For a moment longer, he said nothing. Then he reached up and pushed the door open fully, stepping back just enough to allow Darcy a clear view inside.
“You might want to watch how you say that,” he remarked mildly. “Especially to the man you’ve come to see.”
Darcy stared at him. “You—”
“Aldous Harrowe,” the man said, extending one large, scarred hand as if this were the most ordinary of introductions. “Compiler of certain archaic poetry. Chronic nuisance to clerks. Occasional dockworker to put bread and ale on the table. An’ at present, the only person in this house inclined to decide whether you’re worth the trouble.”
Darcy accepted the man’s hand numbly, still staring. The cockney speech, the hulking form, the gruff ways… could this man possibly have anything of value to tell him?
Harrowe tilted his head, studying Darcy now with open interest. “Well?”
Heat. Too much ofit—pressed beneath the skin, caught there, with nowhere to go. Then cold, sharp as pins, racing along her arms, her ribs, her spine. She tried to draw her knees closer, but found they would not answer her. The blankets weighed a great deal. Or perhaps it was only that her limbs had grown distant, untrustworthy.
Water touched her mouth. It tasted wrong. Bitter, thin, with a faint edge of leaves. Tea. She turned her head away, but the cup followed, insistent, brushing her lip again. Someone murmured encouragement, the sound sliding past without settling into sense.
Leather and dust. Books. Still the library, then. Not her room. Her father would not have allowed it. The thought pleased her dimly, then slipped away.
The air shuddered. Or perhaps the floor. She could not be certain which. A noise rose beyond the walls—voices? Shouting?—too many of them, tangled together, swelling and breaking apart again. Her heart answered it without asking her leave, hammering against her ribs until she wondered vaguely whether it might escape altogether.
Cold again. Her teeth struck once, twice, a sound she recognised only because it echoed too sharply in her head. Hands came to her arms, firm, steadying. Her father’s, she thought. They had always been warm.
“Elizabeth.” Her name, low, close. She tried to open her eyes. Light flared instead, white and unfocused, streaked at the edges. She shut them again at once.
Something brushed her cheek. Cloth. A handkerchief, damp. The pressure lingered too long. She turned her face away and found she could not tell why.
A bark cut through the fog—sudden, sharp, near enough to startle her fully awake for a breath or two. Brutus? The sound carried with it the cold of morning walks, the snap of frost beneath her boots, the solid comfort of a body pressed close at her side. She reached for it without knowing she had done so, her fingers curling weakly into the coverlet.
“Quiet,” someone said—not to her. “She is worse again today.”
The barking ceased, but the echo of it remained, pacing the edges of her thoughts.
Her mother’s voice rose, broke, rose again—words tumbling over one another, all urgency and dread. Jane answered her, soft and uselessly hopeful, as though gentleness alone might persuade the world to behave itself. Elizabeth tried to smile at that and could not remember how.
Another voice joined them then. Smooth. Even. It slid easily into the spaces the others left open, as though it had always belonged there.
“—not a common fever,” it was saying. “You see that, sir,do you not?”
Her father replied, but she lost the words midway through the sentence, caught instead on the cadence of the other man’s speech. It carried no strain. No fear. Only assurance, laid carefully atop uncertainty like a hand smoothing wrinkled linen.
Elizabeth turned her head, seeking the source of it. The movement cost her more than it ought. The room tilted in response, bookshelves leaning inward, the ceiling pressing lower. She swallowed against a wave of nausea and tasted tea again, though no cup touched her mouth.
The voice came closer.
“It is that burden I told you about,” it said gently. “External. Not of her making, but brought upon her, all the same.”
Something in her recoiled at that—not violently, not consciously, but with the same instinct that had drawn her hand toward the echo of barking. She tried to speak. Her tongue felt thick, misplaced.
“Papa?” she managed, or thought she did.
A hand closed over hers at once. Her father’s. Solid. Real. She clung to it, anchoring herself there while the other voice continued on, patient, persuasive, explaining things she could not follow and did not wish to hear.
The heat surged again, sharper this time, chased immediately by a chill so deep it left her gasping. The library darkened at the edges, sound thinning to a narrow thread she could barely hold.
Somewhere beyond it all, a dog scratched once at the door.
Then even that was gone.
The tea was dark,over-steeped, and smelled faintly of something burnt. Harrowe sloshed it into a chipped cup without apology and shoved it across the table as though this were the natural conclusion to any conversation of consequence.
