Page 92 of Homeless

Ignacio followed the direction of her eyes. “He is resting. Let him rest, Señora.”

She moved the little table by the window where the light was better, turned it so she could see the bed, and she began to work. It was extraordinary, how the work made her feel a little more like herself, gave her mind the diversion it needed to cease the exhausting cycle of worry. Translating the priest's blunt, earnest Spanish into the smooth, deferential, faintly steely English that would command respect was a thing she had done a hundred times at her uncle's elbow. She could do it without much concentration, which was well, for she had only a little to spare.

The undersigned begs leave to represent to Captain White…

She kept glancing up to be sure that Darcy was still sleeping, still breathing without the feverish tossing, and each time it was still true. His breathing had actually gone deeper and slower, and it was losing that reedy snag that had frightened her for days. The paroxysm she had braced for at midday had not come, or had come so faintly she had missed it.

Once, she looked up to find his eyes on her. He must have been watching for a minute or more, and he smiled when she saw him. “Good afternoon, Mrs Darcy.”

She chuckled a little, then rose to sit beside him on the bed. She brushed the hair off his forehead with her fingertips. “I told you not to call me that,” she whispered.

“Right. I will try to remember that, Señora Darcy.” His eyes closed, but the faint smile remained. A moment later, his face was slack once more, and he had gone under again.

She stayed there, her hand testing his brow. Still hot, but not as hot as yesterday. Perhaps Ignacio’s prayers had not gone unheard. Perhaps Darcy would see Santander, and Pemberley again, after all.

“He is better today,” she said, when Ignacio came to collect the first of the fair-copied letters. “You see it? He is cooler. He has slept properly, and kept the broth, and he is quieter. The worst of it is passing. Is it not?”

Ignacio crossed to the bed. He put the back of his hand to Darcy's face, to his throat, and stood a moment. Elizabeth watched his face and waited for it to give her the reassurance she was craving.

It did not.

“He is cooler now,” the priest said. “This is good. Rest is good. Broth is good.” He straightened. “But I have seen a fever be kind in the afternoon and cruel again by dark. It goes and it comes. It lets a man rise up far enough to be glad, and those who love him grow easy, and then —” he made a small gesture, a hand turning over. “I do not say it will. I say only do not put the whole of your heart on one good afternoon. I have seen good afternoons before.”

Her face fell, and her heart with it. “You are very bracing, Padre. One might almost think you had no faith.”

“Faith costs more than fear, when it is disappointed. Fear, you are braced for. Faith, you are not.” He gathered the letter she had written. “Thank you. The captain will be ashamed of himself and will send the flour.”

“You have not yet read it. It may contain little more than fluff and nonsense.”

He shook his head. “Not by your hand. You have a gift for making men do right against their inclination.” He looked from the letter to her, and to Darcy, and back. “It is a useful gift in a wife.”

He left her with the pen and the papers, and Elizabeth turned back to the bed, where Darcy slept on. She tried to heed the priest's caution and could not, quite, because he was better, she could see that he was better, and after a week at the floor of the world, a person had to be allowed to hope for one afternoon.

She bent back to the letters. She wrote. Every few minutes, she looked up, and he was still breathing slow and deep in the good light, and she let herself, against all counsel, begin to believe that they were through the worst of it.

It came for him in the dark, the way the priest had said it would, and it came worse than anything the first days had taught her to fear, because this time she had let herself believe.

She woke with a start. When had she fallen asleep? She had meant only to rest her eyes — she had been so easy by evening, so lulled by the long good afternoon, that she had let herself lie down beside him, her hand resting over his beating heart, and her guard, for the first time in a week, all the way down.

The bed frame was knocking, a hard, arrhythmic banging against the wall that, for only an instant, recalled another room, a warmer room in Vitoria. Before the terror, when there was only heat and forbidden desire between them. Now, the heat was an inferno, and his body the only thing being consumed. His teeth were clattering like iron hooves over cobblestones. His breath was sawing, and the whole great length of his frame shook the bed on its legs.

She was across the room before she was properly awake. She had the door open, shouting, “Padre! ¡Ven rápido, me temo que se está muriendo!”

She never waited to find out if the padre heard her. He often burned candles at midnight in the church, and why would he hover over one sick Englishman? Darcy had been better this afternoon!

She raced back to the bed, her hands sprawling over his quaking form. He was rigid and shuddering both at once, which should not have been possible, his jaw clamped and juddering, his hands fisted in the blanket she had shared with him only moments ago. He was cold to look at and burning to touch, worse than before, hotter than her hand could easily bear, the fever come back up through him like a tide that had only gone out to gather itself.

“No! No, no — Fitzwilliam!” She dragged the blanket up over him and reached for the others, the ones she had folded away that afternoon in her foolish certainty that he would not need them, and could not find them fast enough. She threw what she had over him and then did the thing that worked, the only thing, climbed up onto his chest and clung to his shaking body. She put her lips on his brow and held him, held the shuddering down with the whole of her weight, and felt his teeth knock and his frame heave and his heat pour into her.

She murmured at him, nonsense, I have you, I have you, be still, I have you, the way she had for a week, except that before, she had half believed it, and now she did not. Because she had been reckless enough to trust to faith, and been made a fool of, and the fear she had put aside that afternoon had come back for her with interest.

The cold hour broke, at last, into the hot one, and that was worse.

He stopped shaking and went taut and began to fight her. Fought the blankets, fought her arms, lurched away from her and threw the covers off with a strength she had not known was still in him, muttering, then talking, then — she had thought she was past being frightened by his voice and she was not — crying out.

In a voice that was at once perfectly clear and terribly abstract, he shot half up with his eyes open, seeing nothing, “Where is she?”

She strained at his flailing hands, trying not to let him hit her and yet let him find her. She could not say for whom he searched. His sister, perhaps. She had heard him call for his mother once. Occasionally, he had said her name… more than occasionally… but sometimes, he seemed to be searching for someone else altogether. Someone he had loved intimately and lost, she knew not how, or what woman had gone so deeply into the heart of Fitzwilliam Darcy that he would sob for her in his nightmares. When he had been like this before, she had been able to comfort him, to placate the terror in his mind with her touch, with the feel of her hair and her body under his hands, and he would imagine that whoever he sought was her, and be soothed.