Page 24 of A Selfish Disdain

Soon Darcy, helped down from the cart by young Thatcher and Reeves both, joined her. He could no longer conceal how the journey had strained him, for his steps were unsteady in a way that had everything to do with the fever now plainly written across his countenance.

Elizabeth noticed he had a high colour along his cheekbones; a color that she did not like the look of at all, and a glassiness about the eyes that made him seem, for the first time since she had known him, uncertain of his own footing.

Elizabeth took command of the situation instantly, before either man could think what to do, her voice carrying an authority. She marched into the inn and went straight to the innkeeper. "A room, the best you have, and a fire in it directly. And send for a physician if there is one within reach.” She added, “For my cousin has taken a wound that wants proper attention, and I do not like the look of him at all!"

The innkeeper’s wife, a stout, capable-looking woman, understood the panic in Elizabeth's eyes and voice, and went about ordering commands to ensure the lady's wishes were met with vigor.

Within a few moments Darcy was got up the narrow staircase, which proved more difficult than any of them had imagined it to be. He was such a tall man, and so unsteady now, and the stairwell had not been built with such a burden in mind. Nevertheless, he was settled at last into a bed that Elizabeth, following close behind, thought looked entirely too small to contain the whole of him. However, she was pleased when he was laid on bed to rest.

She called at once for a basin of cool water and clean cloths. Once they had been brought to her, she went about dabbing his face and neck to try to cool him. She labored over him for a half an hour, trying her best to reduce the fever that she felt was growing considerably.

By and by, the physician, a Dr. Ashworth, summoned from the nearby town, arrived and pronounced, after a rapid examination, that the wound had indeed taken a turn for the worse.

While it was not gangrenous, not yet at least, it was inflamed enough, and the fever had risen high enough, that he deemed it prudent to have careful nursing, over the next few days before anyone could safely relax. The doctor was grateful that Elizabeth was present and could support him.

"He is strong," Dr. Ashworth reassured Elizabeth, packing his instruments, "and the wound itself, properly cleaned as it has been, is not so very grave a thing in a man of his constitution. But fever is a chancy business, Miss…Bennet, was it? And, I have seen stronger men than this taken worse by less, when the fever is allowed to run unchecked. He wants cooling, and quiet, and someone by him who will notice at once if the fever climbs rather than breaks. Can you manage that, or shall I send word for a proper nurse?"

"I can manage it," said Elizabeth, with certainty, and Dr. Ashworth, looking at her a moment with an assessing eye appeared satisfied enough with what he found to leave his instructions and depart with no further argument.

Reeves, still weak himself but insistent upon making himself useful, took up a post in one of the room's chairs by the door, declaring that between himself and Miss Bennet they would manage well enough between them to watch through the night.

Young Thatcher, having seen them safely to the inn, took his leave to return to his own worried family with Elizabeth's gratitude, and a note for the innkeeper to see him paid handsomely for his trouble, pressed into his hand.

It was, by the time all this was accomplished, well past noon, and Elizabeth, sitting at last in the chair drawn close beside the bed, found herself alone; Reeves having succumbed, despite his own protestations, to an exhausted doze in his corner, with nothing before her but the low, laboured sound of Darcy's breathing, and a basin of cool water, and a cloth she pressed, with hands that had long since stopped trembling from fear and begun, instead, to move with the steady purpose of genuine occupation, against his fevered brow.

The afternoon passed in this manner, and the evening after it, the fever climbed slowly and terribly, despite every remedy Elizabeth and the innkeeper wife’s own experience could bring to bear, until Darcy, some hours past dark, began to speak.

He did not address Elizabeth, not with any awareness she could discern at least. His speech was disordered, and it sounded as if it came from a fragmentary mind that was loosened by heat and pain.

"Elizabeth!" The name came from him with a rawness that startled her. "Elizabeth, I did not mean! I did not mean it as it sounded!"

She wet his brow, her hand not quite steady now, and replied to his cries gently, as one might to a startled child. "Shh, Mr. Darcy. I am here." She did not know whether he heard her. But, she said it again regardless. "I am here. You need not explain anything to me tonight."

He did not seem to hear. His head turned restlessly against the pillow, and his good hand closed, for a moment, as though reaching after something only the fever could show him. "I should have told you. Should have told you from the beginning, before I ever… "

The sentence did not finish. He drew a breath that caught and shuddered, and was still a moment, and Elizabeth found she had stopped breathing herself, waiting to see whether the stillness would hold or break.

Eventually, he did settle, and Elizabeth pressed the cool cloth once more to his forehead. Her hand began to shake, feeling something crack open in her own chest, feelings that she had been holding close and deep.

She knew it was fear, not the fear she had felt from the highwaymen, nor even the fear of the fever's danger, but the specific, particular terror of a woman who understood, all at once and far too late to be of any comfort to her, exactly how much she stood to lose should this man's health not find its way home again.

"Do not," she whispered, to him, or to herself, or to whatever silent power might be troubled to listen, "do not you dare leave off finishing that sentence to me properly, Fitzwilliam Darcy. Whatever quarrel remains between us, you will live to finish it in your right mind, and not slip away from me in the middle of a fevered sentence I cannot even be certain you meant."

It was the first time she had used his Christian name, and she had said it willingly.

Despite her quiet pleas, the fever did not break. Instead, it climbed past midnight and on toward an hour Elizabeth had stopped troubling to guess at, to a height that brought Reeves fully and abruptly awake in his corner, his own face gone grey with alarm at whatever he read in hers; and it was somewhere in the deepest, most frightening part of that long night, with the candle burned low, and the fire wanting tending that she had not the heart to leave him long enough to give it.

His voice fell at last into a silence that Elizabeth thought was more frightening than any of his fevered words had been. She understood exactly how much of her own heart she stood to lose should the coming dawn not bring the turn Dr. Ashworth had promised her it might yet do.

Not surprisingly, Elizabeth did not sleep that night. She sat with the cloth in her hand laboring to keep his brow cool, and her eyes fixed on the rise and fall of his chest, counting each breath as it came. She did not permit herself, not even once, to consider what she would do should she find that the next one did not follow.

Fortunately, his breadth continued, without the stop that she feared. Although ragged and wet, it labored into the morning.

When morning’s dawn came, it was grey and brought with it no turn at all, only the same fever, banked slightly from its worst height of the night but nowhere near broken, and a silence from the bed.

He had stopped speaking somewhere in the small hours, sliding from restless muttering into a stillness so complete that she had twice laid her hand flat against his chest merely to ensure to herself of its rise and fall.

Elizabeth was relieved to hear a knock on the door, and when it opened, to see Dr. Ashworth had returned. It was early, and he was eager to discover how his patient was doing with the first proper light. He first examined the wound, and then checked the fever. The doctor, after his examination pronounced himself neither pleased nor alarmed.