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"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet." Charlotte rises and smooths her skirt. At the door she pauses, and looks back. "Lizzy. A fortnight is a long time."

"It is only fourteen days."

"Yes," she says. "That is what I mean."

***

I do not sleep much again. It is becoming a habit with me, like rereading his letter.

I do reread it, by the last of the candle. Not all of it. Only the part about his sister, and the last line. I will only add, God bless you.

He wrote that to a woman who had just told him he was the last man in the world.

The Thames crack runs across the ceiling. I follow it with my eyes and do not talk to anyone at all.

***

In the morning Mr. Pettigrew sends word that the patient has passed a good night, has eaten a boiled egg, and is asking for Miss Bennet at intervals of roughly a quarter of an hour.

"He is very determined, miss," says the boy who brings the note. "Mr. Pettigrew says if you don't come soon, he'll get up and fetch you himself, and Mr. Pettigrew says he's not to get up."

"Then we had better go," says Charlotte, already reaching for her bonnet.

Lady Catherine is not in evidence when we arrive. The butler informs us, with great solemnity, that her ladyship is in the morning room composing a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Charlotte and I do not ask on what subject. We do not dare.

The Colonel meets us at the foot of the stairs. He looks better than yesterday, as though he has slept, and worse, as though he has thought about things.

"He's sitting up," he says. "His valet has shaved him, and he has been demanding a mirror so that he may see the size of his lump. He says it is the most interesting thing that has happened to him since Eton."

Lowe opens the bedchamber door for us. He bows to Charlotte. He bows to me, a little deeper, and his eyes rest on me for one moment longer than is quite comfortable, before he steps back out of the way.

Mr. Darcy is sitting up against a mountain of pillows.

Someone has dressed him in a clean nightshirt, and over it a dressing gown of dark blue silk, and his hair is brushed back from the bandage at his temple. The bruise has come out properly overnight, a great purple bloom from his eyebrow almost to his hairline. He is pale. He is unshaven no longer. The collar of his nightshirt is open at the throat, where I have never in my life seen Mr. Darcy anything but buttoned and starched and tied, and I discover that there is a hollow at the base of a man's throat that I have apparently never given the least thought to before.

I give it some thought now. I cannot seem to help it.

Then he sees me, and his whole face changes, and I forget about his throat entirely.

"Miss Bennet," he says.

That is all. Just my name. But the way he says it.

I have heard Mr. Darcy say my name perhaps a hundred times. At Netherfield, across a card table. At Rosings, across a pianoforte. In Charlotte's parlor, across the whole width of the hearth rug, with his voice like a closed door. I have never heard him say it like this. As though it is the best word he knows.

"Mr. Darcy," I manage. "You look—"

"Dreadful. I know. Lowe has shown me." He touches the bruise and winces. "I look as though I have been in a mill with a prize fighter. I made him take the mirror away. He would not let me keep it."

"You would only have looked at it all day, sir," says Lowe from the door.

"Precisely. It was the most interesting thing in the room." His eyes have not left my face. "It was. Until a moment ago."

Charlotte, behind me, discovers a great interest in the view from the window.

"Mrs. Collins. Good morning. Forgive me, I did not mean to ignore you." He does not look the least bit sorry. "Fitzwilliam, a chair for Mrs. Collins. And one for Miss Bennet, here. No, nearer. Nearer than that."