Page 42 of The Marriage Articles

“I beg your pardon?”

“The penult. You are treating it as short. It is long.” He settled his head against the pillow with the satisfaction of a man who had corrected an examination candidate. “Read it again.”

Elizabeth read it again, exactly as she had read it the first time.

“Better,” he said.

She laughed, she could not help it, and he looked at her with an expression of deep injury. She composed herself and read on, and within a quarter of an hour he was asleep, which she judged the first true success of the day.

When he woke he found fault with the pillows. There were four of them. The arrangement, he informed her, was defective in principle, too high at the left, too low at the right, the middle pillow superfluous. Elizabeth rearranged them. The new arrangement he found worse, on grounds he did not specify. She restored the original. He declared it tolerable. She left the pillows where they were.

“You are being impossible,” she told him, pleasantly.

At four, when the hour came for the draught, he refused it. He did not need it. He had slept. Sleeping had cured him. He intended to rise and dress. Elizabeth set the glass on the night table and said nothing at all, which he appeared to find more provoking than argument. Twenty minutes later, when she turned to the window to draw the curtain against the afternoon glare, she heard the glass move. When she turned back it was empty and he was looking fixedly at the ceiling.

The shadows were lengthening across the square when she found Georgiana at the door again, and this time there was no near-smile about her. The girl was white, quite white, standing in the corridor at the threshold of her brother’s room, unable to cross it. Elizabeth went out to her at once and drew the door near shut behind her.

“Georgiana. What is it?”

“They say he is very ill.” The voice was small and terribly controlled. “Mrs Fenwick says the physician is to call daily. He only calls daily when... when...”

She did not finish. She did not need to. Elizabeth reproached herself for her slowness. Georgiana’s mother had been taken ill and had not recovered, and her father after her. A fever in a bedroom in this house was not, for Georgiana, a comedy about barley water.

“Listen to me,” Elizabeth said, and took both the girl’s cold hands in hers. “Your brother has a fever from standing in the cold, which is the most ordinary ailment in England. The physician calls daily because he is cautious and because we pay him to be. He would not bleed your brother, and he did not look grave, not once. I was in the room the entire time, and I am an excellent judge of gravity, having been raised in a house where it was never once displayed.”

Georgiana’s fingers tightened on hers. “He does not get ill. He never gets ill.”

“Then we may agree he has chosen a dramatic way to be ordinary. Come.” Elizabeth drew her a step towards the door. “I cannot manage him alone, and he is quite beyond reasoning with. Will you help me?”

It was not true, she managed him perfectly well, but the girl needed employment, and Elizabeth was prepared to manufacture any quantity of it. She put a folded cloth into Georgiana’s hands and a bowl of cool water and set her to the office of refreshing the compress. Georgiana bent to the task with exacting care. Thereafter, through the long evening, Elizabeth found her things to carry. A cup. A candle. A fresh pillowcase. The warming pan to be taken away and returned. Georgiana carried each one with the gravity of a courier. Some colour came back into her face. Once, when her brother demanded whether the two of them intended to hold a levee in his bedchamber, she answered that they intended nothing of the kind. It was the nearest thing to spirit Elizabeth had yet heard from her.

Dinner she took on a tray in the sickroom, directing between mouthfuls the small business of the house. She had run a sickroom before, her mother’s many disorders having trained her early, though her mother’s fevers had been theatrical events requiring an audience. This was a quieter and more stubborn illness altogether.

The evening wore on. He slept a great deal, and she sat beside him, replacing the cool cloth on his forehead each time it grew warm, her fingers learning the shape of the task. When he woke he was fractious for a few minutes and then, exhausted by his own fractiousness, slept again. Georgiana she finally sent to bed near ten, against protest, by promising to wake her if there were any change, a promise she had no intention of keeping unless the change were dire.

The candles burned low. The square outside was quiet, the house quieter, the whole Mayfair night reduced to the ticking of his watch on the night table and his breathing, which had gone rough and hurried.

Near midnight the fever climbed.

She knew it by the heat of him before she touched him, and by the restlessness, the way his head moved on the pillow, the way his hands plucked at the coverlet. She wrung out the cloth and laid it on him. He did not wake, but he spoke, and the words came from somewhere beyond her knowing.

“The lower field wants draining,” he said, clearly, to the ceiling. “I told him. Father.” A pause, his eyes moving beneath the lids. “The rain gets into everything. It gets under the door if you let it.”

Elizabeth held very still. “Hush,” she said, and put the cloth to his forehead. “It is only the rain.”

“It is on the grass. I can hear it on the grass.” His voice thinned. “You will take a chill. You must not. I told her she would take a chill and she said, she said she never...”

He stopped. She waited, her hand resting on the cloth, her heart going at a pace she declined to examine.

“She laughs,” he said, his voice thinned to the thing itself. “At everything. She finds... she finds it all amusing.” His head turned on the pillow, towards her, though his eyes did not open. “Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth leaned closer.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The candle burned low. The square outside was empty and dark. Elizabeth wrung the cloth out over the basin and laid it back across his forehead. He was quiet now, which she liked less than the quarrelling. All day he had been insufferable in the most reassuring manner. She had laughed at him and meant it. She was not laughing now.

She touched his cheek with the back of her fingers. Hot still. The house was asleep. It was the two of them, the night, the sound of his breathing, which came quick and shallow and not at all like him.