Page 58 of The Marriage Articles

It was inadequate. He knew it was inadequate. She looked at him with something that was almost amusement, the ghost of her ordinary self passing across a face that had gone serious, and he understood that she had heard the whole of it anyway.

“Bring him back safe, Mr Darcy,” she said, “and I beg you will be equally careful of your own safety.”

He watched her go, and thought that a woman who could call him Mr Darcy after a kiss like that was either a very accomplished tease or a very determined strategist, and that he was in no condition to discover which.

The hall was quiet. The candles burned steady in their sconces. Darcy stood with the letter in his hand and the sense of what she had given him still upon him. He would carry two things with him to Portsmouth, her fear for him and his longing for her, and neither would be answered soon.

❧ ❧ ❧

Darcy stepped down from the carriage at Portsmouth into air thick with salt, tar, and the outgoing tide, and the first breath was almost a pleasure. Almost. He had stopped only to change horses, sleeping in snatches against the squab, and his body had acquired the carriage’s motion so thoroughly that the cobbles of the quay seemed to shift beneath him as he stood. Ships lay in three rows along the harbour wall, their masts bare against the evening sky. Somewhere below the quay a crew was shouting over a cargo. He gave his man instructions for the inn, where chambers had been bespoken before ever he left Derbyshire, and where Dr Baillie, summoned by express out of London, was to be told to attend the moment he was come. Then Darcy walked to the military hospital, and with every step he was aware that he was walking towards an answer he had been afraid of for two and a half days.

He heard Richard before he saw him.

The ward was long and whitewashed, full of beds and the hush of men too ill to make a noise. From the far end of it came a voice raised in vigorous objection to everything being done for it. “I am perfectly capable of sitting up without three men holding my elbows. Take that away. I said take it away. If you bring that basin near me again I shall have you up before the commanding officer, and I shall enjoy it.” An orderly’s murmur, patient and unconvinced. “No, I will not lie back. I have been lying back since Lisbon and I am heartily sick of the view.”

Darcy stopped where he was, just inside the door. The fear he had carried from Pemberley, folded small and kept out of sight, unfolded itself and was suddenly no longer needed. A man who could threaten an orderly with a court martial over a basin of water was not dying. He stood a moment longer than courtesy required and simply listened. Richard was alive, and loud enough to scold.

He went down the ward between the beds. The Colonel was propped against a heap of bolsters, thinner than imagination had made him, unshaven, his hair in want of cutting, one leg stretched out before him beneath a sheet with a bulk of bandaging under it. Two orderlies stood over him in attitudes of cautious siege. At the sight of Darcy they retreated with evident gratitude.

“Stop shouting like a fishwife,” Darcy said. “They can hear you in the harbour.”

Richard’s head came round. For a moment the grin that came over his face was so entirely glad that neither of them troubled to comment on it. “Darcy. Good God. They wrote to you, then. I told them not to write to anyone.”

“Your father wrote. I was at Pemberley. The express found me in my library at an inconvenient hour, for which I shall hold you accountable.” Darcy drew up the ward’s single chair and sat. “You look terrible.”

“I feel terrible.” Richard subsided against the bolsters, and some of the loudness went out of him now that there was nobody left to perform it for. “It is the leg. The leg is damnable.”

The surgeon, when he came, was a grey man with ink on his cuff and the air of one who had delivered this report a hundred times and expected the family to mishear the hopeful parts. Darcy rose and gave him his name, and the surgeon gave the report in return. The leg had been wounded above the knee, a musket ball taken out cleanly enough in the field. It was the transport home that had done the mischief. “A ship is the worst place in the world for a wound of this kind,” he said. “Damp, motion, and no means of keeping the dressing as it should be kept. The wound has taken infection. There is a risk of fever, and I will not pretend to you that the risk is small. But the ball is out, the bone is whole, and the patient has the constitution of an ox, as you may have gathered from the noise.”

“I gathered it,” Darcy said.

“The fever is what we watch for. If he comes through the next days without it, or through it, he will keep the leg and very likely the use of most of it.” The surgeon glanced down the ward towards his patient, who was watching them with open suspicion. “He has refused every proposal to move him to the quieter ward, saying he cannot walk to the door, which is accurate. We need his bed for a man just in from the ships, and I was about to have him carried over whether he wished it or not.”

“Have him carried to my carriage all the same. I have chambers at the inn, and a physician coming down from London who should reach us tonight or tomorrow,” Darcy said.

Richard delivered his opinion of being moved, of London physicians, of inns, and of cousins who took charge, speaking fast and plain when he was agitated. “If you think I am to be jolted about in a carriage for your convenience, you may think again. I have been jolted from Lisbon to this godforsaken ward and I am done with it. And a London physician, what does London know of a ship’s fever?”

“You may deliver your opinion of London, of physicians, and of my interference until you are quite exhausted,” Darcy said, “but you will go. I have not come all this way to debate the matter with you. London may know nothing of a ship’s fever, but I know that you are not to be left here to sink or swim on your own humour. You will submit, and we will have done with it.”

Richard opened his mouth, closed it, and submitted. Two orderlies came forward and Darcy stood close, offering his shoulder. Richard’s grip on it was harder than his face admitted to as they lifted him.

The drive was short, which was fortunate. They went through the streets at a slow pace. Richard held his temper for all of thirty yards.

“The ship’s stores were a disgrace,” he said. “The biscuit was crawling with worms before we had cleared the harbour. The ship’s surgeon gave every man the same medicine, whether he had the fever or a splinter. The oranges they gave us in Lisbon were so green I have eaten better fruit in a siege. And the bandaging, you cannot imagine the bandaging. A child with a torn shirt could have done better.”

“I am astonished they did not throw you overboard for the relief.”

“They considered it.”

Darcy let him go on. It was the most reassuring sound he had heard in two and a half days. At the inn, men were found, and the Colonel was got up the stairs to his chamber with more advice from the patient than the bearers strictly required.

The doctor had arrived, and it was there, in the bedchamber with the bandages newly off, that Richard fixed upon his true grievance. “The leg may go to the devil if it must,” he said, “but I have not been clean since I was put aboard, and I will have a bath. Tell him I am to have a bath.”

Dr Baillie considered the wound, then the patient. “A bath you may have, on one condition. That leg does not get wet. Not a splash. It will be bound and raised and kept out of the water entirely, and if you are not equal to managing that, you will not have the bath.”

“I am equal to anything that ends in my being clean.”

So it was arranged. Linen and a basin were brought, the leg bound in oiled cloth and laid along a chair, while Darcy’s own valet was summoned from the inn’s lower floor to attend. “You are to help him,” Darcy told the man, “and to see that he does not kill himself in pursuit of cleanliness.”