The perfume of coconut and rosemary filled the room, and Wilson spoke in a low murmur as she gently eased my wife’s pain. Eventually, she slept again, and I retreated in a kind of dazed numbness to the chair in my room. At four in the morning, I awoke again, I suppose from the cold, for my fire had burnt down to embers. I returned to my wife’s bedside, where I found Wilson in a chair but bent over with her head resting on her arms on the edge of the bed. She was asleep in this miserable position. I put my hand on her shoulder to wake her.
“Go to bed, Wilson. I will stay with her.”
“Lily will be here soon. She comes at six, Mr Darcy.”
“You cannot continue at this pace. If I need someone, I shall ring.”
Thus, I found myself again in a sickroom at night. I sat, I stood, and I paced, only to sit, stand, and pace again. I was standing at the bedside looking down in puzzlement at this diminutive figure of a woman. She was a stranger to me in so many ways, yet I knew her almost intimately. With a start, I realised I had come to care for her very much.
I was in a kind of abstraction in this posture, standing over her, when she startled me.
“Are you an angel?” she croaked in a dry whisper.
I froze in place for a second until I realised my duty. I sat her up and put a cup of water to her lips. She drank and would drink more, I thought, if she had the strength. I put her back down on the pillow, and she looked at me in wonder.
“I thought you would look more like Jane,” she whispered.
By the candlelight on the mantel, I saw the glass-like reflection of her eyes and knew she was in a form of waking dream. She thought I was some sort of spiritual spectre.
“I suppose you are here to judge me,” she whispered.
I was afraid to move. She continued to speak in a mad jumble of words, interspersed with wrenching silence, whimpers of pain, and with her breath short and shallow, as though she was running, panting for air.
“I cannot forgive her!” she wailed, as though confessing her sins to me, a dark angel hovered over her in her agony. “Oh Lydia! You stupid child!” And then, “No, Papa, please, please do not make me!” She reached for my hand with both of hers and begged me in a desperate, pathetic whisper, “Send me away, Papa! Do not force him to do this! Do not let him do it!” She collapsed back into her bed, and I was about to pace to the window in abject misery when she bolted upright and threw off her covers.
With surprising strength, she fought me. “I am going. I have saved some money—let me go! Papa, I will not let you do this to me! Why will he not listen to me? Why will Mr Darcy not listen to me?”
“Mrs Darcy,” I said in as soothing a voice as possible, given that we were wrestling against one another and the hair on the back of my neck stood prickled in fear.
“I am not Mrs Darcy!” she wailed. “No one calls me Elizabeth here! Only his sister, and if not for her—” She made a tremendous surge to leave the bed, and I restrained her only by brute force, my left knee on the bed, both arms strapped against her heaving torso.
“I am Elizabeth Bennet.” Her voice was now hoarse from speaking, and she began to weaken. She looked up at me with haunted eyes, and asked, “Am I not?”
“Elizabeth.” I spoke her given name for the first time. She slumped against me in exhaustion. “You should rest now, Elizabeth,” I told her.
I stood at the bedside, my hands shaking and my knees strangely weak. My wife was spent, yet she was still so restless. Her head turned from side to side on the pillow. Lily knocked timidly and came into the room.
“Go and fetch Wilson,” I growled. This was no place for a timid girl of eighteen.
47
ELIZABETH DARCY
The musicians are tuning their instruments in preparation for the last half of the ball. Supper is over, and I am alone in the retiring room after half the ladies in Meryton have come and gone. I know better than to retire in the first rush, so I wait until the set is about to begin before I step in to check my curls against their unruly habit of coming loose. I feel the luxury of pale ivory silk against the palm of my hand as I smooth out my skirts. I am buttoning my glove and thinking with a sigh of resignation of my promise to dance the next set with Charlotte Lucas’s brother. He is a dolt, and a cad besides, but he is our dolt, and I cannot snub him without remorse.
I am in the hall, on the way to the dance floor. The constable’s closet door is slightly ajar. Strange. An impulse of devilry makes me want to slip inside. I suppose I am half hoping that if I am late, John Lucas will dance with Lydia instead.
This is a curious room. I have always wondered about it. The assembly hall is where our magistrate holds his inquests, and in this room, the guilty are locked until they are taken awayto the assizes. The last time it was used—I doubt I even know. I step in and my eyes strive to adjust to the dark when a sound disturbs me.
Mr Darcy! I swirl around to run away but the door slams, followed by the click of the bolt. I hear my sister’s victorious laugh on the other side of the oaken planks.
“Lydia!” I roar. “Unlock the door this instant!”
Her laugh trails down the hall. I begin to beat my fists against the door, but Mr Darcy grabs my wrists and speaks in a hissing whisper.
“Do you have no shame, madam?”
I realise that my pounding will only bring witnesses, and I am instantly limp with fear. He seems to sense the fight go out of me and drops my arms. He is feeling his way around the door frame. Why was he in here in the dark?
