Page 7 of Elizabeth’s Refuge (Mr. Underwood’s Elizabeth & Darcy Stories #16)

For a moment Darcy could not say anything when he stepped into the room and saw Elizabeth smilingly seated up, her hair lit like a halo by the last rays of the dying sunlight.

His breath caught, and she looked at him and smiled, and there was something in her eyes that made Darcy think that Elizabeth knew how he saw her when he looked at her, and that she liked it.

He swallowed, and he walked forward.

She stretched her delicate hands out to him. “Mr. Darcy. I must thank you again, and again, and again.”

Her voice was rough and had a nasal burr. But it was also strong.

“No thanks. No thanks are needed.” Darcy took and kissed her hand and then pulled the chair that he’d been sitting in to care for her close again and looked at her closely.

She looked clean and neat now, and the scent of sickness that had been in the room for the past days only lingered at the edges.

“You had Becky to dress me, and not in my own clothes. I at least must thank you for that .” Elizabeth winked at the maid. “I should not say this in front of her, but she is quite capable and determined.”

The lady’s maid blushed when Darcy looked at her and looked down and mumbled something.

Elizabeth laughed and that sound made Darcy’s heart soar. “I forget that we are only to speak freely with each other when the master is not present. Propriety and decorum in front of the servants.”

Darcy peered at Elizabeth carefully and studied her.

She was pale now rather than flushed. But while she looked somewhat thinner than she had when she arrived before her fever, there was a clearness to her skin that was different from the dried, almost parchment tone of her skin in the depths of her illness.

The fear that had entered his heart the moment he saw her collapse in a faint in his drawing room now at last left.

Elizabeth, he hoped, would not too long from now be recovered fully in health.

“Becky, I must have a few words with Mrs. Benoit alone. Might you stand in the corridor, and I will leave the door unlocked, enter again in two minutes, and I think that shall be enough to ensure some propriety is observed.”

“Yes, sir.” The woman bobbed her head and stepped outside.

The room was overly warm; the fire had been kept high to ensure the invalid was not bothered with a draft from the window.

Darcy could not keep from remembering how he’d kept company with Elizabeth during her thrashing fever. He stared for a moment at her hand, lying white and small on the coverlet. He wanted to grip it again, like he’d dared to when she’d called his name during her illness.

But now she was not in a dream, and he now was well rested, not with his judgement and sense of normality drained by two nights of fear and waiting for the doctor, and hanging on every change of Elizabeth’s breathing or complexion to determine how she fared.

This was now a normal evening in a normal room where he was attending a gentlewoman who he respected in the highest way a man could respect a woman. He must behave himself.

“The news. I presume they hunt me for his murder.”

“Lord Lachglass is not dead, nor permanently injured beyond a scar on his forehead and the likelihood that his nose will heal bent.”

Elizabeth’s eyes wavered from side to side, and her head tilted confusedly, as though the notion of him yet living completely shocked her. “But… I know I could not tell… but I had convinced myself.”

Darcy touched her soft arm covered by the pretty yellow wool dress Becky had adjusted to fit her. “Does it disappoint you to not be a murderess?”

“A little, perhaps?” She laughed weakly, but shook her head. “Alive. And Mr. Blight?”

“A bribed servant claims he walks around with a bandage around his face, and has eaten only soup for the past days, but otherwise is well.”

Elizabeth nibbled adorably on one of her knuckles. “Truly, so easily resolved. Not dead. Almost as though all was a bad dream.”

“No.” Darcy shook his head. “I am afraid matters are not over yet. He wants revenge. He has men throughout the city asking for you. I sent a letter to your aunt and uncle through means that I am certain cannot be tracked that you were with friends, to relieve their worry, once I learned that Lord Lachglass was yet alive. But until you are healthy, I think we should refrain from going to them.”

“What can he do to me at this point?”

Darcy could imagine many things a vengeful and vicious man could do to Elizabeth.

At present he had asked his man of business to hire his own investigators to look into Lord Lachglass’s affairs, political, business and otherwise.

There were enough rumors around Lord Lechery that it would not surprise Darcy at all if he could shake from the trees some proof of serious wrong action to hang over the aristocrat’s head, even if Darcy understood the privileges of titled gentlemen well enough to know that he would never see Lachglass hung, as he ought to be.

Or have his head chopped off if he insisted, as he no doubt would, on the aristocratic right to not be executed like a commoner. Darcy’s thirst for vengeance upon the man who imposed himself on Elizabeth would be satisfied by a chopped off head entirely as well as by a hanging.

Darcy feared what Lord Lachglass might attempt to do to Elizabeth if he knew where she was.

She still waited for a reply, and he did not want to scare her with the imaginations that haunted his mind: Assassins, frivolous accusations, kidnapping — especially kidnapping.

Darcy shrugged. “I do not know, but I would prefer not to find out before his temper has had a chance to cool.”

“I still want to add to your note to my Aunt and Uncle one of my own.”

Becky knocked on the door, and Darcy called for her to come in.

With a bob of her head, the servant walked to the far side of the room and pulled a dainty chair next to the window, so they could pretend she could not hear their conversation if they spoke quietly.

She settled on her lap some blue piece work, and with a barely audible clicking of her needles against each other, she became, for Darcy at least, almost part of the furniture.

Except he was very aware that she still had ears.

“Ah, Mrs. Benoit,” Darcy began, unsure and awkward suddenly, and needing to use the false name to both remind himself not to call her either Miss Bennet, or his dear, sweet, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth laughed, “I confessed only a half hour past to Becky there that I have no memory of my marriage — now do not feel you need to answer a word, Becky. I know how stern Mr. Darcy is. I’d not break propriety in the slightest if I served him, which fortunately I do not.”

“You do not want to serve me?” Darcy replied, with an amused voice.

“No, not at all. I have had enough of service for a life. And if it comes to it, that I shall enter service again, I like you far too much to lose the right to tweak your nose — as a metaphor — whenever the urge comes to take me.”

Darcy grinned, and he replied with his straightest face, “I am much too respectable a gentleman for my nose to ever be tweaked.”

“A pity.” Mirth played around the edge of her pale lips. “I do dearly love to tweak noses.” Then she flushed. “Ah, I have perhaps done enough business with noses of late though.”

Darcy winced. “So I have heard. But precisely how did you cause that…” He glanced again at Becky.

It really was inconvenient both maintaining propriety and not speaking anything in front of the servants.

He did trust Becky, and he wanted to find a place for the woman in his house, as it was the proper thing to do for the daughter of a woman his mother had remembered in her will.

He would not have placed her in the position of being in charge of Elizabeth’s care if he had not trusted her, and known who her people were.

And for that matter, they had both known each other as children, though the separation between a gentleman and a person from the lower orders had already been there.

Despite that, discretion in front of servants had been drilled into Darcy’s mind by his father and mother.

It was always a simple notion: Never trust one who must earn a day’s wage with information of true importance.

There were ample stories of men betrayed in some important way by a servant.

Mr. Darcy always maintained a distant but courteous manner with his servants, even maintaining his dignity around those such as Mrs. Reynolds who had helped to raise him as a child, and who was related to the family.

Elizabeth’s convivial manner with Becky felt strange to Darcy to watch.

Once he would have seen it as a sign of her poor breeding — in a way he still thought that, but the insult was now turned around and pointed towards himself: Elizabeth did not have an overly rarified breeding and an overly refined sense of her own self-importance.

Both features of Elizabeth that showed her superiority.

“Mr. Darcy,” Elizabeth said archly, “we must have some conversation. Only a little may do — you were quite verbose when it was only the two of us. As for what I did to the nose of that personification of at least two of the seven sins — though he certainly does not personify sloth, so he cannot manage for all seven — I used my head, like every clever and sensible young woman ought.”

“So that’s how your forehead was bruised.

” Darcy unconsciously and unstoppably brushed his fingers over where the remaining hint of damaged skin had been disguised by an excellent application of some cream by Becky.

The covering made the tone of the skin on her bruised forehead nearly match the rest of her skin.

Darcy blushed and drew away his hand. He looked at Becky again, who studiously studied her knitting. The needles clicked against each other.

It appeared he did need a chaperone, and not only to maintain a thin pretense of Elizabeth’s respectability.