Page 146 of Homeless

His sister was crying too hard, or he was slipping too fast; the room was tilting again, the cold coming back up through him in its long shudder, the nausea cresting toward another fit, and her face was blurring, and he lost her.

She got the carriage door open before it had fully stopped and was out and up the steps almost at a run. If she could only reach her room, only get the door shut behind her, she could be sick in private, and fall apart in private, and no one need see the miserable fool the morning had made of her.

She had given him up. She had given up the single most precious thing she would ever hold, had cut him out of herself with her own hand and sent him away, and she had gone this morning to spend what that sacrifice had bought her… and it had bought her nothing. A willing enough man who could not help. A letter to an embassy that would do nothing. A lovely girl in a good hat, very much looking forward to an afternoon drive with a gentleman. She had ruined her own life, and her uncle was no nearer saved, and it had all come out to nothing at all. She was going to be sick with the hatefulness of it, right here on the stairs, if she did not —

“Lizzy?” Her aunt's voice called from the parlour. “Lizzy, is that you?”

She stopped with her hand on the banister and shut her eyes. She could not face her aunt just now. She had not the strength to bear her aunt’s grief as well as her own.

“Lizzy?” her aunt called through the door again. “Lizzy, come, please. There is a caller for you.”

A caller? What a cruel trick! Just when she was least presentable, she had to go and make herself welcoming to… to someone. Who the devil would bother to call on her just now?

She went back down, smoothing her face as she walked. She set her hand to the parlour door and opened it.

Her aunt was sitting very upright on the sofa, and beside her, straight-backed and pale, with her gloves still on and her chin up in a way that did not quite hide that she had been crying, sat Georgiana Darcy.

Elizabeth could only gape stupidly for an instant. Why… why would she have come back? Darcy would have stopped her, would not have let her interfere… would he? Or had he sent her to plead on his behalf?

And then, another horror slid round her heart. Her aunt knew the Darcy name very well. Was even now looking bewildered, but also terribly, heart-breakingly suspicious.

“Elizabeth, this young lady has been waiting above half an hour. I told her she was welcome to call again, but she said she must wait and see you. She is —”

“Georgiana,” Elizabeth murmured, still unblinking.

Georgiana’s chin came up, and her eyes glittered, but she spared Elizabeth no greeting.

Her aunt's hands moved helplessly. “That is what she said. Miss Georgiana Darcy. And she says — Lizzy, she says the most extraordinary thing, she says that you — that you are —” Her aunt could not make herself say it, and looked at Elizabeth with her eyes wide and pleading for it to be nonsense. “She says you are Mrs Darcy! That you are married to her brother, of all men. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley! What could have occasioned —”

Elizabeth put her hand out and found the back of a chair, but she could not manage her voice. She could only stare painfully at Georgiana — at Darcy's eyes in that pale, set face, looking back at her now with a flat, sullen hurt that was almost hatred.

“Lizzy.” Her aunt again, softer now, frightened. “Lizzy, it must be a misunderstanding. You cannot be… how could you possibly be married and I not know of it? Lizzy, say something.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth heard herself say. Her voice came from very far off. “Yes. It is true. I… I am… was. I am sorry, Aunt. So sorry I did not tell you. He only meant to protect me, but I… oh, it is my fault! I was not to fall in love with him, but I did, and now I have ruined —”

“He is dying,” Georgiana broke in.

The words did not seem to belong to the room. They shattered in her ears, cutting and terrible. She had to grab the chair with her other hand. “He what?”

“He is dying,” Georgiana said again, and this time, there was real venom in it. “And for some reason I cannot begin to fathom, when you have done — after you sent that — he is begging for you. He will not stop asking for you. That is why I am here. That is the only reason I am here.”

The floor went out from under her.

She did not faint, quite — she came to herself already halfway down, her vision spotted and unfocused. Her aunt cried out and was rushing to kneel beside her, and Georgiana was up off the sofa with her gloved hands out in alarm despite herself. Elizabeth fought her way back up through the white roaring dark with the one thought hammering.

“No,” she said. “No, he cannot — he cannot be dying, he was — he did not even come, he —” he was going driving in the Park, he was courting that girl, he was sensible, he let me go — “No. No. You are mistaken! There is a mistake.”

“There is no mistake.” Georgiana's hands were on her arm now, helping her to her feet. “He collapsed yesterday. After I brought him your — after I came home. He read it and he — he tried to call for the carriage, he said he was going to you, and then he fell down in the hall and he has been — Miss Bennet, Mrs — Oh, I cannot think what to call you! But he has been out of his senses since, burning, shaking, they cannot —”

“The ague.” Elizabeth's whole body had gone to ice. “It is the ague. The fever from Spain, come back. Padre Ignacio said it would.”

Georgiana stared at her. “Yes, Fitzwilliam said that name. But the physician called it a tertian fever, he said it would come in waves that —”

“Has he had the physician?” Elizabeth had hold of the girl's arm now. “The bark, Georgiana. Tell me he has the bark. Peruvian bark, Jesuit's bark, they will know it — tell me the doctor is giving him the bark, please tell me you got some!”

“Yes!” Georgiana blinked, taken aback as she tugged her arm away. “Yes, the doctor is giving it him, and other medicine besides, to soothe the fever. He vomited the first of the bark, but he has kept some down in the night.”

“Gracias a Dios.” It came out of her without thought; she pressed her hands together and shut her eyes and said it again under her breath, gracias a Dios, gracias a Dios, because there was bark, and that one fact was a rope thrown to a drowning woman.