Page 3 of Yearning

Elizabeth had come along with her sister and her sister’s new husband to their house in London, where Miss Caroline Bingley was also residing. Caroline did not like Elizabeth—or at the very least, had not liked her—but she was polite to her now in a pitying way.

Caroline had once carried a torch for Mr. Darcy. She had been very short and pinched with Elizabeth after learning that she would be marrying the man that Caroline had wanted for herself. But after Mr. Darcy’s accident, Caroline only seemed entirely relieved, as if she had escaped some sort of awful fate, and she seemed to be kind towards Elizabeth in a way that indicated she felt as if she had won, in some way.

Yes, it must be that. To Caroline’s way of thinking, she had lost when Mr. Darcy had not chosen her, but then, when Mr. Darcy had been injured so badly, it had all made sense to Caroline, and now she was all charitable solicitude to Elizabeth, who had been dealt such an awful hand.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth ended up spending quite a great deal of time with Caroline, for Jane and Mr. Bingley had a tendency to retire early and sleep late. When they were in the company of others, they spared little attention for anyone besides each other. They had their own little jokes, which were only funny to them, and they seemed to have developed a lexicon of words that meant something only to them, and they were always and forever looking at each other besottedly. Elizabeth would have been happy for them—

No, Elizabeth was happy for them. She was not jealous, not at all. She would not be. Jane was so kind to everyone that it was impossible to be jealous of her. Jane herself was never jealous. Elizabeth would not repay her sister’s good nature with bad nature of her own, even if Caroline’s feeling sorry for her set Elizabeth’s teeth.

Every day, Elizabeth traveled across town to the Darcy town house. Miss Darcy was staying there currently, though Elizabeth understood that Miss Darcy had her own household in town where she resided with a female companion. However, Miss Darcy had come to stay with her brother during his recovery.

Miss Darcy spent a great deal of time sobbing over him, which meant that Elizabeth did not see much of the other woman—girl? Miss Darcy was but sixteen years old, and Mr. Darcy was all that the poor girl had, since both of her parents had died. At any rate, Elizabeth could understand why the girl would sob. It was disastrous. But whenever she began to cry, Miss Darcy would excuse herself, as was proper.

Elizabeth said to her, again and again, that Miss Darcy must stay. “We are family now, are we not?” she would say, and Miss Darcy would press her lips together in a line and leave anyway.

Because no one thought that Elizabeth was actually going to marry Mr. Darcy.

Perhaps Elizabeth could understand why when she saw him. She had seen him before, in the wake of it, so perhaps she should have been ready for it, but there had been so much blood then and that was what she primarily remembered, all of the blood. And then, of course, Mr. Darcy had been screaming, and that had been the one thing she could even focus on, so she might not have had much left of her faculties to acknowledge the look of him.

But now, he was all stitched up and splinted and bound and bandaged, and there were pieces of him just missing, and it was rather horrid. He was never awake. When he did wake, they would always make him drink laudanum, because he was in too much pain to be coherent or to understand not to move and that if he moved too much, he might undo the work the surgeon had done setting his bones, some of which were really shattered.

He had a clout on, like an infant. Servants were changing him when he soiled himself. He was fed mostly thin broth, and this while he was sleeping, and someone stroked his throat to make him swallow.

She sat with him every day, and she read aloud to him and she held his hand and she spoke to him. She told him everything that was going on in her life, repeating to him her conversations with Caroline, even. And then, she also, when they were left alone, which did happen, would tell him all manner of rosy and cheery plans for the future.

“Perhaps you’ll have a wheeled chair, but that will not stop us from going on walks, you know,” she would say. “We shall have summers together, walks in Lambton and on the grounds of Pemberley, and we shall spend all winter reading books. You will read it first and then I shall read it, and then we shall talk over what it is we think, and we shall have lively games of cards, and we shall be together, and I know it, and you must know it, too.” She would squeeze his hand—his one remaining hand—and she would tell him that she was here with him. She would whisper to him that she loved him.

The time that he asked her to kill him, it was not the only time he was conscious when she was there. No, he woke often enough when she was present, but he was never really aware of her in those times. He was often still carried away by whatever opium dream he was floating on. He would talk of things that were not there, strange red snakes that he claimed were stretched out over the lamps, armed men in the corners, his own dead mother, rocking in a rocking chair in the corner with an infant Georgiana in her arms.

So, this time, this time, it was different.

She had been in the room with him for some time, and various people had come in and gone. It was one of the afternoons wherein his aunt the Lady Matlock, Colonel Fitzwilliam’s mother, had come to look in on him.

Elizabeth had met the colonel in Kent, when she had been staying very close to Mr. Darcy’s other aunt’s house, Rosings.

Lady Matlock was more polite than Lady Catherine—the two women were not related by blood, but by marriage—but she was rather dismissive of Elizabeth, barely paying attention to her. She did not stay long, as a general rule.

The colonel was not there. He was on some assignment with the army, and he would not be back for several weeks, Elizabeth understood.

She had not seen the earl himself, Darcy’s uncle, but she understood that the man had come to look in on his nephew at least once.

That day, Lady Matlock was the same as ever with Elizabeth. She did not remember her name. “Miss Benning, yes, you’re still here, I see.”

“I am Mr. Darcy’s intended,” said Elizabeth, not bothering to correct the name. She would be Mrs. Darcy soon enough.

“So you said last time,” said Lady Matlock, peering down at her nephew. “I do not mean to be indelicate, but we are, even now, in a room with a man who is, let us be frank, mangled and destroyed.” She looked at Elizabeth. “You are good to come to him, but no one would blame you if you wished to be set free from the engagement. A lady is allowed to change her mind. In this instance, no one would think less of you.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I have heard this before, my lady, but I have no intention of leaving Mr. Darcy’s bedside. I am in love with your nephew. Our love, it is certainly large enough to withstand this.”

Lady Matlock gave her a ghost of a smile. “As you will, madam.” She said nothing else to Elizabeth for the rest of the visit.

After the countess had left the room, Mr. Darcy’s eyes opened, and they sought hers out, and she could see that he recognized her, that he knew her, that there was intelligence and awareness in his eyes.

But she could see little else of his face, truly, for his jaw had been broken, and his entire face was bound in bandages meant to keep his jaw in place. He was not really meant to move it over much.

The room where Mr. Darcy was being kept was downstairs, not the master’s suite in the house. It was a sitting room that had been converted into a sick room. The walls were painted pale blue with gilded trim. There had once been framed paintings on the walls, but these had been removed for some reason—Elizabeth thought they might have given him something to look at, though she supposed he was never awake for long—and there were darker squares there, where the paintings had hung. The walls were sometimes spattered with things, Elizabeth had to own. Spilled broth, for instance, that sort of thing. Perhaps the paintings had been removed to protect them.

The bed sat right in the middle of the room, and there were chairs and couches and other things all set up round the bed, so that people who came to see him might sit down and look upon him.