Page 41 of You Willfully Misunderstand Me

"I am unhurt. I am entirely unhurt!" She reached him without any memory of crossing the yard, her hands hovering over him, uncertain where they might land without doing harm, and finally settling, helpless, at his uninjured arm. "What have they done to you?" she cried, feeling both relieved and terrified at the state of him.

"You need not worry,” he started, trying to impress with a small smile. “I assure you, they did less than they intended." A ghost of that dry humor she had come, these past days, to know as particularly his own. "I believe I have disappointed them considerably."

"He fought like the devil himself," said Duncan, with the frank admiration of a man assessing another man's work. "Two of them will not sit easy for a fortnight, and the other pair ran when they heard us coming through the lane; thought there was a garrison upon them, likely, the noise Rab makes."

"And the fourth?" Elizabeth asked, though some part of her did not wish to know the answer.

"Took a ball in the leg for his trouble, from Mr. Darcy's own pistol, and was in no state to run anywhere," Fergus said grimly. "He's trussed in the cottage now, and will answer for himself once we've sent for the magistrate. He may tell us who sent him, or he may not, but he'll tell someone, in time."

Darcy swayed, and Elizabeth's grip on his arm tightened involuntarily, as though her slight strength might actually be sufficient to hold a man of his size upright.

"You are not at all unhurt," she said, low, for him alone. "You are grey as a ghost, sir, and bleeding, and I would very much like you to sit down before you fall down and prove me a liar for having just told these good people you were living."

"A fair point, madam,” he took a deep breath, and added, “Well made." And then, to the general astonishment of the yard, and rather to his own as well, Fitzwilliam Darcy's legs simply ceased to support him, and it was only Duncan's quick arm and Elizabeth's smaller one, wholly inadequate to the task butoffered without hesitation, that kept him from measuring his length upon the cold Isle of Mann ground.

CHAPTER 21

The fever had come upon Mr. Darcy during the second night of his recovery. Mrs. Kewley had pronounced it no more than she had feared and rather less than she had dreaded, a wound gone hot and angry. Butmore often than notwas cold comfort to a woman keeping vigil at three in the morning, watching a man's face turn from ash to crimson and back again by the light of a single guttering candle.

Elizabeth had not left the room in two days, save when propriety and Mrs. Kewley's considerable will had combined to force her out for an hour's sleep she had not taken. She told herself it was only that no one else could be spared, the Kewleys had the cottage to keep, and the surgeon could not be persuaded to remain longer than his rounds allowed, but she knew, somewhere beneath the telling, that this was not the whole truth, and had not been the whole truth for some time now.

The candle burned low. Outside, the wind came up off the sea in long, restless gusts, rattling the small window, similar to the one she herself had once made so undignified an exit, and she found some grim humor in that, even now.

Mr. Darcy had not been lucid since the surgeon's visit that afternoon. The fever had climbed with the dark, as fevers were wont to do, and his breathing had grown rougher, and twice he had spoken words she could not make sense of; names, perhaps, or fragments of some conversation held only in the country of his own delirium. She had held his hand through both, more for her own steadying than his, though she told herself otherwise.

"You must not," she said now, very low, laying the cloth once more against his brow, "you must not do this. You must not leave things so unresolved between us, sir, for I find I am not at all willing to spend the remainder of my life wondering what you would say to me after all of this is done, and never having the satisfaction of an answer."

He did not stir, and she had not expected him to. It had become, these past hours, less a conversation than a kind of prayer, words offered into a silence, asking the Lord to listen and answer her pleas.

"I have behaved very badly toward you," she went on, her voice unsteady, "from the very first. I was determined to think ill of you, and I searched for evidence of it with a diligence I might have better spent elsewhere, and when you gave me every reason to think otherwise, I did not credit it, because it was easier to be right than to be honest." She pressed the cloth again, wrung it, replaced it. "You would tell me, I think, that this is scarcely a fit subject for the sickroom. You would be correct. I find I do not signify that at present."

The wind gusted harder. Somewhere below, she heard Mrs. Kewley moving at the opposite side of the house, banking the kitchen fire for the night, and the ordinary domestic soundof it seemed, absurdly, to loosen something in her chest that had been wound tight for two days.

"I love you," Elizabeth said, and having said it once, low and fearful, into a room she believed held no one to hear it but herself, found that the words, now lost, would not be recalled. "I have loved you, I think, since I left Kent I think, though I was too proud and too foolish to name it so at the time, and I have gone on loving you through every mile of this dreadful business, and I did not think, I did not intend, to tell you so under these circumstances, or perhaps any circumstances at all, for I had resolved that if you recovered I should say nothing of it and allow you to make your own choice unburdened by mine. But you are not well, sir, and I find that resolutions made in fear are very poor resolutions indeed, and so I am telling you now, when perhaps it does not matter, because I could not bear the alternative, that you should go from this world, or even only from this room into a fever you do not return from as yourself, without ever knowing that you were loved. That youareloved. Entirely, and against every design I had for my own heart, which apparently consulted no one before disposing of itself so completely."

Her voice broke upon the last words, and she pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth, as though she might physically hold back what had already been said.

It was several moments before she registered the change in his breathing; for, it had gone quieter and steadier. And beneath her other hand, still resting over his, she felt his fingers move, a deliberate, weak, unmistakable pressure, closing around her own.

She went very still, "Elizabeth." His voice was barely more than breath, cracked with two days' silence and fever both,but it washisvoice, present in a way it had not been present in hours, and her heart seemed to stop entirely before starting again at twice its former pace.

"Mr. Darcy?" She leaned forward, searching his face in the candlelight, and found his eyes open, dark and fever-bright butaware, fixed upon her with an intensity that stole what remained of her composure. "You are awake. Oh, thank God, you are awake! How long have you? …Oh! How much did you…?"

"Enough," he said, though his hand in hers trembled with the weakness of it, there was something in his face she had never before seen there so plainly, not the guarded reserve of Netherfield, nor the wounded pride of Hunsford, but something unguarded and entirely happy. "Enough to wonder whether I have finally caught a fever severe enough to dream exactly what I have most wished to hear, and whether I shall wake in a moment to find it was never said at all."

"You are not dreaming." Her voice shook. "Though I own I had rather hoped, when I said it, that you were entirely insensible and would never know I had said it at all."

"Then I am grateful for the deficiencies of my own constitution," he said, "for I do not think I have wanted anything in my life so much as to hear you say it again, now, knowing that I am awake to receive it."

Elizabeth looked at him, exhaustion still heavy in his face, at the fever that had not yet fully broken, at the hand that held hers with what strength he had left to give it, and found that whatever careful, guarded thing she had meant to preserve of herself, some reasonable reserve to be produced again once he was well and the danger past, had gone entirely beyond recall.

"I love you," she said again, steadier this time, and without a single word of qualification to soften it. "I said I should not tell you so unless you were well enough to choose it freely, and here you are, sir, contradicting me by the mere act of waking at the worst possible moment for my dignity."

Something moved across his face that was not quite a laugh, he had not the strength for laughing, but was its nearest relation, warm and unguarded and touched, too, with something like wonder.

"Elizabeth," he said again, as though the name itself were an answer he had been rehearsing in whatever country fever had carried him through, "I have loved you since before I well understood what danger I was in from doing so, and I have gone on loving you through every refusal and every reproof you have ever seen fit to give me, richly deserved as most of them were, and I had resolved, very much as you resolved, to say nothing further of it unless I could be certain of not distressing you by the saying. I find I have no similar reserves of restraint remaining to me tonight."

"You are unwell. You should not be speaking at all, let alone…"