hear it.
“My pa,” said Jem, surfacing, his voice thick. “Is that my pa?”
“That is your pa,” Elizabeth said. “Worn out with shouting. You would think a grown man would have more sense.”
“I want him to come over.”
“I know.”
She had the cloth in the basin and was wringing it cool when a shadow came into the doorway, and she knew the size of it before she looked, the way one knows a step on a stair. Mr. Darcy stood there with a covered basket in his arms and a careful expression.
“Mrs. Collins said the boy wanted broth that would stay down,” he said. “And honey, for the throat. There is calf’s-foot jelly, and clean linen, and—the cook insisted—a quantity of things I could not identify.” He set the basket down where she pointed and did not come further in. “How does he do?”
“He does as a seven-year-old does with a broken leg and a fever coming on. Poorly, and crossly.” She did not soften it. “The broth is welcome. Thank you.”
It cost her nothing to say and she resented, a little, how little it cost. Gratitude was simpler when one could keep it general—thank God you were both here—and harder when a man kept turning up with the exact thing the moment required and standing in the doorway waiting to be told where to put it.
He should have gone then. The supplies were delivered and the errand was done. Instead he stood turning something over in his hands, and after a moment he brought it out from under his arm and held it toward the bed as though presenting credentials.
It was a book. A handsome one—calf binding, gilt edges, the kind of volume that lived behind glass at Rosings and was taken down to impress visitors. Fables, with Engravings.
“I thought,” Darcy said, “the boy might like it. To pass the hours. There are pictures—a fox, a crow, a lion with a thorn.” He opened it to show a plate, and the morning light caught the gilt, and it was, Elizabeth thought, possibly the most beautiful object that had ever entered the Holts’ lives, and possibly the most useless.
Jem looked at it. He was seven, and feverish, and his leg was bound to a slat, and he could not read above his own name. He looked at the fox and the crow with the grave politeness of a child whose mother has taught him manners he is too tired to feel.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “It’s very fine.” And then, because the book had nothing in it that he wanted, “Is my pa still there? Can he still see me?”
Elizabeth watched it land. She watched Darcy take the small, complete defeat of it—the gift held out and the gift declined, courteously, by a child who wanted only one thing in the world and it was not engravings.
She waited, with an interest she told herself was purely practical, to see what a man like that did when the world failed to be impressed by the treasures of Rosings.
What he did surprised her.
He did not press the book. He did not explain to the boy why it was a fine thing to have.
He drew the stool to the bedside, and he sat—folding all that height down to a child’s level—and he laid the open book across his own knee, where it stayed, doing nothing, a prop for a hand to rest on. And he answered the question.
“He is still there,” Darcy said. “He has not moved from the bank since yesterday. I saw him this morning. There are two men with him keeping him warm, and your dog is there—”
“Tip’s there?”
“Tip is there. He will not leave either.” Darcy turned a page he was not looking at.
“The carpenter—Mr. Dawes—has begun on the crossing. He has men cutting timber, and more carrying it down, and he has driven the first posts into the bank on this side. It is slow. He says a thing done quickly over that water is a thing done twice. But it goes forward. When it is done, the first man across will be your father, because he has told everyone within shouting distance that he intends to be, and no one has the heart to argue with him.”
Jem’s eyes had gone wide and fixed on Darcy’s face. This was the only treasure in the room—news, the shape of the outside world, the precise disposition of his father and his dog. He drank it. “Tell the rest,” he demanded, the sir forgotten, which from Jem was the highest possible compliment.
And Darcy told him the rest—what the bridge had looked like at first light, how many men, what the water was doing—quietly and accurately.
Elizabeth sat back on her heels and revised something, against her will, with brisk irritation.
She had set him down, two days ago, as a man who understood people as positions on a chessboard.
A man who saw a tenant’s son and reached for a gentleman’s gift had not, it seemed, entirely left that estimate behind.
But a man who saw the gift fail and put it down—who stopped trying to give the boy what a gift ought to be and gave him instead what he actually knew—that was not on her chessboard anywhere.
It was inconvenient. She filed it where she filed inconvenient things, to be dealt with when she had slept.
The fever climbed a little toward noon, and with it came the question Elizabeth had been turning over since the first night.
“He would be better at Rosings.” Darcy said it low, while Jem dozed. “There are rooms standing empty and warm. A proper bed. When the surgeon comes through the upper crossing, he will come to Rosings first—it is on the road. The boy could be received there, and his mother lodged near him, and—”
“No.” It came out faster and harder than she meant. She made herself slow down, because the objection was real and deserved better than temper. “He cannot be carried that far. Not yet.”
She expected him to argue the comfort of it, the sense of it, the obvious gentleman’s logic that a great warm house must be better than a parson’s box-room. She had her answer ready and her heels dug in.
Darcy did not argue. He looked at the splinted leg, and then at her, and asked the question she had not expected—the one she would have asked herself, the one the surgeon would ask when at last he came.
“How fresh is the set? If we move him today, what does the carrying cost the leg?”
She blinked. “Everything,” she said. “It cost me an hour and him a great deal of screaming to draw that straight, and it has had one night to begin knitting. A mile of being carried over a broken lane—jolted, set down, taken up—would undo it. He would arrive at your warm rooms with the bone wrong again, and we should have to break and set it a second time, and I do not think—” Her voice caught on the picture of it and she finished flatly.
“I will not do that to him for a featherbed.”
“Then he stays,” Darcy said. Simply. As though that settled it, because to him it now did. “What does he need here that Rosings has and the parsonage has not? Name it and it will come down the hill.”
So it was not the boy who would go to the comforts. The comforts would come to the boy. She had been braced to fight and there was nothing to fight, and the readiness drained out of her and left her, absurdly, almost annoyed at the want of a quarrel.
“A second mattress,” she said. “More linen. Barley, for the water. And a low chair, so whoever sits the night is not crippled by morning.”
“Done.” He rose. “I will send it within the hour.”
“And send word down the lane ahead of the surgeon, when he comes.” She heard herself adding to his errands as though he worked for her, and did not trouble to stop. “An hour’s warning will do. I would rather not be caught at the door with my sleeves to the elbow and nothing ready.”
“You will have your hour. I will set a man to watch the road.” He said it as though it were plain beyond argument—as though, of course, what she wanted was what would be done.
He had asked what the boy needed and taken her answer entirely, the way she had given Dawes’s name and watched him take it, two days ago, and pocket it.
She wished, with some asperity, that he would do something stupid soon, so that she might go back to the comfortable arrangement of her own opinions.
It was the splint that undid the careful distance she had been keeping all day.
Toward evening the swelling shifted, as she had known it would, and the binding that had been snug at noon now sat loose along the boy’s shin.
It had to be taken up before the slat could slide.
Elizabeth knelt and worked the knots, and the leg—dead weight, a sleeping child’s—began to roll as she lifted the binding clear.
“Hold it,” she said. “Steady, at the knee, while I—”
Darcy was already there. He had crossed from the window without being asked and got his hand under the boy’s knee to take the weight, and Elizabeth reached at the same moment to do the same thing, and her hand came down over the back of his.
For the length of a held breath, neither of them moved.
His hand was warm, and broad, and unexpectedly bruised across the knuckles from two days of work no gentleman’s hands were made for, and the shock of the contact went up her arm and into her chest and stopped her breath clean.
Heat climbed her throat. She was aware of him—the whole size and warmth and nearness of him, the steadiness of the hand beneath hers—with a suddenness that had nothing practical in it at all, and the awareness scalded.
She took her hand back a fraction too fast. Fast enough that he would have felt it, fast enough that the taking-back said more than the touch had.
The business of the splint had not, inconveniently, finished itself.
“I have it,” Darcy said. His voice had gone low and careful. He did not look at her. He held the knee exactly where she needed it and fixed his eyes on the wall above the bed as though it required his whole attention.
“Yes,” she said. “Good. Thank you.” Four words, and not one of them quite steady, and she bent to the binding and made her fingers do their work and did not look at him either, and the task that had been simple all day declined, now, to go right under her hands.
Jem had been watching them. He had surfaced again and lain under their two bent heads with the frank, exhausted curiosity of a sick child, and now asked the room at large, in the tone of one settling a private matter, “Is he your husband?”
Elizabeth’s head came up. “Mr. Darcy? No. No, Jem, he is not my husband.”
Jem considered this. He looked from her face to Darcy’s, weighing some calculation known only to the feverish and the seven-year-old, and then he sighed, with the deep and frank disappointment of a boy who had got hold of a tidy idea and been sorry to give it up.
“Oh,“ he said.
And Elizabeth laughed.
It broke out of her—startled, helpless, and entirely genuine.
The first real laugh in two days, cracking up out of all that strain at the boy’s lordly disappointment in her arrangements, at the whole impossible day.
She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth and laughed, and it shook something loose in her chest that had been wound tight since the bridge went down.
When she got her breath she looked up, still smiling, to share the absurdity of it—and found Darcy already looking at her.
He was not smiling. He was only looking at her, as though the laugh had struck him somewhere he had not expected.
She stopped laughing.
He looked away first. He bent his head to the boy’s leg and busied his hands, and gave her nothing more to look at.
Elizabeth turned back to the binding. Her face was warm. Her hands had steadied. She knotted the last strip and smoothed it flat. The anger she had carried up from the bridge two days ago had deserted her at a most inconvenient hour, and she had neither the time nor the temper to go looking for it.
“More barley in the water tonight,” she said to Mrs. Holt, because it was a true thing, and a useful thing, and the only thing in the room she was sure of.