Page 1 of Yearning

I

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a double wedding, but it was not.

As Miss Elizabeth Bennet surveyed her sister Jane gazing into the eyes of her husband-to-be at the altar, tears filled Elizabeth’s eyes, and she tried to convince herself that she was crying primarily happy tears for her sister, who was so well settled. Certainly, she could not be feeling sorry for herself, not on today of all days, and not when this marriage had taken place with all haste, at least in part so that Elizabeth could accompany her married sister to London and thereby be closer to him.

Him being Mr. Darcy.

Her fiancé.

The man she was meant to have married today in the double wedding.

The man who everyone now said was not capable of marriage, and perhaps they were all correct. She did not know. She had a letter from his sister Miss Darcy just yesterday, saying that he had awakened enough to speak a bit to her, and that he was demanding that he be given less laudanum, that he was inquiring after who was collecting rents from his tenants.

All of that sounded promising, of course, but his sister did say it was hard to understand him because of the way his jaw had been broken, and that he was not supposed to speak, because it might affect the way the surgeon had set it, and that—despite his pleas—they had put him under with laudanum again so that he could rest more.

He had been thrown from a horse and trampled. Mostly on one side of his body, but the damage was extensive. Elizabeth had never been a horsewoman herself, and now she felt as if it was the wisest decision she might ever have made. But of course, she was being foolish, for there were a number of ways that a body put oneself in danger. Daily. Weekly. There were so very many ways to be injured. A thing like what had happened to Mr. Darcy could happen to anybody, at any time.

She had simply never really dreamed of it happening to someone like him.

Only the day before his accident, they had been on a walk together. They walked together often. Now that they were engaged, he held her hand.

He had kissed her, once, but only once, and he did not kiss her that day, and she sometimes thought wistfully of it.

The one kiss had been so tentative, so gentle, and the press of his lips had been like the sweetness of the coming of spring, and she had felt like a blossom unfolding her petals against him. His tongue had touched hers for one moment, only one, and that had sent such a sensation through her body, like nothing she had ever felt in her life. She’d been awash in him—his broad shoulders and the dark points under his chin that his valet had not quite shaved away and the smell of him, the clean and nearly woodsy scent of his that she only caught when they were quite close.

But he had pulled away, a little smile playing on his lips, and gazed at her with affection and said, “Oh, dear, Lizzy, I think we must not. If I start at that with you, I shan’t know how to stop.”

And this husband-to-be of hers, he was rather firm and stubborn. If he decided a thing, he was set on it. At one point, before she had accepted his proposal of marriage, she had found that exasperating about him, but now, all of that—the times when she had misunderstood him or even understood him perfectly well and been angry with him—burrowed into her like arrows of pain. She loved him so much, and she had thought she would spend the rest of her life with him, and now everything was different.

One day, they walked together, hand in hand, talking of all manner of things from when they had fallen in love with each other to what they thought his aunt Lady Catherine would say when she discovered the thing that she had feared most had, indeed, come to pass. His aunt had been quite set against their marriage, after all.

One day, everything was set, and the future was bright, and Elizabeth had struggled and gone through ever so much, and she had finally arrived at a destination.

And the next day…

She was not there when he fell from the horse, but she was there when they brought him back. She was at Netherfield that day with Jane and her mother and some of her sisters, and they were having tea in the sitting room. Kitty was talking too much, because Kitty had taken to filling the space left from Lydia—who always used to talk too much.

Lydia was now married to Mr. Wickham, something brought about by Mr. Darcy’s wealth and influence, something that no one in the family knew of but her.

Her husband-to-be had done it for her. I believe I thought only of you, he had said. She remembered the way it felt to know that this man, a man she had been abundantly rude to on a number of a occasions, would have done such a thing for her.

She felt so grateful to have finally found him, to be marrying him. Her own happy ending, truly.

And then they brought him in, and everyone got quiet, even Kitty.

He was screaming, she remembered that. The sound of it, the sound of that agonized, male shrieking, it had cut through the air and chilled her.

The surgeon spoke to her about things when he knew she was his intended. He was not going to keep that leg, or that arm, and his pelvis was shattered, and then the surgeon stopped telling her things. He told her one last thing. He came out and looked at her with a cold kind of pity and said that he was not going to marry her, that he was essentially unmanned, that it wasn’t salvageable.

And this was when Mr. Bingley, who was the one marrying her sister Jane right now, the one who was letting Netherfield, began saying that they needed to get Mr. Darcy to London, to a proper surgeon, no offense to Mr. Simmons who they’d summoned for this task, but if it was about that, then he needed to be moved.

Mr. Simmons said not to move him, but he also said he’d leave all of his reproductive parts as they were, then, and he looked at Elizabeth with a severe look on his face. “One thing is for certain, madam, he will never get children on anyone.”

Elizabeth remembered feeling strangely dull at that point. She supposed it was too many things at once, too much intensity, too many awful blows, and now she had nothing left in her to quite react to anything. But, also, was this something she was meant to react strongly to? She was not certain why anyone was making so much of a fuss about children, because certainly she wanted children, but she wanted Mr. Darcy more. It was a foolish thing to worry over, really, when she was, in that moment, desperately worried that he would not survive.

The men were all very affected by whatever it was the surgeon had said, about children, or about being unmanned, whatever it was the surgeon even meant by that, and all of them—Mr. Bingley, her own father, the male servants, Mr. Simmons, every man who knew—got very serious and sometimes white-lipped as they spoke about it, and they all seemed to agree that it hardly mattered if moving him meant risking his life, that if there were some chance to save that part of him, that it must be done and with all haste.