Page 7 of Yearning

She nodded at that. Yes, that must be the case, mustn’t it?

“It is all right to grieve the turns and changes of life,” said Mr. Bingley. “You are allowed to be angry this happened.”

She bit down on her bottom lip, and she said nothing. “I don’t want to give him up. I want to marry him. I know everyone says—”

“Of course you do,” interrupted Bingley, as if saying anything else was absurd. “He is Fitzwilliam Darcy. He is a formidable man. He will come out of this in a way that will surprise us all, and I have no doubt of it.”

“Yes,” she said, turning to look at Bingley. “Yes, quite, this is what I think as well.” She gave him a smile.

He patted her hand. “I have no doubt that you and he will be together when you are old. You are quite right for each other. And this part, this part won’t last forever. You must simply fight through it, until things get better. Things always get better.”

Her lips parted. No, they did not. This, what had just occurred, was proof that things did not always get better. She kept that to herself, however.

After Mr. Bingley dropped her back at his house in town, she contemplated the fact that Bingley never visited Mr. Darcy, that she had not seen him there in the whole of the time she had been in London. Yes, he was distracted by his new bride, but also, it must make Mr. Darcy feel abandoned, for none of his friends were coming to see him, only family, and—with the exception of Colonel Fitzwilliam—none of the members of his family stayed very long.

Well, no wonder he wants to die, she thought.

She went to him the next day.

When she had some time alone with him, even though he was sleeping, she took his hand in hers and she spoke to him.

“It’s all right to be angry about it,” she said to him, quite aware that she was saying to him the things that Mr. Bingley had said to her. Mr. Bingley was correct about some things, even if he was far from perfect himself. “You must be angry about it, of course. Anyone would be. I am angry, too. It is not fair or right or anything of that nature, Fitzwilliam. It should not have happened.”

He lay still, his hand limp in hers, breathing, his eyes closed.

She had not expected a reaction, of course. “You must think of all the things you had planned and feel as if none of them can happen now. You must think of what you thought you were, and think…” She swallowed.

It was quiet for some time.

Finally, she said to him, her voice a fierce whisper. “I do not care. I want you anyway. I shall not go anywhere, and I shall not harm you, and I shall protect you, and whatever it is that life is for you now, it involves me, and we shall face it together.”

His breath seemed to hitch a little.

She studied his face. “Fitzwilliam? Can you hear me?”

Nothing from him.

Of course he couldn’t. She could be free, could say anything, really. “Everyone keeps behaving towards me as if I’ve suffered some personal tragedy, but I am really all right. I am whole and well and in possession of all of my limbs. It is you who are so badly affected, and I shall not heap worse things on your head by trying to escape you, as if you are a trap. You are not a trap. You are the man I love. I shall never stop loving you. I cannot.”

His breathing changed again.

She turned to him, furrowing her brow. “Are you awake again?” she said.

Nothing from him.

MR. FITZWILLIAM DARCY was, indeed, awake. He had been feigning sleep whilst being aware more often than not these days. It was the only way to escape the laudanum. If he woke, if he said anything at all, someone would decide he was in too much pain and then there was more laudanum, and he would drift off into some puffy pink cloud world of dreams, and everything was so very, very confusing there.

Things felt so good on the laudanum.

But they were false, and he knew it. Waking, pretending to be asleep, all of that, it was its own sort of agony. Not only because of the pain in his body, which was actually much less now than it had been, but because of the opium cravings themselves, which felt to him as if he had been harpooned with a number of small, gleaming spiderweb threads, all of which were burrowed into his face and they tugged and tugged on his skin, tiny points of pain that promised to be released as soon as he had another dollop of laudanum…

But that sort of thing was likely simply because the laudanum made him hallucinate, and the hallucinations were not always pleasant, but they always felt pleasant, which was disjointing and uncomfortable.

He wanted off the laudanum, because he wanted to think clearly.

The suicide attempts—well, there was no categorizing them as attempts, was there, if he was begging someone else to assist him—he felt, somewhere inside, that wasn’t like him.

It was only that he had seemingly lost all sense of himself somewhere in the middle of this strange nightmarish turn of events. How long had it been now? He had asked someone the other day. It had probably been Richard, his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, because mostly people weren’t talking to him, but Richard was and Elizabeth was, and that was really all.