CHAPTER 21
The fever had come upon Mr. Darcy during the second night of his recovery.
Mrs. Kewley had pronounced it no more than she had feared and rather less than she had dreaded, a wound gone hot and angry.
But more often than not was cold comfort to a woman keeping vigil at three in the morning, watching a man's face turn from ash to crimson and back again by the light of a single guttering candle.
Elizabeth had not left the room in two days, save when propriety and Mrs. Kewley's considerable will had combined to force her out for an hour's sleep she had not taken.
She told herself it was only that no one else could be spared, the Kewleys had the cottage to keep, and the surgeon could not be persuaded to remain longer than his rounds allowed, but she knew, somewhere beneath the telling, that this was not the whole truth, and had not been the whole truth for some time now.
The candle burned low. Outside, the wind came up off the sea in long, restless gusts, rattling the small window, similar to the one she herself had once made so undignified an exit, and she found some grim humor in that, even now.
Mr. Darcy had not been lucid since the surgeon's visit that afternoon.
The fever had climbed with the dark, as fevers were wont to do, and his breathing had grown rougher, and twice he had spoken words she could not make sense of; names, perhaps, or fragments of some conversation held only in the country of his own delirium.
She had held his hand through both, more for her own steadying than his, though she told herself otherwise.
"You must not," she said now, very low, laying the cloth once more against his brow, "you must not do this.
You must not leave things so unresolved between us, sir, for I find I am not at all willing to spend the remainder of my life wondering what you would say to me after all of this is done, and never having the satisfaction of an answer. "
He did not stir, and she had not expected him to. It had become, these past hours, less a conversation than a kind of prayer, words offered into a silence, asking the Lord to listen and answer her pleas.
"I have behaved very badly toward you," she went on, her voice unsteady, "from the very first. I was determined to think ill of you, and I searched for evidence of it with a diligence I might have better spent elsewhere, and when you gave me every reason to think otherwise, I did not credit it, because it was easier to be right than to be honest." She pressed the cloth again, wrung it, replaced it.
"You would tell me, I think, that this is scarcely a fit subject for the sickroom.
You would be correct. I find I do not signify that at present. "
The wind gusted harder. Somewhere below, she heard Mrs. Kewley moving at the opposite side of the house, banking the kitchen fire for the night, and the ordinary domestic sound of it seemed, absurdly, to loosen something in her chest that had been wound tight for two days.
"I love you," Elizabeth said, and having said it once, low and fearful, into a room she believed held no one to hear it but herself, found that the words, now lost, would not be recalled.
"I have loved you, I think, since I left Kent I think, though I was too proud and too foolish to name it so at the time, and I have gone on loving you through every mile of this dreadful business, and I did not think, I did not intend, to tell you so under these circumstances, or perhaps any circumstances at all, for I had resolved that if you recovered I should say nothing of it and allow you to make your own choice unburdened by mine.
But you are not well, sir, and I find that resolutions made in fear are very poor resolutions indeed, and so I am telling you now, when perhaps it does not matter, because I could not bear the alternative, that you should go from this world, or even only from this room into a fever you do not return from as yourself, without ever knowing that you were loved.
That you are loved. Entirely, and against every design I had for my own heart, which apparently consulted no one before disposing of itself so completely. "
Her voice broke upon the last words, and she pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth, as though she might physically hold back what had already been said.
It was several moments before she registered the change in his breathing; for, it had gone quieter and steadier. And beneath her other hand, still resting over his, she felt his fingers move, a deliberate, weak, unmistakable pressure, closing around her own.
She went very still, "Elizabeth." His voice was barely more than breath, cracked with two days' silence and fever both, but it was his voice, present in a way it had not been present in hours, and her heart seemed to stop entirely before starting again at twice its former pace.
"Mr. Darcy?" She leaned forward, searching his face in the candlelight, and found his eyes open, dark and fever-bright but aware, fixed upon her with an intensity that stole what remained of her composure. "You are awake. Oh, thank God, you are awake! How long have you? …Oh! How much did you…?"
"Enough," he said, though his hand in hers trembled with the weakness of it, there was something in his face she had never before seen there so plainly, not the guarded reserve of Netherfield, nor the wounded pride of Hunsford, but something unguarded and entirely happy.
"Enough to wonder whether I have finally caught a fever severe enough to dream exactly what I have most wished to hear, and whether I shall wake in a moment to find it was never said at all. "
"You are not dreaming." Her voice shook. "Though I own I had rather hoped, when I said it, that you were entirely insensible and would never know I had said it at all."
"Then I am grateful for the deficiencies of my own constitution," he said, "for I do not think I have wanted anything in my life so much as to hear you say it again, now, knowing that I am awake to receive it."
Elizabeth looked at him, exhaustion still heavy in his face, at the fever that had not yet fully broken, at the hand that held hers with what strength he had left to give it, and found that whatever careful, guarded thing she had meant to preserve of herself, some reasonable reserve to be produced again once he was well and the danger past, had gone entirely beyond recall.
"I love you," she said again, steadier this time, and without a single word of qualification to soften it.
"I said I should not tell you so unless you were well enough to choose it freely, and here you are, sir, contradicting me by the mere act of waking at the worst possible moment for my dignity. "
Something moved across his face that was not quite a laugh, he had not the strength for laughing, but was its nearest relation, warm and unguarded and touched, too, with something like wonder.
"Elizabeth," he said again, as though the name itself were an answer he had been rehearsing in whatever country fever had carried him through, "I have loved you since before I well understood what danger I was in from doing so, and I have gone on loving you through every refusal and every reproof you have ever seen fit to give me, richly deserved as most of them were, and I had resolved, very much as you resolved, to say nothing further of it unless I could be certain of not distressing you by the saying.
I find I have no similar reserves of restraint remaining to me tonight. "
"You are unwell. You should not be speaking at all, let alone…"
"I have very nearly died twice this week," he said, with the ghost of that dry humor she loved best in him, "once by pistol and once, I am given to understand, by fever and a festering, and I find both experiences have left me disinclined to postpone anything further that I might yet have the chance to say. Elizabeth, will you…"
"Do not," she said, half laughing and half weeping at once, pressing his hand between both of hers, "do not you dare ask me anything of consequence while you are grey as a Manx fog and cannot sit upright without Mrs. Kewley's assistance.
You will ask me properly, sir, when you are well, and I shall give you my answer then, though I will confess to you now, so that you need not spend your convalescence in any suspense over the matter, that my answer is not in serious doubt. "
Darcy's eyes, fever-bright and full of something that had not been there in all the long months of their acquaintance; she saw admiration, love, and the particular unguarded hope of a man who has finally permitted himself to believe he might be allowed to keep the thing he wants most, her.
"Then I find," he said softly, "that I am entirely content to wait."
He closed his eyes then, though not, his hand did not loosen from hers. "You will stay," he said, after a moment, and it was not quite a question.
It was a silly request, and she aimed to tell him so. "I will have you know that I have not left this room in two days. I do not know why you imagine I should begin tonight."
"I do not imagine it my darling, but I only find I wish to hear it confirmed from your lips, as often as you will consent to say it."
"Then I shall stay," she said, "... that is until Mrs. Kewley comes to scold me for it, and possibly a little while after that, for I have found her scoldings very easy to disregard when I have set my mind against them."
A ghost of a laugh moved through him, more felt than heard.
His breathing had not yet found its ordinary rhythm; the fever had loosened its grip but not surrendered the field entirely, and beneath her palm, where it rested still upon the back of his hand, she could feel the faint unsteady work of it.
"You ought to sleep," she told him, gentler now, the laughter gone out of her voice and something graver come into its place. "You have said what you wished to say. I have heard it, and I am not going anywhere, and there is nothing further tonight that cannot wait for morning."
"It tis’ a reasonable proposal, but I find myself entirely unable to act upon it."
"Why not, sir?” she asked, attempting to sound lighthearted.
"Because I have spent the better part of two days, by your own account, battling a fever from a gunshot wound, and I find I am not yet willing to sleep on the chance of returning there without first satisfying myself that this," his fingers tightened, faintly, around hers, "was real, and will still be real when I wake. "
Something in her chest ached at that, tender and sore in equal measure.
She had not thought, in all her turning over of his character these past months; his pride, his reserve, the wall of good breeding he carried before him like a shield, to find beneath it a fear so plain and so unguarded as this, that his happiness, once glimpsed, might prove only fever's trick after all.
"Then I will tell you what I told you before," she said, low, "and you may test it against as many wakings as you require, sir, until you are satisfied it does not change with the light.
I love you. I loved you before I said it, and I shall go on loving you tomorrow, and the day after, whether you are awake to hear it or not, for I find it is not a thing that appears to require your permission to continue. "
His eyes opened again at that, and what she saw in them undid her rather more thoroughly than any declaration of his own could have. "Then I believe," he said, "I may risk the sleeping after all." The slightest of smiles forming on his lips.
"You may. I shall be here when you wake, and cross with you if you do not," she responded gently.
His eyes closed once more, and this time she felt the change in him, the careful, deliberate slackening of a body that had held itself braced, in one fashion or another, for a very long time indeed. His grip on her hand did not loosen, even in sleep, and she did not attempt to free it.
She sat a long while in the candlelight, listening to his breathing settle by degrees into something steadier, watching the fever-flush recede a little further from his face with each quarter hour, and did not move even when her arm had gone stiff with the awkward angle of her position, nor when the candle guttered low enough to want tending.
It was very near dawn before she permitted herself to weep, and even then, only quietly, and only because she had finally judged him sound asleep enough not to hear it.