“Your new sister is very poorly,” Lydia said in a lower voice. “Miss Darcy is thinner than she was at your wedding. Her cheeks are pink with fever, and her face is white as a sheet!”
“Yes, we all know it, but we still hope it is only a severe relapse.”
They parted and Elizabeth returned to the parlour to find her husband now visibly more at ease. His indifferent behaviour toward Lydia irritated her. “I presume by your absolute silence that you did not approve of my sister’s conversation.”
He looked at her in surprise. “You could not expect me to participate in a conversation about neighbourhood gossip or catching a husband.”
“You might have at least been attentive for the half an hour she was here. If I had not seen you with Colonel Fitzwilliam, I might suppose you incapable of gentlemanly manners.”
“I was perfectly polite, and to be perfectly polite on awkward occasions is the result of proper home training in good principles, like anyone raised as a gentleman would have.”
“Were you raised in a stable by vagrants, then? You did not even offer your sister an umbrella.”
“She is not—” He stopped and looked embarrassed while he agreed that he ought to have done, but it was too late to take back the sentiment.
Lydia is not his sister, and I am scarcely his wife.Her family was not his, her cares and concerns were not his. Mr Darcy would not show her friends the same attention as his own, and he would be only as attentive and courteous to her as was necessary for appearance’s sake. They had an arrangement, and there was no right for her throat to feel raw or tears to prick the back of her eyes. Elizabeth sat near to Georgiana and busied herself with her work.
He had grownaccustomed to the sound of his sister’s cough over the previous months, so this wet, productive, haunting sound drew him out of his sleep and had Darcy inside her room before he realised he had passed through Mrs Darcy’s room to get there. She was already propping Georgiana up and holding a small basin under her lips. He shared a significant look with his wife, and in an instant was hollering down the stairs to send for the doctor. By the time the servants were roused, the message sent, and Peruvian barkin syrup made, when Darcy returned to his sister, the basin was full.
There was expectoration with every return of her cough, streaked with blood. Mrs Darcy handed him the basin, and it smelled like a newly plastered room. He winced and replaced it with another.
“Georgiana, my dear, Mr Lynn is on his way.”
Her head lolled on Mrs Darcy’s shoulder. The coughing seemed to have passed for now, but his sister’s breath was short and hurried, and perspiration covered her forehead. Darcy stared uselessly at his suffering sister, thinking of the fatal spitting up of blood that had carried off his mother.
“Send the maid in with more cold water; her fever feels very high. You can wait for Mr Lynn downstairs. Mr Darcy? Mr Darcy, did you hear me?”
He nodded, and did as he was bid, pacing and awaiting the first sound of the doctor. The sunlight was inching over the horizon when Mr Lynn entered the house. Darcy followed on his heels and stood in the doorway between Georgiana’s room and his wife’s. The wretched suspense of waiting for him to examine the patient felt as though it took hours.
“Is she in excessive pain? Can you prescribe a composing draught, something anodyne?”
“I would rather bleed her, if you can convince your wife to agree, but twenty-five drops liquid laudanum in cinnamon water with common syrup can be taken.”
Mrs Darcy shook her head. Georgiana still leant against her like a child against its mother. “Do not bleed her. She is so weak. Let her sleep.”
Darcy glared at her. “Would bleeding help?”
Mr Lynn shrugged. “It may check the frequency of her pulse and lower her fever, but only temporarily. This is not a cough that can be cured, particularly if this leads to haemoptysis, as many consumptives experience.”
“What about her strength? She is restless and weak, and?—”
“Go downstairs,” Mrs Darcy said firmly. “She is finally asleep. Mr Lynn, should I stay with her tonight?”
“Mr Jones says that healthy persons should not sleep with consumptive ones. I do not believe in the contagiousness of the disease, but the secretions of the body are too disordered for it to be judicious for a healthy person to be exposed to its influence for an extended period.”
Mrs Darcy settled Georgiana onto the pillow and told the maid to come for her if she awoke, and they filed from the room. Someone had lit candles in the parlour, and Darcy fell into the sofa to await the news. Mrs Darcy moved to sit near to him, and at the last moment changed her mind and sat in the chair farther away, for which he was grateful. He could not bear to be near enough to see fear for his sister in her pretty eyes.
“Mr Darcy, if I understand Mr Jones’s letter correctly, Miss Darcy had a consumptive cough throughout her childhood, and had been weak and oppressed during her confinement, and had not recovered well. She bore a foetus after the seventh month, and since then has worsened, with more exportation and a loss of strength. Is that accurate, sir?”
What could any brother who loved his little sister say to that? To have her sufferings, her short life, reduced to those indifferent sentences filled him with misery. He fought the soreness in his throat that threatened tears in absolute silence.
“You understand correctly,” Mrs Darcy eventually said, “but what Mr Darcy and I need to know is what can be done for Miss Darcy to prolong her life and ease her pain.”
“If this is a hectic fever, then her comfort will be your concern. If it is not remittent, then I doubt she will survive a fortnight. A fever in the third stage of consumption is sometimes a measure of an impending improvement or it is a precursor of a swift decline.”
A hectic fever: a slow, consuming fire to accompany the wasting away of her body and the filling of her lungs. Mrs Darcy and Mr Lynn talked on, but Darcy only thought of how much it hurt to think the words:My sister is dying.The knowledge closed around him, stealing his breath and knotting his insides.
“Oedema may supervene, and the palliative measures?—”
