Chapter Nineteen
Fever
She had not meant to work herself into illness.
She understood that afterward, looking back on the fortnight that preceded it, but at the time she had noticed only that there was a great deal to be done and that doing it kept her mind from dwelling too long on a silence she could not mend by dwelling.
The water that summer had gone bad in a way even boiling did not entirely correct, several households along their row falling ill with the same low, grinding fever that seemed to want nothing more than time and patience to run its course, and Jane, moving daily between the household accounts and the hospital work and whatever small errands Prudence found for her, had simply not noticed the particular heaviness settling into her own limbs until it was too far advanced to easily mistake for ordinary tiredness.
She woke on a Tuesday morning unable, for a long confused moment, to work out where she was, the room tilting gently in a manner that put her unhappily in mind of the ship, and it was Prudence’s hand on her forehead, cool and sure, that brought her properly back to herself.
“You are burning,” her aunt said, in a voice that held none of its usual dryness. “How long have you felt unwell?”
“I did not feel unwell. Only tired.”
“That is generally how it begins.” Prudence was already at the door, calling for water and for the surgeon to be sent for, and Jane, sinking back against the pillow with a heaviness she had no strength to resist, understood dimly that she had been rather more foolish than she knew in ignoring whatever signs her body had been giving her.
?∞?
The fever held her four days, though she remembered clearly only perhaps two of them, the rest passing in a confused, half-waking blur of heat and cold by turns, Prudence’s voice somewhere near her, a cloth cool against her forehead and then, some indeterminate time later, gone warm again and needing changing.
“It is not the same fever that the men have,” she heard the surgeon say, at some point in that blur, his voice pitched for Prudence rather than for Jane, who he perhaps did not think capable of properly hearing him.
“It is the water fever, common enough this season, and generally, in a young woman otherwise strong, it runs its course and leaves nothing worse behind it than a fortnight’s weakness.
I will not pretend to you there is no danger in it, for there is always some danger in a fever left to run long enough, but I do not think, from what I see here, that we have cause for alarm. ”
Jane understood, hearing this through the fog of her own illness, that she was meant to find it reassuring, and found instead that she could summon very little feeling about it at all beyond a vague, distant relief that seemed to belong to someone else, someone standing at a slight remove from the body that ached and burned and could not, for the present, be troubled to care very much about its own prospects.
?∞?
On the third day, the worst of it, she woke briefly to find Fitzwilliam in the room.
She did not, at first, trust the seeing of him, thinking it perhaps another piece of the fever’s confusion, and it was only when he spoke, his voice low and careful in a manner that had nothing of the letters’ careful distance in it, that she understood he was actually there.
“You are meant to be with your regiment,” she managed, her own voice coming out thin and strange to her own ears.
“I was with my regiment. I am here now.” He said it plainly, without any apology in it, and took her hand, the one lying loose on the coverlet, and held it in both of his.
“Your aunt sent word. I did not ask my colonel’s permission before I came, which I understand is not strictly the done thing, and I find I have discovered I do not particularly care. ”
“You will be in trouble.”
“I will be in a great deal of trouble,” he agreed, “and I find myself entirely unable to regret the cause of it.” He looked at her a long moment, and even through the fever’s haze she could see something raw and unguarded in his face that the careful letters had given no hint of.
“I have been telling myself for a month that distance was the sensible course, Jane. I have been very sensible indeed, and I have found, arriving here to be told you were ill and might be seriously so, that sensible is a poor substitute for anything that actually matters.”
She had no strength to answer that properly, and drifted, within a few minutes, back into the fever’s confused half-sleep, but she carried the memory of his hand round hers through the following days, returning to it each time she surfaced briefly into clarity, a small fixed point in a world that otherwise would not hold still.
?∞?
He came every day after that, against, Jane understood later, a good deal of proper military order, and sat with her through the worst of it, reading aloud when she was well enough to attend to the words and simply sitting, silent, holding her hand, when she was not.
She was fretful, in the days her strength began slowly to return, in a manner she was afterward rather embarrassed by, cross with the weakness that kept her abed, cross with Prudence’s insistence that she stay there, and crossest of all, on the sixth day, with Fitzwilliam himself, when he would not let her get up to see to some household matter she had convinced herself, in her still-fevered stubbornness, only she could properly manage.
“You will lie still,” he told her, with a firmness she had not heard from him before, taking gentle but immovable hold of her shoulders when she attempted, for the third time that morning, to rise.
“The household managed a great many years before you arrived in it and will manage one week more without your interference, however convinced you presently are otherwise.”
“You cannot simply forbid me.”
“I am not forbidding you. I am physically preventing you, which I grant is a somewhat finer distinction than you are presently inclined to appreciate, but I find myself entirely willing to go on physically preventing you for as long as the fever has you talking such nonsense.”
She glared at him, with what little strength the glaring cost her, and he looked back at her with an expression that held no repentance whatever, only a kind of fond, exasperated patience that made her, despite herself, want very much to laugh, and did laugh, weakly, and found the laughing eased something in her chest that had been tight and cross and frightened all at once.
“You are impossible,” she told him.
“I am told that regularly, by people whose judgment I generally trust,” he said, settling back into his chair beside the bed, “and I have found I do not mind it nearly so much when it comes from you.”
She slept properly that night for the first time in above a week, and woke the following morning with her fever properly broken at last, weak still but clear-headed, and found him asleep himself in the chair beside her bed, his head fallen at an angle that would plainly cost him a stiff neck, having stayed, she understood, considerably past any hour propriety would have sanctioned, and she lay a while simply watching him sleep, and thought that whatever careful distance he had tried, for a month, to maintain between them, it had not survived her illness, and she found, examining the thought honestly, that she was not, in the smallest degree, sorry for it.