Darcy felt that lightness again, like butterflies in his stomach. He could not recall any such sensation since he was a callow lad of fifteen or sixteen.
He was in danger of being seen to flirt with her, and that it was wholly possible he might give her expectations, even though she was — like the community — decidedly beneath him.
Miss Elizabeth would not think highly of that thought on his part. She would describe him again as thinking meanly of the worth of those without equal wealth and influence. But it was not thinkingmeanlyof them to believe they were in a different station in life, and belonged to separate spheres.
He was also in danger of allowing himself tothinkthat he might want to give her expectations… After all, he did intend to marry within the next year.
Darcy leaned away from her, and Elizabeth herself moved a little away from him. She then, after glancing at him again, rose and made a little curtsey. “I just thought upon something I wished to ask Miss Lucas.”
Darcy could not contemplate with complete satisfaction the end of theirtete a tete, though he knew a conclusion to their disconcerting conversation had been necessary.
That night he did not fall asleep easily, because his mind insisted on running over the conversation with Miss Bennet, like a river overflowing its banks. What could he have said to make her see the fundamentaljusticeof his maintaining reserve and distance between himself and strangers in the assembly of a country market town?
Darcy drowsed into a fitful sleep.
Suddenly he was not in Netherfield. The vibrant red silk coverings of his own bedroom. Mahogany paneling of the ceiling. The thick coverlets, but he could not push them aside. His bladder swelled, and he desperately needed to relieve himself, but he could not. Voices, the doctor approaching with a knife to bleed him. Pain in the legs. Unable to move. Struggling. The pain everywhere. His back aching, aching. He needed to do something. His arms were weak and unable to move. First the weakness in the back of his right arm, like had happened once already. But now the weakness spread, with a startling rapidity.
He desperately struggled to move his arm, but it wouldn’t move. He tried to grab his right arm with his left. But though he struggled the left also would barely move. He couldn’t make his chest draw in air.
The muscles hurt so much, like when the doctor had ordered them to be massaged during the first few weeks.
Darcy tried to scream, but he couldn’t breathe. Gasping, couldn’t. He was trapped forever, just watching flickers of motion around the bed. Georgiana’s face, his father’s, Mr. Wickham gloating,a cripple! A cripple!The serious manner of Mr. Thompson, his physician. Stroked chin, shaken head:Hopeless, the case is hopeless.
Darcy woke suddenly, jerking up from his pillow. He profusely sweated; his heart raced.
The gentle gibbous moon gleamed through half open curtains that wavered in a draft. The night air was cold on his face.
He pushed himself up to a half sitting posture and grabbed the bedframe to pull himself, dragging his legs on the bed till he could lean against the head of the bed in a sitting posture.
Darcy’s breathing calmed down. One breath after another.Don’t think about the fear. Don’t remember the fear. Don’t think at all.
One breath after another.
That bloody, devil take it, damned, damned nightmare. He’d thought he’d had it for the last time after more than two months without that dream.
Darcy pushed himself till he was able to swing his legs, still swaddled in his bed clothes, over the edge of the bed. His feet pressed against the ground. They were useless except as leverage for the muscles which still possessed their proper motive power.
At the house in Bath he’d kept one of the maids awake all night in exchange for some extra salary and reduced daytime duties so that she could fetch him tea, chocolate and biscuits after these nightmares. But he’d not had that arrangement established here in Bingley’s house.
Darcy sat on the edge of the bed for a while, mindlessly watching the fluttering shadows made by the moonlight through the window. That hollow feeling in his stomach was back, and he hated to feel scared, helpless in the face of his own anxieties.
Suddenly a wholly unexpected thought:I wish I could talk to Miss Elizabeth right now.
Conversation with her made him feel… more alive. More full. As though his cripplingreallydidn’t matter, as opposed to him simply making the pretense to himself that it didn’t matter.
He grabbed his crutches from their hook and pushed himself to stand up, then went over with careful steps to the writing desk that sat right beneath the window. Hand on the desk, and he lowered himself into the chair and hung up the crutches on the hook to the side. In the moonlight he found the tinderbox kept on the desk. He opened it, and pulled out the flint, striker, and brimstone matches. Darcy removed the inner lid of the tinderbox, and with a few quick strikes generated a spark that caught on the char cloth in the bottom.
He lit one of the brimstone matches and used that to light each of the three long beeswax candles that sat in a candleholder made from gold on his desk.
After blowing out the brimstone match he removed a bottle of brandy from the desk, a carefully wrapped mix of chocolate and sugar, and a stack of paper with his coat of arms imprinted as a watermark.
He poured himself two fingers of the fine spirit and leaned back in the chair sipping it as the reflection of the candlelight flickered against the windows.
A bite of the chocolate, andnowthe anxiety in his stomach from the dream was properly leaving. From experience Darcy knew he would not be able to sleep again for at least an hour.
A few times Darcy had taken laudanum in the first month of the illness to allow easier sleep. But the regular use of either laudanum or any large quantity of alcohol would have set him upon a course he would not have admired in another, and which he thus could not tolerate in himself.
Fragments of the dream remained with him. Desperation for air. Wanting to scream — the loss of what abilities yet remained to him.
