Page 25 of A Selfish Disdain

"It is not uncommon," he told her, wiping his hands on a cloth the innkeeper provided, "for a fever of this kind to hold for two days, even three, before it commits itself one way or the other. I would not have you alarmed by the holding, provided it does not climb further than it stood last night. I would have you considerably more alarmed if it does." He studied her a moment.

She was aware of what she must look like, having neither slept nor changed her gown, her hair coming loose from its pins and likely puffy eyes from crying earlier in the morning.

His voice gentled. "You have not slept, Miss Bennet. You look quite worse for the wear because of it. I would beg you to rest a little, and allow Mr. Reeves to watch over your cousin for a few hours. He is not likely to change drastically while you slumber."

She gave him a slight smile and a shake of her head. "I have not liked to. And I do not think I could, even if I lay down this moment and tried; my nerves have been wound too high since he tossed and spoke so last night to be easily persuaded into rest."

The doctor shook his head and issued a ‘tsk tsk’ before stating, "You will do him no good collapsed in a chair yourself, whatever your affection for your… cousin." The pause before the word was very slight, and entirely deliberate, and Elizabeth met his eye and did not trouble to correct him, nor to confirm his statement.

Dr. Ashworth said, "Sleep in turns with your man there. I will call again this evening."

She did not sleep, not properly, though she allowed Reeves to persuade her, some hours later, into an hour's doze in the chair with her head fallen against its wing, from which she woke with a start and a crick in her neck and the instant, sick conviction that something had changed for the worse in her absence, a conviction that soon proved to be nothing more than the ordinary cruelty of waking afraid.

However, she found that Darcy lay as he had lain, his breathing still laboured, and his colour still high. He was no better, she made herself take proper stock of his care and cooling.

At least he is not markedly worse, she reflected, tiredness laced across her face, and limbs still painfully aware with a persistent soreness that reminded her, how recently and how violently she had been thrown from an overturned carriage.

The day passed in small tasks that gave her hands occupation, cloths wetted and wrung and pressed to his brow and throat and wrists, broth made and cooling untouched at the bedside because he could not be got to take it, the fire tended, the shutters adjusted against a sun that seemed, perversely, to have chosen this of all days to shine with some vigour.

She talked to him, sometimes, in the long stretches when Reeves slept and there was no one else to hear her do it. Of course, she did not say anything of consequence, only small things, the state of the room, an account of what Dr. Ashworth had said, a description, once, of Longbourn's garden in the height of summer. They were only little things to say because she had nothing else with which to fill the silence.

Darcy surfaced only twice that day, and neither time fully. Once, near noon, his eyes opened and moved about the room that told her he saw nothing in it he recognized, not even her, though his gaze passed over her face without pausing; and once again toward evening, when he said something she could not make out at all, low and urgent, before sinking back under before she could lean close enough to catch it.

Each time she felt her heart lift with a hope she then had to watch fall again, and found the falling harder to bear, by the second occasion, than the waiting had been before either.

By the second night the fever had not broken, but neither, Dr. Ashworth allowed on his evening visit, had it climbed, "which is not victory, Miss Bennet, but I will own I had feared worse by now, and I did not find it," and Elizabeth, hearing this, discovered she had reached the particular species of exhaustion that lies past ordinary tiredness altogether, a state in which her hands continued their work with perfect steadiness while some other, more essential part of her seemed to have gone very far away, watching the room from a great distance and waiting.

Reeves, watching her from his chair as she wrung out yet another cloth with hands that no longer quite felt like her own, said quietly, "You ought to rest properly, miss. He would not thank you for wearing yourself to nothing on his account."

"He is not presently in a condition to thank anybody for anything," said Elizabeth, more sharply than she intended, and then, more gently, seeing his face, "Forgive me, Reeves. I know you mean it kindly. I find I cannot leave him. I do not entirely know how to explain it beyond that, and I find I have not the strength tonight to try."

Reeves said nothing further, but offered a submissive nod; she saw him watching her a while longer with an expression she was too tired to properly read, and did not have the heart, that night, to address.

Hence, the second night passed much as the first, save that he did not speak again, and Elizabeth was left to sit through the dark hours with nothing to mark the passage of time but the guttering of the candle and the small, constant labour of his breath, wondering what she would say to him, what she would let herself say to him, should he wake, at last, and be well enough to hear it.

CHAPTER 15

The church clock in the smallish town struck three while Elizabeth sat counting the intervals between Darcy's breaths, a habit she had fallen into somewhere past midnight, into the third day of his fever.

Reeves had fought his own exhaustion valiantly through the earlier hours, insisting each time his head began to nod that he was perfectly capable of continuing the watch, and each time losing the argument a little more completely, until at last, some while after the second candle had been lit to replace the first, he slept in earnest, his breathing settling into the deep, untroubled rhythm, and Elizabeth had not the heart to wake him.

She had told herself, somewhere in the middle hours of that long night, that she had begun to understand, a little, what nursing truly demanded. It wanted a steadiness she had not expected of herself, yet when the occasion called for it, she had managed it. Elizabeth laboured, and prayed, and watched, and grew a particular kind of patience of a woman who has stopped asking how much longer a thing must be endured, and has settled instead into simply enduring it.

Her laboring was not in vain. And, slowly, surely, Mr. Darcy began to change. There was no sudden cry or a violent thrashing to announce the growing crisis. There was only a subtle alteration in the rhythm she had been counting; his breaths growing shorter, and faster, and shallower, drawing from somewhere higher in his chest than they had before, until they were so quick and too uneven for counting to keep pace with at all.

She sat forward in her chair and laid her hand flat against his chest, and felt beneath her palm a heart labouring at a pace that frightened her more thoroughly than anything the whole of the preceding two days he had.

"No," she said, very quietly, as though a quiet voice might somehow persuade where a loud one could not. "No! You do not have my permission to do this!"

Reeves was alarmed and once, asking what he might do, and she called for him to find the doctor.

Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy did not answer her cries, of course; he was past answering, and past any awareness. However, at that very hour, there was a woman sitting beside him whose hand was pressed flat his heart that would not slow.

With Reeves gone, Elizabeth began to talk to Mr. Darcy. She sobbed, as she said, "I take it back," pressing the cool cloth once more to his burning brow with her hand shaking all the more. "Everything I said to you. Every word of it. I do not know if any part of you can hear me, but I can’t bear to let it stand. I could not bear it, do you understand me, being the last thing ever spoken between us."

She stopped, and drew a breath that shook and went on regardless. "You are not selfish. But, heaven knows you are proud enough to try the patience of a saint, and I do not withdraw that particular charge, whatever else I withdraw. I knew it was unjust even as I said it, but I said it anyway because I was frightened, and angry, and too proud myself to admit what frightened me. I have watched you these two months arguing with me over everything under the sun, and I told myself, and told Jane, and told anyone patient enough to listen, that it was nothing more than the pleasure of a contest neither of us could resist losing. I do not believe that any longer, Mr. Darcy. I have not believed it, if I am entirely honest with you, for rather longer than I’d like to admit.”

His breathing did not steady, not truly, but something in her own chest eased a little. "I do not know if you can hear any of this," she went on, quieter now, "but I find I cannot sit here in silence a moment longer, waiting, pretending I do not feel what I feel. So I will say it, and you may forget it entirely once the fever has passed, and we may go on afterward as though tonight never happened, if that is what you would prefer. But I will have said it, at least once, honestly, with nothing between us but the truth of it."