Page 42 of You Willfully Misunderstand Me

"I have very nearly died twice this week," he said, with the ghost of that dry humor she loved best in him, "once by pistol and once, I am given to understand, by fever and a festering, and I find both experiences have left me disinclined to postpone anything further that I might yet have the chance to say. Elizabeth, will you…"

"Do not," she said, half laughing and half weeping at once, pressing his hand between both of hers, "do not you dare ask me anything of consequence while you are grey as a Manxfog and cannot sit upright without Mrs. Kewley's assistance. You will ask me properly, sir, when you are well, and I shall give you my answer then, though I will confess to you now, so that you need not spend your convalescence in any suspense over the matter, that my answer is not in serious doubt."

Darcy's eyes, fever-bright and full of something that had not been there in all the long months of their acquaintance; she saw admiration, love, and the particular unguarded hope of a man who has finally permitted himself to believe he might be allowed to keep the thing he wants most, her.

"Then I find," he said softly, "that I am entirely content to wait."

He closed his eyes then, though not, his hand did not loosen from hers. "You will stay," he said, after a moment, and it was not quite a question.

It was a silly request, and she aimed to tell him so. "I will have you know that I have not left this room in two days. I do not know why you imagine I should begin tonight."

"I do not imagine it my darling, but I only find I wish to hear it confirmed from your lips, as often as you will consent to say it."

"Then I shall stay," she said, "... that is until Mrs. Kewley comes to scold me for it, and possibly a little while after that, for I have found her scoldings very easy to disregard when I have set my mind against them."

A ghost of a laugh moved through him, more felt than heard. His breathing had not yet found its ordinary rhythm; the fever had loosened its grip but not surrendered the field entirely,and beneath her palm, where it rested still upon the back of his hand, she could feel the faint unsteady work of it.

"You ought to sleep," she told him, gentler now, the laughter gone out of her voice and something graver come into its place. "You have said what you wished to say. I have heard it, and I am not going anywhere, and there is nothing further tonight that cannot wait for morning."

"It tis’ a reasonable proposal, but I find myself entirely unable to act upon it."

"Why not, sir?” she asked, attempting to sound lighthearted.

"Because I have spent the better part of two days, by your own account, battling a fever from a gunshot wound, and I find I am not yet willing to sleep on the chance of returning there without first satisfying myself that this," his fingers tightened, faintly, around hers, "was real, and will still be real when I wake."

Something in her chest ached at that, tender and sore in equal measure. She had not thought, in all her turning over of his character these past months; his pride, his reserve, the wall of good breeding he carried before him like a shield, to find beneath it a fear so plain and so unguarded as this, that his happiness, once glimpsed, might prove only fever's trick after all.

"Then I will tell you what I told you before," she said, low, "and you may test it against as many wakings as you require, sir, until you are satisfied it does not change with the light. I love you. I loved you before I said it, and I shall go on loving you tomorrow, and the day after, whether you are awake to hear itor not, for I find it is not a thing that appears to require your permission to continue."

His eyes opened again at that, and what she saw in them undid her rather more thoroughly than any declaration of his own could have. "Then I believe," he said, "I may risk the sleeping after all." The slightest of smiles forming on his lips.

"You may. I shall be here when you wake, and cross with you if you do not," she responded gently.

His eyes closed once more, and this time she felt the change in him, the careful, deliberate slackening of a body that had held itself braced, in one fashion or another, for a very long time indeed. His grip on her hand did not loosen, even in sleep, and she did not attempt to free it.

She sat a long while in the candlelight, listening to his breathing settle by degrees into something steadier, watching the fever-flush recede a little further from his face with each quarter hour, and did not move even when her arm had gone stiff with the awkward angle of her position, nor when the candle guttered low enough to want tending.

It was very near dawn before she permitted herself to weep, and even then, only quietly, and only because she had finally judged him sound asleep enough not to hear it.

CHAPTER 22

The word came up from Castletown on a bright, hard morning some three weeks after the fever had broken, the harbor works were finished, the Liverpool Packet had cleared the point without incident, and regular passage to Liverpool would resume imminently.

Elizabeth heard it from Mr. Kewley himself, delivered with particular satisfaction, and she carried the intelligence up to Darcy, who was by now permitted to sit in a chair by the window, though not yet to walk further than the garden gate.

"Well," he said, when she had told him. "So, it is decided for us, after all."

"So it would seem." She said, taking her usual seat, the mending she no longer had any real need to pretend at lying forgotten in her lap. "I confess I had rather hoped the harbor might require another fortnight's repair."

"As had I. Though I own that is poor return for the harbormaster's evident hard work, to wish it undone on our account."

She smiled, but it did not reach the trouble sitting beneath it, and she saw in his face that he had made an attempt at lightness.

"Elizabeth." He said her name now with an ease that had become, these past weeks, entirely natural to them both, though it would want a great deal of explaining to anyone in Hertfordshire who might overhear it. "You are thinking of something, and I know you have not said it. What is on your mind?”

She looked at him, with a serious look, and admitted, "I am thinking that I have spent the last few weeks on this island becoming a version of myself that I do not know how to carry back onto the Packet."

He was silent for a moment, turning the words over with the same careful attention he gave to everything that mattered to him, "Explain it to me," he said. "I find I would rather understand this trouble better.”