“Less than you suppose.”
Her throat was thick. Tears had come up while she was still gathering herself, and she had not been quick enough to stop them. Two of them moved already down the side of her face. Speaking would steady her. Speaking always did.
“You are very polite,” she said, “for a man whose bones I have ground together.”
“I save my complaints for real grievances.”
She tried to laugh.
It started as a laugh. It broke into a sob before she could stop it, and she closed her mouth on it. Too late. He had heard.
He stood up.
It was a kindness. He was giving her the room—moving, doing something practical, so that she would not have to be looked at while she failed to stop crying.
“May I bring you broth?”
“Not yet.”
The word came out steadier than she had any right to. She reached for steadiness again before he could ask anything that required more.
“Water, then.”
“Yes. Water.”
She turned her face away from him, toward the window where the grey was. She pushed the tears off her cheek with the heel of her hand, hard, as if she could press them back into wherever they had come from.
More came.
He crossed to the table and poured. The sound was small and domestic, absurdly gentle against the violence of the room. He returned and held the cup while she drank. Cool water, stone tasting, from the same cursed spring with which they had washed her wound. She swallowed twice, then once more because he waited. When she turned her head aside, he set the cup within reach.
“Mr Darcy?”
“Yes.”
“Do not let me lie here and think.”
He sat again. “I had not intended to encourage it. You need rest, Miss Bennet.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. The motion alone cost her. She had to wait through what followed it before she could speak. “That is impossible. Please… will you… talk to me?”
“Upon what subject?”
“Any. A stupid one, if you please. I cannot bear my own thoughts.”
His thumb moved once across her knuckle. The marks of her grip were on the side of his hand where the candle reached it. He had set himself to find an answer for her: a sensible man at one in the morning, with a woman half-fevered and wholly miserable to talk down from her thoughts.
“Very well. Tell me where you learned to dance so much that the possible loss of it presents itself before all other losses.”
The question caught her off guard. “What?”
“You spoke of dancing first. Therefore, you must once have liked it.”
“I did.”
“There. We have established one happy fact. Where?”
“In assembly rooms, chiefly.” Her breath came short on it. “Where else does anyone learn such things?”
