Page 149 of Homeless

“I can think of no better time.” He was too weak to reprove her as she deserved, too weak to do anything at all but lie in the dark and hold her. “I shall make you pay for it, though. Be warned. I mean to be a very great deal of trouble, and to make you nurse me most cruelly, for weeks — months, perhaps — before I am well enough to forgive you properly. Now you will never be let off.”

Her chest broke with half a sob and half a laugh. “You will have no luck trying to frighten me away, if that is your threat. None at all. I have nowhere else I mean to be.”

“I knew you could not resist a challenge,” he murmured.

She caught his hand and clasped both to her heart. He caressed her fingers a little, drowsily, as his eyes fought to drift closed again. But then his thumb crossed something hard and cold, and he opened his eyes once more.

“That is…” He picked her hand up, out of the shell of the blankets and into the firelight, to be sure of it, turning her hand with his clumsy fingers. The pinchbeck ring. On her hand again, where it belonged. “You are wearing it.”

“I am. Georgiana told me they had to pry it out of your fist when you fell. That you would not let go of it, even senseless, even carried up the stairs — that it took two of them to open your hand.” She turned her fingers so the little ring caught the red light. “So I put it back on. And I will tell you now, Fitzwilliam Darcy, that you shall never get it off me again. You may try. You will not succeed.”

“I shall buy you a better one,” he said it drowsily into her hair. “My wife ought to have a gold ring with a stone in it.”

“You shall do no such thing, because your wife does not want a better one. I want this one. It has been on my hand through every dreadful and every wonderful thing that has happened to me since you first put it there, and it is worth more than anything you could buy in all of London. This one, or none.”

“This one, then,” he sighed, letting his eyes close as his mouth pressed against her brow. “This one, always.”

He was drowsy now, the little strength the clear hour had given him running out, the dark and the warmth and the nearness of her pulling him down toward sleep. He gathered her closer, or tried to, his arm heavy and weak over her.

For a few seconds though, he clawed his way back. Back, long enough to know what he must. “Elizabeth,” he murmured, “are you sure this time? Truly sure? For I warn you, if you mean to change your mind again, I shall have to marry you a second time, properly, in a church, in daylight, with your name read out three Sundays running, so that you cannot unwrite it with a letter. I am too tired to do it this week. But I shall. Do not think the fever has made me forget.”

She leaned in and kissed his eyes closed, one and then the other, softly, and he felt her mouth curve against his skin.

“There is no need to marry me again,” she whispered. “My name is Mrs Darcy. It has been Mrs Darcy since June, and it will be Mrs Darcy until I die, and I will thank you, sir, to remember it.” She settled down against him, her head beneath his chin, the ring hand over his heart. “Now go to sleep. I am not going anywhere. Go to sleep, my love, and let me be the one who comforts you for a change.”

“Good.” A long breath left him, and by the time he had got to the bottom of it, he was asleep.

LX

Not Quite Dead

He was propped up on a bank of pillows, weak as a newborn lamb and perfectly, absurdly content. He lay and looked at the two women in his room and thought that a man could do a great deal worse than to be half dead in such company.

Georgiana sat in the window with a book, reading to him — some sort of travel account that had, more than once, made him roll his eyes and Elizabeth sputter aloud with cries of “Falsehoods, I say! I never saw a venta with a glass mirror and a tub for a bath, and you cannot persuade me that the carter did not raise his price at least twice on the journey.” It had become more of a comedic endeavour than any sort of improving account, and twice, Georgiana had been obliged to stop reading and dry her eyes from laughing at Elizabeth’s outbursts.

Elizabeth had her chair drawn close to the bed, holding his hand in both of hers. Every little while, she would lift her free hand and lay it against his forehead, or smooth the hair back from it, or trace some idle tender line along his knuckles — small, unthinking touches that she made while listening to Georgiana, as though her hands could not be near him and be still. He would have liked to hold her, to lean his weight against her and rest his cheek on the top of her head, but that was too great an intimacy with his sister in the room. She had been in the bed, these last nights, when the room was dark and empty of everyone but the two of them. But by day, she kept to the chair so that the new Mrs Darcy might not scandalise the house.

The physician had come that morning, and gone, and left behind him the first unqualified good word Darcy had had of anyone. He would do. The gentleman would certainly come through this bout; the bark had taken hold, the fits were weakening, and barring some fresh misfortune, Mr Darcy would mend. He would want careful nursing and a long convalescence, which Darcy was content to accept. He had, he informed Samuels gravely, a nurse who would not countenance him dying, as she had already cheated him out of Last Rites on two occasions and had every intention of making him repay her for the trouble.

He was watching Elizabeth's face — she had that odd little downward tilt of concentration she wore when she was listening and thinking at once, and he had spent a good part of the last several days simply looking at it, savouring her — when there was a knock.

Georgiana stopped reading and looked up. “Come,” Darcy summoned.

Jeffries put his head in. “Excuse me, sir. There is a gentleman below — one of your solicitors, sir, Mr Yates from Yates and Corbin. He is asking most particularly to see you. I would have sent him off, sir, you not being fit for business, only he was uncommonly insistent, and he said…” Jeffries hesitated.

“Yes?”

“He said it was a matter touching Pemberley, sir. Said it would not keep.”

Darcy shut his eyes briefly.

Of course. No, it would not keep. Michaelmas was — he had lost count of the days, but it was close, it was very close. It was already Monday, and this would be the formal business of the end of it, the papers a man signed to hand his family's seat over to strangers, the decent legal undressing of three hundred years. Yates would have brought it himself out of long service and old kindness, to spare him a stranger's face at such a moment. Darcy had known it was coming, and had been too ill to grieve it properly. He supposed he must rouse himself now and sign whatever wanted signing and be done.

“Send him up,” he said. “Let us have it over.”

Elizabeth's hand tightened on his. “You are not strong enough for business, Fitzwilliam.”

“It is not the sort of business that wants strength. Only a pen, and a steady enough hand to make my mark, and I can manage that much lying down.” He gave her the ghost of a smile. “It is only the last of it, Elizabeth. The formalities. Let me sign the thing and then we need never speak of it again.”