Page 48 of The Winter of Our Discontent (Pride and Prejudice Variations #1)

My sister was settled, though anxious. She sat picking at her food and glancing at me from time to time.

None of us spoke. Mrs Annesley was silent because I was silent, and I was silent because I knew not what to say to comfort my sister.

And my sister was in the throes of some horrible imaginings by the looks that crossed her face like dark clouds.

Am I to bury my wife? I wondered. Was there to be yet another funeral at Pemberley?

Certainly, people recover from illness, and Mr Yardley was optimistic.

Mrs Darcy’s constitution, he claimed, was that of a hardened naval lieutenant after a blue water tour of fifteen months.

Her constant physical activity could not be for nothing, could it? But still. She had looked so—so ill!

Apparently, Georgiana was not the only one in the throes of some horrible imaginings that morning, and pulling myself back into reality from such reflections, I reckoned with what was required of me.

When I arrived in Manchester, I had not thought beyond seeing my sister settled.

Now, it became clear I must decide what to do.

I cleared my throat and my sister’s eyes lifted uncertainly from her plate.

“Georgiana, I really should go back?—”

“Yes,” she said earnestly, almost pleading with me. “You must go to her. What if they are heating her room too much?”

This time, it was my own eyes that fell to the plate set before me. She recalled, as did I, how ghastly hot my mother’s sickroom was kept. We were both of us overlaying those other deaths we had lived through on top of the mere possibility of my wife not surviving what was likely a severe cold.

“I will make sure the room is properly aired.”

“And you will not let them burn camphor?”

“No. That I will not.” I turned to Mrs Annesley. “I am aware that in our haste to leave Pemberley, there may have been things that were left behind. Send for anything you need, ma’am. I do not know how long you will have to stay, but I trust it will not be long.”

“Will you write to us? I cannot stay here willingly without news.”

“I will write to you every day, dearest.” I dropped a kiss on Georgiana’s forehead before I left the room. So desperate was her concern for Elizabeth, my own risk in returning did not cross my sister’s mind, and I, though aware of it, cared even less.

“Do not spare the horses,” I shouted to my coachman as I came out of the inn, still putting on my gloves.

Of the furious ride back to Pemberley, I recollected nothing of the road or the weather.

I relived my mother’s death, my father’s death, and my grandfather’s death before that.

I pieced together hazy memories of my uncle Lewis de Bourgh’s passing when I was ten, of my friend Hadley’s sister’s death from childbed fever, of Richard’s friend, John Delaney, who died in agony from a sabre wound in the Duomo Valley.

I fell into a most morbid reverie until we neared my home.

Seeing my land from the hillside as we descended the escarpment, I shook off those dark musings and told myself I would find Mrs Darcy much recovered and be heartily ashamed of having terrified myself with my imagination.

But Harrison greeted me solemnly at the door.

The house was silent as a tomb, and I knew then that she was no better.

“How is she faring?”

“Mr Yardley is with her, Mr Darcy.”

As I took the stairs, I saw a hollow-eyed boy hovering in the hall and heard my butler say, “Go back to the kitchen, John. There is nothing to be done.”

Mrs Reynolds stood outside the mistress’ suite, and so I stood there as well. I did not know what to do with my arms, and I paced wretchedly to and fro until Yardley came out of the room with his bag in hand.

“Darcy,” he said to me in a sober greeting.

“Is she no better?”

“I am afraid she is not.”

“What is your opinion?”

He shook his head. “She is feverish. We can only hope it does not progress, or that she does not now suffer pneumonia. There exists such a variety of illnesses of which we know nothing.” He looked at me directly, saying more with his eyes than he could speak aloud.

“She still takes liquids,” he said, striving for a note of hopefulness, “so I do not despair.”

“But?”

“If she stops taking liquids, then she cannot survive.” He turned to Mrs Reynolds. “Sweetened tea, lemonade, and broth, ma’am. Unpalatable and bitter teas will not induce her to drink, and our remedies must be forgotten for now.”

Mrs Reynolds put her handkerchief to her lips, dipped a curtsey, and hurried away.

“Will you not stay? I will have a room readied for you.”

Yardley pulled a note out of his pocket with two fingers in a kind of salute. “The midwife urgently calls for me. There is a difficult delivery in Lambton. I will return when I can. Meanwhile, Mrs Darcy’s maid is a competent nurse. In truth, there is nothing more I can do at present.”

I know not how long I stood in the corridor outside my wife’s room before I went to my own.

The hours dragged by. I ate something but could not taste it.

I did not even pretend to read. I went to the window and looked out at the night, seeing nothing.

I listened for sounds from the other room in a suspended state.

Romney arrived. I took off my coat and waistcoat, but I would not go to bed.

After my valet left me, I went to the adjoining door, unlocked it, and without hesitation opened it to the anteroom that separated our apartments.

I knocked softly on my wife’s door—twice.

“Is there aught you need, Wilson?” I asked when the maid finally opened the door to me.

“No, sir. Mrs Reynolds has brought what the doctor suggested.”

“We will leave this door open. If she worsens, you will wake me, though I do not plan to sleep.”

“Yes, sir.”

I drowsed by the fire in a chair when a slight noise startled me. In an instant I was in Mrs Darcy’s room. My wife was thrashing, and Wilson worked to soothe her.

“What is to be done?” I asked, going to the opposite side of the bed to help restrain my wife .

Wilson only looked at me. After a moment, she said, “She is very tender, sir. Perhaps some warm liniment on her back will soothe her.”

“Go. I will stay with her.”

My wife struggled, trying to free herself from her blankets as though they were chains holding her down.

“Be still,” I said to her over and over, both hands constantly in motion as I tried to keep her from harming herself as she flailed against me.

Wilson arrived, and I thought nothing of helping my wife to sit up, of holding her arms as Wilson untied her nightgown and exposed her back.

The perfume of coconut and rosemary filled the room, and Wilson spoke in a low murmur as she gently eased my wife’s pain.

Eventually, she slept again, and I retreated in a kind of dazed numbness to the chair in my room.

At four in the morning, I awoke again, I suppose from the cold, for my fire had burnt down to embers.

I returned to my wife’s bedside, where I found Wilson in a chair but bent over with her head resting on her arms on the edge of the bed.

She was asleep in this miserable position.

I put my hand on her shoulder to wake her.

“Go to bed, Wilson. I will stay with her.”

“Lily will be here soon. She comes at six, Mr Darcy.”

“You cannot continue at this pace. If I need someone, I shall ring.”

Thus, I found myself again in a sickroom at night.

I sat, I stood, and I paced, only to sit, stand, and pace again.

I was standing at the bedside looking down in puzzlement at this diminutive figure of a woman.

She was a stranger to me in so many ways, yet I knew her almost intimately.

With a start, I realised I had come to care for her very much .

I was in a kind of abstraction in this posture, standing over her, when she startled me.

“Are you an angel?” she croaked in a dry whisper.

I froze in place for a second until I realised my duty. I sat her up and put a cup of water to her lips. She drank and would drink more, I thought, if she had the strength. I put her back down on the pillow, and she looked at me in wonder.

“I thought you would look more like Jane,” she whispered.

By the candlelight on the mantel, I saw the glass-like reflection of her eyes and knew she was in a form of waking dream. She thought I was some sort of spiritual spectre.

“I suppose you are here to judge me,” she whispered.

I was afraid to move. She continued to speak in a mad jumble of words, interspersed with wrenching silence, whimpers of pain, and with her breath short and shallow, as though she was running, panting for air.

“I cannot forgive her!” she wailed, as though confessing her sins to me, a dark angel hovered over her in her agony.

“Oh Lydia! You stupid child!” And then, “No, Papa, please, please do not make me!” She reached for my hand with both of hers and begged me in a desperate, pathetic whisper, “Send me away, Papa! Do not force him to do this! Do not let him do it!” She collapsed back into her bed, and I was about to pace to the window in abject misery when she bolted upright and threw off her covers.

With surprising strength, she fought me. “I am going. I have saved some money—let me go! Papa, I will not let you do this to me! Why will he not listen to me? Why will Mr Darcy not listen to me?”

“Mrs Darcy,” I said in as soothing a voice as possible, given that we were wrestling against one another and the hair on the back of my neck stood prickled in fear .

“I am not Mrs Darcy!” she wailed. “No one calls me Elizabeth here! Only his sister, and if not for her—” She made a tremendous surge to leave the bed, and I restrained her only by brute force, my left knee on the bed, both arms strapped against her heaving torso.

“I am Elizabeth Bennet.” Her voice was now hoarse from speaking, and she began to weaken. She looked up at me with haunted eyes, and asked, “Am I not?”

“Elizabeth.” I spoke her given name for the first time. She slumped against me in exhaustion. “You should rest now, Elizabeth,” I told her.

I stood at the bedside, my hands shaking and my knees strangely weak. My wife was spent, yet she was still so restless. Her head turned from side to side on the pillow. Lily knocked timidly and came into the room.

“Go and fetch Wilson,” I growled. This was no place for a timid girl of eighteen.