“How do you know my father has not thrown me off for some strange reason?”
“It would have been a difficult matter in such a case to find respectable employment.”
“As the matter turned out,” Elizabeth laughed, “I did not find respectable employment.”
When Darcy smiled back at her, she touched her forehead.
Her face and forehead was flushed, and it had become redder, he realized in the past minutes as they talked.“I feel queer, of a sudden,” she said in a tinny voice.“And quite dizzy.”
And then before Darcy’s terrified gaze, her eyes rolled up into her forehead, and she slumped into the chair in a dead faint.
Darcy anxiously jumped forward and felt her forehead.
She was burning up with fever, but at least he felt her thin reedy pulse pumping blood through her precious body.
With a leap, Darcy rang for his servants, pulling the bell rope connected to the servant’s quarters again and again until Mrs.North followed by a maid and a footman bustled into the room.“A doctor, for Miss Bennet.Immediately.Immediately.The physician immediately.”
Chapter Three
The first time Elizabeth awoke was from the sharp sting as the surgeon’s knife cut open the vein above her wrist so that he could let her blood.She blearily looked towards her arm and tried to pull it away.But the steady and experienced hand of the surgeon held her arm in place, as her blood burbled purply with each pulse into the wavering cup held against her arm.
“Shhhh.Shhhh.You will be all right.You will be well soon.”Darcy’s deep comforting voice sounded from her side.
She was lying on a soft bed.Her throat felt raw with flame.She tried to swallow, but she could not because it hurt so much.
The doctor finished his work and tied a strip of white gauze around her arm tightly.“Rich colored blood.I think the young miss will recover,” he said looking at the cup.
Elizabeth tried to swallow again, but a droplet of saliva caught in her throat and she started desperately coughing.Mr.Darcy and the doctor helped her sit up higher as she coughed, each cough causing a spasm of achy pain to go through her chest.Everything hurt.
“Keep her seated up.I have made the observation that when a patient is made to keep their chest upright when their tonsils are swollen, or they are otherwise ill, it reduces the frequency of pleurisy of the lungs.There is no authority or experiment to support this belief, but I suspect an upright posture permits the patient to cough more productively when oral secretions make inroads into the breathing passageway, instead of down the esophagus.Keep Mrs.Benoit—” Elizabeth blearily blinked at this name.Everything swam before her eyes, and she could not think clearly, but she was fairly certain her name wasnotMrs.Benoit.“—with her head and chest elevated.Enough cushions so she can comfortably sleep.Sleep will do more for her than my ministrations can.I’ll visit again tomorrow at this time, and bleed her once more depending on the progression of the illness.”
Darcy stood, and shook the doctor’s extended hand with his fine hand.Darcy had such a fine muscular hand.Elizabeth stared at the hand.The light from the candle was painfully bright in her eyes.Her throat hurt so much.
The servant in the room stuffed cushions behind her on the surgeon’s orders, pillows that cradled her head.She wasn’t as comfortable this way at first, but when her head lolled to the side backwards, she began to drift off again, though the afterimage of the candle burned into her sleep, and ate into her delirious dreams.
Elizabeth did not remember later any moments of distinct consciousness for the next three days.What she did remember, always, till the day she died, was the sense of Darcy’s presence next to her, warm, comforting and helping her to sleep and know all would be good.Her hand would search out his, and he would let her hold his.
Quite improper, but she was happy for this.
Each evening the doctor would come, frown and tap his nose, take Elizabeth’s pulse and temperature, and leave with a cup of her blood to drink.For she presumed, in this strange state of mind that her fever had given her, that that must be what doctors did with the blood, and that perhaps the bleeding did nothing beneficial — it had certainly done little to help Papa after his stroke — but the doctors had perpetrated bleeding as a scam upon all of society so that they could satisfy their endless desire to drink blood.
Elizabeth also had memories — she was not quite sure if they were memories or fragments of a dream — of vomiting, throwing up over Darcy’s fine wool clothes.Of throwing the covers to the side feverishly because she was too hot.And other memories that she was sure were dreams.
Jane and her sneaking into the same bed, whispering as little girls.A seven-headed hydra, each head that of Lord Lachglass, that though she smashed with her skull every head, there was always another sneering head, leering forward to bite her.A swinging gibbet, they led her up to be hung, but when the lever was pulled, instead of her hanging, she saw in impossibly vivid color Mr.Blight, his tongue sticking out and his face blue and black.
And then she was back in the bed.
Dark.No candle burning, but a dim red glow from the fireplace.
Elizabeth felt sick with shuddering aches, and she suspected she yet burned with a little fever, but she knew she was healthier than she had been for the past days, however many they had been.And at last she could appreciate that she was lying in the softest, comfiest bed she had ever slept in, including the one she’d possessed when she was one of the more blessed Miss Bennets of Longbourn.
She looked to her side.Darcy sat up in the winged armchair, lightly snoring.
Elizabeth felt a powerful wave of affection for him that went up and down her achy limbs and filled her soul.Her true hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
She looked at him, her eyes still bleary from illness and fatigue.His features and clothes were barely visible in the dim firelight.But she felt a deep thankfulness to him.
After so many years, when he had every right to despise her, he immediately, and without question, gave her sanctuary, paid for her care, and then sat by her bed to keep her company as she was sick.
