Page 8 of Yearning

Four months, all told, that was what Richard had said. Four months since it happened.

He had no memory of the accident at all, as if his mind had tidily decided to wipe that away, and he was grateful for that, truly. The last thing he wanted to remember was the feeling of the horse trodding all over him, hooves pounding into the tenderest parts of his body, pulverizing bones in his limbs…

No, that was better gone, he supposed.

But whoever it was he’d been before that happened, he wasn’t that man anymore, or so he’d thought. Now, he realized that perhaps he didn’t feel like that man anymore because no one was treating him like that man. Everyone was treating him as if he was already dead, or as if he should be dead, that he would be better off dead, and so perhaps that was why he thought he wanted to die.

But as he lay still and pretended to be asleep and she spoke to him, he had a surge of a memory of what he used to be. He remembered a conversation with Miss Elizabeth Bennet as they walked together, the conversation that had led to his finally asking her, once again, to be his wife. She had thanked him for what he had done for her sister Lydia, securing her marriage to Mr. Wickham, and he had told her that he had not wished her to know and that her family owed him nothing. I believe I thought only of you, he had said to her.

Yes.

Her.

Now, she was saying to him that he was not a trap. He had not thought of it from that perspective before, but if he put himself in her shoes, he was instantly appalled. Here she was, a brilliant and beautiful young woman. Not yet one and twenty.

No. Four months. Her birthday had happened. He had missed it.

However, she was still so very young, and he couldn’t let her do this, whatever it was she was trying to do, which was to martyr herself here by his bedside, near as he could tell. Perhaps he was being dramatic. She was not going to die, of course, but she was throwing her entire life away on him. And he… he could be no sort of husband to anyone.

It was odd, truly, because he had no memory of whatever the horse had done to him, but he had swum to awareness the first time sure that part of him was gone. So, there was something there, anyway, some impression of a memory. When it was happening, he must have felt it. He could only imagine the agony. It was strange. He truly couldn’t remember it.

But at night, with his good hand, once, he’d reached down to explore. And then, once or twice, he’d seen it, whatever there was left of him.

So, he was worthless. He was not even really a man anymore, and he would not sentence her, not Elizabeth Bennet, not the bright, vibrant woman he loved with all his being, to a life with him, not when he was half a man, not when he was whatever he had become.

He had saved her before, saved her family’s reputation in order to save her, and it had come at a sacrifice, for it had involved giving George Wickham more money, something he had sworn to himself he would never do, but for her? For Elizabeth? He’d do anything.

This would be that same action. He would save her, at some sacrifice to himself, and it would be right.

It was what Fitzwilliam Darcy would do.

It was who he was.

When he had been a man, that was the sort of man he had been.

He would be that again, and he would claw his way back to some semblance of an identity, and that would be all he needed.

For her, he thought. I can do it for her.

THEY BROUGHT IN the doctor to speak to Mr. Darcy, because he had been refusing to take the laudanum. He had been seizing the bottles from their hands and tossing them against the walls. When they held down his wrist, he had been clamping his mouth shut against the liquid. Whatever they forced in, he spit in their faces.

“You don’t wish to have any more laudanum, I understand,” said the doctor to him. “I applaud you, sir. It’s a rare man who would have the wherewithal to resist it.” The doctor was speaking to him like he was a man, not like he was a child. All the female servants in the house had begun to talk to him in some sing-song-y voice. Time for your medicine, now. That’s a good boy. Open up for me, won’t you?

“I cannot think when there is so much of it. I have dreams and I think that things are real that are not real. I forget…” He had to school himself, because he was overcome with a rush of emotion, and it would not do to break down in front of the doctor, not if he wanted to continue to be talked to as if he were a man and not a large, mutilated invalid child. But he wanted to cry, in fact, when he thought of the way he kept forgetting in the laudanum dreams. He dreamed, over and over again, that this—reality—was the dream. He would think, in the dream, bemusedly, To think, I dreamed I had no prick. What a thing to imagine. How maudlin. But then, to wake and realize he’d had it wrong, that it was the other way round, that this was real and that had been the dream. It had happened too many times, and every time, it hurt afresh. “At any rate, the opium dreams are too vivid. I cannot bear them anymore.”

The doctor gave him a look, a look of sheer horror and pity. The doctor’s lips had gone white.

Yes, it was a bit amusing, wasn’t it, to be this, to embody the worst thing that any man could imagine happening, to have sunk to the very depths of the pit of bad fortune. Every man was better off than he, even the poorest and the most wretched. He was the lowest rung of any fathomable ladder.

The doctor cleared his throat. “That’s all… that’s understandable. However, at the amounts you are taking, I cannot recommend you cease it entirely. Your body is weak, and you will have a bad reaction to the lack of it in your system. You know of this?”

Darcy swallowed. “Fevers, yes? Sweating it out, that sort of thing?”

“Your body is weak,” said the doctor again. “You may not be strong enough. You have not fought your way back from the very edge of death, sir, only to be felled by withdrawing from opium.”

“So, what are you saying? I must take it forever?”

“No, no,” said the doctor. “We shall wean you from it, if that is what you wish. A little less each week until you are free of it.”