Page 51 of The Winter of Our Discontent (Pride and Prejudice Variations #1)

FITZWILLIAM DARCY

Dear Georgiana,

Elizabeth is strong, and though she is fevered, she still takes liquid, and so we must have hope. Perhaps tomorrow she will begin to recover. You must not worry.

Some iteration of these exact words had gone out every morning for days. I instructed my sister, but I was really instructing myself— stay strong, stay hopeful, do not worry.

I cannot explain why I was a fixture at my wife’s bedside.

Wilson, who regarded me with scepticism at first, now took my anxious presence as a given.

Only when the chamber pot was required or I needed to eat, wash, and shave, was I anywhere but in that room.

I slept there, in a chair or on the chaise longue.

By the slimmest of margins, we began to detect improvement. By the sixth day in the early afternoon, I was able to read at least. I was deep in Gulliver’s Travels— I could not read anything weightier—when Elizabeth stirred .

“Mr Darcy?” Her voice was small and childlike as if she were confused or awestricken.

“Are you thirsty?” I had become an expert on the placement of pillows, and she looked at me in total bewilderment as I sat her up, positioned her shawl, and lifted a cup of lemonade to her lips.

She made a face.

“Would you rather have some tea?”

“Water,” her voice croaked.

She drank deeply, and I wished she would stop. I might have been good with pillows, but the basin for retching was beyond my capacity. Where was Wilson?

“Where is Wilson?” Elizabeth murmured.

“She has gone to make you a poultice.”

Another face. “What is that smell?” she asked plaintively.

“Burning camphor. Could I—should I open the window, just for a moment?”

“Would you?” She was still looking at me disbelievingly, as she did when she thought I was an angel of judgment.

We both inhaled deeply as a cold breeze scoured the room. I closed the window and looked around guiltily. “Is there anything I can get for you, Elizabeth?”

She stared at me, still suspicious I was a figment of her imagination.

“A letter came for you. Would you like me to bring it?”

She nodded with great dark eyes and held the sealed letter to her breast. I knew it was addressed to the maid and also that it was a letter from her sister Jane.

I am master at Pemberley, and Wilson knew better than to refuse to answer my questions.

Apparently, my wife had been so beleaguered, so alone, she had corresponded through secret means to protect her privacy.

I had been appalled to learn this but too terrified she might not outlive this sickness to indulge my feelings of remorse just then.

Eventually, when she did not break the seal, I began to wonder whether she had the strength to read.

“Would you like me to read it to you?”

The idea seemed to distress her, and she clutched the letter tightly as she quietly replied, “No thank you.”

I did not know why her distrust wounded me so. I had certainly earned it. I had heard our whole history, relived in her vivid and often tormented dreams. With a sigh, I closed my book.

“You must wish for a moment to yourself. I am just there,” I gestured to the open door between our suites, “if you need me.”

On the morning of the ninth day after my return from Manchester—or was it the tenth already?

—no matter, I was again in my wife’s room.

That morning, I was a jumble of excitement.

Wilson was, too, I discovered, when she knocked over her little jar of lavender in an uncharacteristically flustered movement.

Elizabeth looked very well that morning.

Compared to her appearance of a week ago, she looked wonderful.

Yes, she was pale and fragile and so weak her hands shook when she held a teacup.

Her spirits wavered from stoic to piteous to petulant, and at times, she became deeply introspective.

That morning, she had been a little fractious.

She did not want a cap, her plaits were too tight, the sheets were scratchy, the tea tasted like yesterday’s wash water—and did it always rain here in Derbyshire?

Having prepared to put her to rest in the family vault, these fretful complaints could only strike Wilson and me as endearing and hopeful signs of life.

We looked upon our patient with softened eyes as we told her spring would soon come, and she would be out walking around the lake before she could click her fingers.

When Elizabeth was settled, Wilson gave me a meaningful look, and I said, as offhandedly as I could, “My dear, you have a visitor this morning.”

“I saw Mr Yardley only yesterday.”

“This is not Mr Yardley or Mr Hodge or anyone you expect.”

Her bottom lip jutted out ever so slightly, and before she could outright refuse to see anyone, I went to the door where her sister Jane had been standing for close to half an hour.

My wife burst into the most wrenching sobs as her sister flew through the room to the bed where she, too, dissolved into tears.

Even Wilson reached for her handkerchief.

I stood at the window and blinked my own tears back from whence they came.

I did not deserve to participate in this reunion.

I, who kept my wife apart from those she loved for nearly half a year, must see that my only choice was to withdraw silently.

Wilson followed me out of the room, and we went our separate ways.