Yardley looked away and shook his head.
“Who?” Mrs Darcy, unbeknownst to us, was in one of her rare lucid moments, awake enough to hear us.
Wilson tried to soothe her back to sleep, but she insisted in a coarse whisper, “Who gave birth, Mr Yardley? Was it Ellen Wimple?”
He nodded.
“But it is too soon. Tell her it is too soon!”
“Shh,” Wilson said, sponging her with a lavender-soaked cloth.
Elizabeth pushed her maid’s hand away to stare at the doctor, her eyes startlingly clear for the first time in days. One hand fluttered up to her mouth and tears of horror filled her eyes as she comprehended the meaning of Yardley’s grave face.
Her head fell back on the pillow, and I heard her whispered lament, “Everything dies here.”
A burst of the bitterest resentment filled my mouth. How dare she utter such a curse against Pemberley! Then I realised she was not saying that everything dieshere, but that everything diesin this world,and I found myself blindly groping for a chair.
49
FITZWILLIAM DARCY
Dear Georgiana,
Elizabeth is strong, and though she is fevered, she still takes liquid, and so we must have hope. Perhaps tomorrow she will begin to recover. You must not worry.
Some iteration of these exact words had gone out every morning for days. I instructed my sister, but I was really instructing myself—stay strong, stay hopeful, do not worry.
I cannot explain why I was a fixture at my wife’s bedside. Wilson, who regarded me with scepticism at first, now took my anxious presence as a given. Only when the chamber pot was required or I needed to eat, wash, and shave, was I anywhere but in that room. I slept there, in a chair or on the chaise longue.
By the slimmest of margins, we began to detect improvement. By the sixth day in the early afternoon, I was able to read at least. I was deep inGulliver’s Travels—I could not read anything weightier—when Elizabeth stirred.
“Mr Darcy?” Her voice was small and childlike as if she were confused or awestricken.
“Are you thirsty?” I had become an expert on the placement of pillows, and she looked at me in total bewilderment as I sat her up, positioned her shawl, and lifted a cup of lemonade to her lips.
She made a face.
“Would you rather have some tea?”
“Water,” her voice croaked.
She drank deeply, and I wished she would stop. I might have been good with pillows, but the basin for retching was beyond my capacity.Where was Wilson?
“Where is Wilson?” Elizabeth murmured.
“She has gone to make you a poultice.”
Another face. “What is that smell?” she asked plaintively.
“Burning camphor. Could I—should I open the window, just for a moment?”
“Would you?” She was still looking at me disbelievingly, as she did when she thought I was an angel of judgment.
We both inhaled deeply as a cold breeze scoured the room. I closed the window and looked around guiltily. “Is there anything I can get for you, Elizabeth?”
She stared at me, still suspicious I was a figment of her imagination.
“A letter came for you. Would you like me to bring it?”
