Page 88 of Homeless

He pointed at Darcy. “Quod illa habet, tu habebis.” What she has, you will have. “Et pro te —” He spread his empty hand, the little gap of thumb and finger now showing nothing at all between them.

“Sí,” he breathed. “I know.”

Ignacio nodded and instructed Darcy to remove Elizabeth’s gown, her shoes, and her stockings, and to take the pins from her hair. Make her comfortable, easy to care for seemed to be the intent. Then he went away, and Darcy bent over his wife to undress her. Off came the shoes, the stained gown, the petticoat and stockings and stays. He left her in just her chemise, thin and nearly transparent by now.

He was seeing double by the time he was done, and he collapsed to his hip on the bed beside her, gasping and weaving where he sat. Elizabeth’s eyes fluttered now and again. She was aware, she knew what he had done. She was just too listless to care. Her hand fumbled and found his, and that was all the strength she had. He squeezed it, kissed her forehead, and held there, his lips against her brow.

Ignacio came back a few moments later, stirring something in a cup. He lifted it and passed it to Darcy, gesturing towards Elizabeth.

“There. Sit up, love.” He put an arm behind her and lifted her shoulders. “Drink, Elizabeth. Drink it all.”

She obeyed, then sputtered hard at her first taste. “Bitter,” she gagged.

“I know. I know, just drink it.”

She swallowed more, then bent away from him, already heaving on it.

“No, no! You must keep it down. Breathe, Elizabeth! Do not… just keep it in you.”

Her body quivered with the effort of it, and for some seconds, it seemed indeed as if she would roll over and retch on the floor. At length, she lay limp and shivering, half the medicine swallowed. He held her head back against his shoulder and soothed the hair off her forehead with one hand as he held the cup with the other.

Her closed eyes squeezed once, then she opened them and nodded. He held the cup for her until the last of it was drained, then eased her back to the bed. Ignacio produced a blanket and gestured for Darcy to cover her, and he did.

That was the last thing he could recall doing before the fever rose up, unopposed at last, and took him down into the dark after her.

XXXIV

Heat

She came back to herself in reaches, in waves, each one a little further up the shore than the last, and long grey withdrawings between.

For a long time, there had been only the swallowing. Someone lifting her, a hand behind her head, hard and warm and insistent, and a cup at her mouth with a bitterness so profound it had its own colour in her mind. A voice she knew like she knew her own heartbeat kept telling her to drink, only drink, all of it. And she had drunk, because the voice was the only one she would obey from the grave, if it came to that, and each time, she had gone back down under. Then the burning sweat, the vomiting, and the agonising chill that she thought would never abate.

That had happened more times than she could number. She could not have measured that stretch of time in days, but she felt sure it had been a handful. Through all of it, there had been a heat and weight and breath at her side, so close that she did not know whether it was supporting her or she was supporting it. She only knew it was always there, whenever the tide of consciousness came and went.

This morning, the tide came in and did not go back out.

She lay and stared at an unfamiliar ceiling until it resolved into shapes — dark beams, a water stain in the corner, a crucifix on a whitewashed wall. Her body felt scoured, like a rag wrung out and hung up and left, and she was weak past anything she could possibly describe. But she was awake, unmistakably awake, her own mind back in her own skull and looking out. And beside her, like a rock, was the warmth that had been there through it all.

Darcy had not left her. Some part of her had known it every hour of the fever, and had been glad of it — shamefully, thoroughly glad of feeling his body beside her. She had spent more than a month forbidding herself any pleasure in him and had lacked, in her sickness, the strength to deny it any longer. He had sat by her, kept her warm when she shivered, lifted her and poured the bitter cure down her throat and called her sweet things she could hardly permit herself to believe.

She turned her head on the pillow to look at him. He would be waiting, watching her, those dark eyes kindling when she roused, and trying not to show more than common relief at the sight. If he were particularly pleased, he would say something cutting, so that she might answer in kind, and then he would pretend no warmth had passed between them at all. But he would kiss her forehead, as he had been doing all through her fever. Elizabeth lifted her head slightly to see him better.

He was not looking at her.

He lay on his back, the length of his arm wedged under hers on the narrow bed, his hand fallen open atop the blanket. His face was turned up, and his jaw hung slack, his mouth slightly open as an uneven rasp escaped it.

He must be more than usually exhausted. She had heard him snore on other nights. Usually, it was when he had taken the floorboards instead of the chair, and ended up on his back and unable to move, as he was now. But this did not sound like the usual deep rumble in the back of his throat. This was higher, less regular, more like a man with someone’s elbow stuck in his rib cage. Which hers might have been.

“You may stop hovering,” she said. It came out a cracked whisper. She wet her lips and tried again. “I am awake. You need not —”

He did not stir.

Heat was flaring off his body. That was not from her. It was not the blanket, which was thin, or a skin of hot water laid over her against the chill, for there was nothing like that. It was him, and had been him all along.

She lifted her hand and put it against his face. Surely, it was nothing too unusual. He always felt warmer than she did. That had been one of the first things that startled her when she first touched…

His skin was burning.