Chapter Thirty-Five
She surfaced slowly, asthough from a great depth, the return to herself marked first by sound and then by light. Mr Jones’s voice murmured near her ear, and something cool touched her brow. She opened her eyes to the familiar ceiling of the library and, beyond it, the tall shelves that had always seemed to her a kind of quiet protection.
She slid her eyes from one side to the other, trying to make sense of the room’s new aspect. The desk was gone. She was reclining where it should have been, in a narrow bed moved from Heaven knew where, but with her own coverlet smoothed over her lap.
Her father’s chair sat close by, angled as though he had scarcely left it. A small escritoire had been drawn up near the window, its surface cleared except for a single candle and a glass of water.
Mr Jones straightened as he noticed her attention sharpen. “Ah. Awake now, are we?” He peered at her with mild satisfaction, as though this were the best outcome he had allowed himself to hope for. “Do not be alarmed, Miss Elizabeth. You fainted again, nothing more. Your pulse is—well, not robust, but serviceable.”
Elizabeth swallowed. “How long—?”
“Long enough to frighten your family,” he said, with a wry glance toward the door. “But not so long as to justify my staying further. You are to rest. Quietly. And you are not to exert yourself. I think this little arrangement here, where you need not manage the stairs, and your family may all be close to hand, is the very thing.”
She did not argue. She was too aware of how little strength she had to spare.
Her father murmured something at the threshold, and Mr Jones gathered his things, promising to return if summoned. When the door closed behind him, the room seemed to exhale.
A moment later, it opened again. Jane slipped inside and came at once to her side. “Oh, Lizzy,” she said softly. “You gave us such a fright.”
Elizabeth managed a small smile. “I seem to have made a habit of that.”
“Do not jest,” Jane said, though she smiled too. “Mama has scarcely sat down since. And…” She hesitated, then added, “Mr Wickham has been asking after you repeatedly.”
Elizabeth’s brows lifted faintly. “Has he?”
Jane nodded, her look gently knowing. “It is only natural. Everyone has thought for some time that he favours you. A feeling, I think, that might be… mutual?”
Elizabeth let her head sink back against the pillow. She closed her eyes, obliging herself to picture him as she had known him best—smiling, animated, leaning close as they danced at Netherfield. The image would not hold. It slipped away, uncooperative, and in its place rose another: darker eyes, a stiller expression, a hand closing over hers with that inexplicable, shocking certainty.
Her stomach eased.
She drew a careful breath and opened her eyes again.
Jane brightened. “There you are. Why, Lizzy, does your head feel better? That was rather a sudden return of colour to your cheeks.”
“I think,” Elizabeth said slowly, testing the truth of it, “that I might sit up.”
Jane reached for her instinctively, but Elizabeth waved her back and gathered herself with deliberate care. The dizziness lingered, but the nausea had retreated, as though it had been listening for something and had been satisfied.
“You look rather in need of refreshment. I shall go and call for some tea,” Jane said, already halfway to the door. “You have had nothing since yesterday, and Mr Jones was quite firm on that point.”
Elizabeth nodded and let her go.
Her father remained where he was, seated in the chair near her bed, his hands folded, his attention fixed not on her face but somewhere just beyond it, as though listening for something he did not entirely expect to hear. He said nothing.
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
The room darkened behind her lids, and for a moment she drifted—neither asleep nor fully awake—until a sharp, unmistakable sound cut through it.
A bark.
Not the yapping of a small dog, nor the distant echo of something outdoors, but a deep, resonant sound that seemed to belong very near, very present.
Elizabeth’s eyes flew open. “Did you hear that?”
Her father looked up at once. “Hear what?”
“The dog. A large one. The sort of bark a dog makes when he is guarding something.”
