Page 148 of Homeless

The physician frowned rather gravely, then turned his attention to the man in the bed who had subsided under her hand and was watching her obsessively with his unfocused eyes, as though she were the only fixed thing in a spinning world

He cleared his throat. “I am afraid I was a bit wrong-footed, Mrs Darcy. I… well, I had been trying to make out the history of his illness, but in such cases as these, the patient is often the one whose intelligence is most needed and yet most difficult to obtain. When was he last ill?”

“Two months ago. He was taken with it in the last week of July, and was a little more than a fortnight in recovering enough ride to Santander.”

Samuels blinked. “Forgive me, Mrs Darcy… Did you say ride? After only a fortnight with no treatment? I presume you mean in a carriage?”

“On the back of a mule. From Burgos to Santander, and for much of it, we were not afforded proper accommodations. We slept under the stars more than once, and thanked God it did not always rain.”

The physician was rubbing his jaw now, his eyes still round with awe. “Well… Mrs Darcy, I no longer wonder at your familiarity with his illness. I wonder that he survived at all.”

“I believe he was too stubborn not to. Sir, please. You say he will survive this fit? Can you be sure of that?”

Samuels cast about him, and, finding a chair nearby, lowered himself to speak to her evenly, across the bed. “If he can keep it down, yes. It is already in his blood, but as you must know, Mrs Darcy, even with treatment, the ague does not lie down quietly. An initial bout survived without the bark leaves the thing rooted deeper. It explains the violence of the return. If you survived it as well, then it may come back for you one day, but possibly not as badly. But your husband, I think, has not seen the last of this illness, nor may he for many years. Mr Darcy would do well to keep a store of medicine laid by at all times.”

Elizabeth almost laughed at the simplicity of that statement. Laid by… How easy it all seemed from a comfortable house in London!

“I will see that he does,” she murmured as she gazed into her husband’s face. The paroxysm was fading now. His eyes drooped, only a slit showing where one had failed to close entirely, and she soothed it closed with her hand. “He will start thrashing soon. You ought to —”

“Now, hold a minute, Mrs Darcy. I will withdraw my objection to a lady nursing in this… situation. But you will take my direction on the physic.”

“I suggest you give it, then,” she said. “How much bark, and in what, and how long since the last —”

“Elizabeth.” Darcy's fingers had turned in hers and gripped, with a sudden startling strength. He was looking at her, and for a moment his eyes cleared, truly cleared, found her and held her. “You came back. You are… you are really here. I was afraid —” The fever dragged at him, his eyes beginning to cross each other already. “I thought you had… the letter — you gave me back the —”

“I know.” She bent close over him, both her hands around his one now, her forehead nearly to his, and did not care who gasped about it or what Samuels thought of her as a wife and caretaker. “I know, my love. I was wrong. I got it all wrong, every part of it. I mean to eat my words and spend the rest of my life recanting them, but not now. Now you are only going to lie still, and take what this good man gives you, and let me help you fight it, exactly as you helped me. Can you hear me, love? You brought me through this. Now it is my turn, and I am not going anywhere, not this time, not ever. I am here. I am staying. Lie still and let me stay.”

His hand was clamped around something soft, and warm, and breathing.

For a long while, all he knew was the comfort of it, with no thought for what he held or how it had got there. He had her body along his, a brace for his chest to roll against and a pillow for his cheek to rest on and a place for his hand to clasp that comfort near, so that it might never leave.

Skin. His hand was directly on skin, not linen. Skin that dimpled when his fingers flexed, and smoothed when his hand shifted. He lay some time in the groggy fascination of it, his mind still given to blackness, dreams and shards of reality coalescing and splitting until he thought… he was fairly certain… he could pick one from the other. At last, he found the part of his mind responsible for opening his eyes.

He had her.

Elizabeth had come to him… yesterday, he was sure it was yesterday. Bowed over him with the ferocity of a lioness and stroked his head in the night and put cool hands on him when he was on fire and held him while he shook. He was shivering still, a fine, constant tremor that ran through him and into her.

And somewhere in the lost hours, his body had done what his fevered mind had wanted past everything and had wrapped itself around her — his chest curved along her back, his knees behind hers, his hand cupped without any decency at all over the soft warmth of her breast, and his face pushed into the fall of her hair at the back of her neck, his beard against her skin, so that he breathed her in with every shallow breath.

It was dark, but for the low red light of the hearth. That was a small mercy — the candles and lanterns were not there to pierce his eyes. The room had stopped its slow, sick turning, and he could think, in a weak and drifting way, could hold a thought for more than a moment before it slid.

She was in his bed, in his arms, and she was real.

He must have made some sound, or moved, or gripped her more firmly, because she stirred. She drank in a breath and turned over in the circle of his arms to face him — and there she was, close in the red dark, her face inches from his, her eyes finding his and going soft.

“There you are,” she whispered.

“I was about to say the same thing.” He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I thought I dreamed you. I have dreamed you so often.”

“Not this time.” She lifted her hand and laid the back of it against his forehead, his cheek, his throat. He let her satisfy herself, too weak and too content to do anything but be handled. “You are cooler. The fit has passed and you are cooler and you are here, you frightful, foolish man, you are still here.”

“How…” He was obliged to clear his throat a little from too much disuse. “How long have you been here?”

“Yesterday afternoon. I was such a fool, Fitzwilliam! Such a fool. I should have been here, should have come straight from the ship with you and never left your side for a moment. Instead, I did the cruelest thing imaginable, and you nearly— you nearly—” She choked on a sob, turned her face into his hand, and he felt it wet.

“Hush,” he managed. “You will make yourself ill, and then who is to nurse the pair of us?”

“Do not tease me! I cannot bear it, not tonight.”