“Then you will be disturbed. More than now. If I am downstairs I can answer first—”
“Mrs Marsden.” The name stopped her. He did not often use it in that tone. “You have not slept in days. Perhaps longer than days. If you go on as you have done, your sister will lose her nurse before she gains her leg. That is not a calculation I will make. One night. If tomorrow you wish to return to the cot, I will not argue it.”
She did not answer at once.
“You would argue it,” she said at last, very quietly.
“I would. But you need not let that trouble you tonight.”
She looked at the basin, then at the parlour door, then at him. “Very well. One night.”
“Tonight. And any night hereafter, you will take the shorter argument.”
A small movement at the corner of her mouth—not a smile but its nearest approach, gone before it had taken form—and then she took up the basin again and turned back into the parlour.
He stood a minute in the passage before going to the kitchen to tell Mrs Reeves what was required. He thought of the room upstairs, the one he had meant to sleep in when he came to Merebank and had let stand cold and empty because downstairs was nearer his sister and was now nearer Miss Bennet. He found he was glad it would be of use at last, and glad its first proper guest would be a woman who had earned a better bed than the one she had come here in.
Chapter Ten
Shewokeindarkness,the taste of salt on her tongue.
The fever had not broken—she knew this before she moved, before she counted herself beyond the first awareness of the bed—but it had loosened its grip. The heat that had consumed her from within had retreated from its peak, leaving her soaked with sweat, the shift clinging to her skin, the blankets heavy with damp. Her hair lay wet against her neck. Her mouth was dry, cracked, tasting of bile and the bitter residue of laudanum and something mineral—clean, cold, like water from deep underground.
The leg was still there. She knew before she tried because the pain remained, enormous and local, radiating from below the knee with the same grinding insistence it had carried since the ice. But its nature had changed. The pain she recalled—from the bone-setting, from the fever’s worst—had been a white wall, obliterating everything behind it. This was different. Bearable, barely, by the thinnest margin, but bearable—a ground she could stand upon rather than one that swallowed her whole.
She turned her head—cautiously, testing. The pain flared with bright sparks across her vision, but the sparks thinned and faded as she lay still, the first time since the fall that motion had not sent her into white nothingness. She lay breathing, and the breathing was hers to govern, which meant she was lucid, which meant her mind had returned from wherever laudanum and fever had taken it.
The room was dark. The fire had burned low, reduced to embers’ orange glow and the faint grey of moonlight through the curtain. She could not tell the hour. The quality of the silence—deep, complete, the house still around her—suggested late. Past midnight, perhaps. The small hours, when the world contracted to bed and walls.
She parted her lips. “Jane.”
The word came as a rasp, barely voiced, her throat too dry to carry it. She swallowed and tried again. “Jane—”
A shape movedin the dark.
Not from the door, but within the room—from the chair, the hard-backed chair at her bedside. A form resolved from the deeper shadow of the corner, rising, crossing toward her with a tread she recognised before her eyes confirmed it. Heavy. Deliberate. Not Jane’s.
She drew back against the pillow. The movement shot a bolt from the leg she subdued by locking her jaw rather than crying out—but the instinct was older than the pain, the instinct of a woman alone in a dark room with a man she could not see.
“Miss Bennet.” His voice was low, immediate, bearing the care of a man who knew he had startled her. “It is Darcy. Your sister sleeps upstairs tonight—I would not have her on the cot again. I came an hour ago to build the fire and check the fomentations and found you shifting in your sleep. I sat down to watch. I did not intend to alarm you.”
The words assembled slowly in her mind. Darcy. The man who had found her. The hands, the splint, the carrying. The name she had given from the mere when pain had stripped her wit to lie. He was in her room. In the dark. While she slept.
“You are in my room, Mr Darcy.”
“I am aware of the impropriety, Miss Bennet. Your sister is upstairs resting, and she would come if I called her, and I will call her if you wish. But she has been awake for two and a half days on four hours of sleep, and I have allowed her rest because she would collapse otherwise, and the fomentations require watching through the small hours regardless of who watches. I do not think you wish me to call her.”
“I do not wish you to call her.”
“Good. Then you may continue to rest, and if you permit it, I will return to the chair.”
The honesty disarmed her before she could construct a defence. She had been waking alone for the better part of a fortnight—in strange inns, coach stations, rooms paid for with coins designed to leave no impression. Waking alone was the condition she had chosen and purchased at every stop between Longbourn and this valley. She had not expected it intolerable until the alternative spoke in a man’s low voice in the dark, telling her she was not alone.
“I would… be obliged if you would stay.” The word surprised her as it left her lips. “Please.”
She heard him sit. The chair creaked under his weight—the same creak she had heard through the fog of fever, through the laudanum’s dark—a sound woven into the fabric of whatever half-world had been hers for the past day and night. He had been in this chair before. For a long time.
“How long have I been—” She did not know how to finish the question. Asleep was insufficient. Lost came nearer.
