He came to the water’s edge. The cold bit through coat and shirt to the skin beneath, unmarked because his gaze rested on the mere, the only thing in the valley warranting attention.
The mere was unremarkable. Four acres of spring-fed water in a limestone hollow, mineral-rich and cold, of no measurement by any estate’s usual standards. It had been a single line in the solicitor’s description of the property Darcy inherited six months prior,“All that piece or parcel of mineral water called the Mere, containing four acres or thereabouts, together with the banks and margins thereof,”and had not concerned him until an old man in London spun a story. On that story’s strength, Darcy had brought his sister north in winter, carried buckets uphill each morning for six weeks, and finally penned a letter to a doctor in Buxton with questions to which he did not yet know the answers—whether others had observed what he had, whether the water held qualities measurable rather than merely believed, whether Georgiana’s slight improvement was reality or wish.
Now the same water had pulled a woman through its ice and fractured her leg below the knee. The same water, perhaps, whose minerals kept the springs from freezing even in cold—allowing Miss Bennet to walk upon snow that looked like meadow but was a thin crust atop the spring’s warmer channel. She had not known. There had been no sign. The mere had given, at every dusk for six weeks, the look of a flat, safe field.
He turned toward the house. Merebank, from below, was a dark mass on the hill—the chimneys cold save for three. He climbed the slope. The gate’s broken hinge caught his sleeve, tearing a thread from his coat cuff. He did not stop. In the last twenty-four hours he had lost a waistcoat, a shirt, and much of his composure, and the sleeve was a trifling addition to a tally he did not care to reckon.
The kitchen was warm. Mrs Reeves stood at the range. Mrs Marsden sat at the table with a bowl before her—the second broth, kept warm—eating slowly, the spoon moving with the care of one who had not eaten since dawn and hesitated to eat too quickly. She looked up as he entered.
“Mr Darcy.”
He had taken his hat off at the door, and he hung it on the rack. “Mrs Marsden. Mrs Reeves. How is Miss Bennet?”
Mrs Reeves acknowledged him with a nod and returned to the range. Mrs Marsden set down her spoon.
“My sister sleeps. The second laudanum dose took an hour ago. She will sleep through the night unless pain wakes her. I have left the bottle within her reach should she need more.”
“I am very glad to hear it. She will need comfort when she awakens, and from a voice she trusts more than mine.”
“She does trust your voice, Mr Darcy. She told me so. She was very exact about it, but I am afraid that was the only subject she could address with any degree of clarity.”
He found no reply. Exact was a term he rarely applied to himself, and the Miss Bennet he discerned from her dryness by the bank and her refusal of laudanum and sleep was the sort to articulate such matters. He sat, for standing had become difficult. Mrs Reeves set a bowl before him unbidden.
He ate the stew, very good indeed, whether improved from the morning’s portion or by his unsettled hunger. Mrs Marsden finished hers, set down the spoon, and rose.
“Goodnight, Mr Darcy.”
“Goodnight, Mrs Marsden.”
He heard footsteps down the passage to the parlour, the door opening and closing, the faint noise of her moving within the room where her sister slept. A minute later came the second door’s opening and closing—the steward’s office, where Mrs Bannon had at last produced a cot, and Mrs Reeves made a bed. Mrs Marsden was settling for the night. The household was closing itself for rest.
He washed his bowl. Mrs Reeves did not object. She had ceased protesting his occasional kitchen forays in the second week of his residence, upon learning such forays meant he was lost in thought and wished no interruption, and that he did no harm by drying his own cup. She banked the range, wished him goodnight, and went up the back stairs to her attic chamber, where Nan slept—Nan had come down an hour before, after Georgiana’s sleep took her, had eaten in the scullery, and had retired. The two women of the Reeves family were now above, under the eaves as they had been for six weeks.
He was alone in the kitchen. The fire banked. The house silent save for minor creaks—the settling wood, the drip of meltwater, a shutter’s tapping on the ground floor.
He returned to the study. His own chamber was upstairs at the corridor’s far end, past Georgiana’s south chamber. He had moved down to the study since rescuing Miss Bennet—so near the parlour where she lay, and the study’s settee offered a place to lie without climbing stairs past his sister’s door at untoward hours. He had told himself the arrangement was temporary. He had yet to decide how temporary.
The settee was too short and the cushions thin. He did not lie down at once. He rekindled the fire he had allowed to die in the afternoon and sat at the desk with the letter once more. The sentences endured. Tomorrow he would give the letter to Norton to send with the morning post.
He replaced it in the drawer and looked to the study door opening onto the passage opposite the parlour’s closed door. Miss Bennet slept behind that door. Mrs Marsden, by now, also slept behind the adjoining door. The ground floor contained two exhausted women and a man attempting rest on a too-short settee, an arrangement improper by any standard Darcy had learned, and the impropriety was a matter for tomorrow. Tonight, it was the only option, and he would not pretend otherwise out of scruple.
He lay on the settee with a coat over him and boots on. The fire revived, the room warmer than in the afternoon. He closed his eyes and listened to the house—the settling wood, the drip of meltwater, the shutter’s irregular tapping—silence belonging to those who had reached their limits and gone to bed.
He slept some. Of the duration, he was unaware, but he was awakened with a start when the sound came through the wall.
He was on his feet before ending his slumber. The sound came from across the passage—a cry, high and torn, a woman caught in something inescapable. It came again, louder. Words formed or began to, broken by whatever gripped her behind closed eyes.
He reached the study door before the second call ended. Across the passage, at the parlour door, he knocked once softly and waited. Nothing. Mrs Marsden did not stir—he knew without checking, for the steward’s office lay between and any movement from her would have sounded. She had been awake… well, he did not know how long, but the dark circles under her eyes when he saw her in the kitchen told their own tale. She was beyond rousing by cries in the night.
From beyond the parlour door came the cry again. Ragged. Distressed. The voice of a woman whose body slept while the mind did not, or whose mind was asleep while the body rebelled, laudanum holding her under while some dark presence—pain, memory, or whatever else the drug summoned—rose.
He opened the door.
The fire had sunk low. The room was dim, lit by embers’ orange glow and thin moonlight through an uncurtained window. She was restless. Her head turned side to side on the pillow, repetitive, insistent, as if shaking free of some unseen burden. Her hands clasped the blankets. Her lips moved.
He crossed and knelt by the bed. Her face in firelight was flushed—not health but heat, a wrong warmth from within. He brushed the damp hair from her forehead. The skin beneath burned.
Fever.
