Chapter Two #2
The sight hit his stomach like a fist. He locked his jaw.
Swallowed twice. Sickness now would render him useless.
She needed him. He had no one else here—no surgeon at hand, no woman in the house with nursing skill except a cook and a kitchen girl occupied upstairs with his sister, no one in the valley he knew well enough to summon in under thirty minutes’ walk.
Six weeks in the house—the staff he brought from Pemberley were the only ones he could rely on, and they were occupied with one patient. Now there were two.
She was conscious. Eyes open, tracking his approach, pupils pinpoints. The fact they were open—alert—was both best and worst. She was alive. She watched him regard the ruin of her leg.
“How long?” His voice warbled on a high cracking note. He tried again. “How long have you been here?”
Her lips were grey. “I do not know.”
The voice was educated, thin with cold, yet beneath the thinness a composure impossible under the circumstances—not with bone exposed, not sitting in one’s own blood without aid. She did not tremble. That did not reassure him. When the body stills, reserves run dry.
He fell to his knees beside her, hands reaching for the leg before himself had caught up.
He stopped them—grasping his left wrist with his right—because the wrong touch would push bone further through skin or open what kept her alive.
Close now, looking fully—the tibia displaced forward, to the side, torn skin gaping.
Flesh swollen tight, dark with blood still flowing, leaving her.
He had nothing. No bandages, no instruments, no knowledge beyond a groom’s broken arm at Pemberley eight years past—a simple fracture with bone intact under skin.
Nothing like this. A wound that could rot and kill in days if cold and blood loss did not finish her first. She watched him with those terrible, focused eyes. Blood still running.
Think. Think, Darcy!
The bleeding was not arterial. If it were, she would be dead. But it did not stop, running unbroken from wound into skirt fabric, frozen earth—loss her body could not afford, and could not arrest.
He needed to stop bleeding, immobilise the leg without touching bone, get her from the cold before it finished what the mere had begun. He needed a surgeon! Nearest town, Bakewell—eight miles on frozen roads. And it would be dark soon.
His coat came off before the calculation concluded. He spread it over her—torso, arms, everything but the leg. The leg needed visibility. The leg needed tending.
“I will bind the wound. I cannot set the bone—a surgeon must do that—but I must stop the bleeding, or it will kill you before help arrives.” He was talking too much. Words rushed out, fast and uncontrolled, the verbal mirror of the tremor he saw in his own hands. He stopped and breathed.
She looked with those eyes. “Then stop it.”
He tore a strip from his waistcoat lining—the fabric splitting raggedly—folded it into a pad thick enough to apply without crushing bone.
His hands shook, making the cloth tremble.
He clenched and released, then pressed the pad against the wound, around the protrusion—not over it—pressing fabric into torn skin where blood ran.
He smelled the blood now—iron, copper, something raw beneath—the scent of flesh exposed to air not meant to touch it.
His stomach heaved. He bore down harder.
Applying pad, pressing cloth into torn skin beside the bone—never on it—bearing down with both hands while his nausea rose and the blood soaked through cloth and a sound escaped her, sharp and raw.
She screamed—not the stifled noises before, but a true scream forced by pressure. It destroyed something within him. A barrier between task and man shattered.
His vision blurred. Her hand left her lap, closed on his forearm—five white fingers digging through his sleeve into muscle, bearing down with the force of a body spending last reserves on a single claim.
Something to hold while pain consumed her.
Reason told him to keep working. Every other part of him—the man, not the solving hands—wanted to stop and take away the sound forever.
He pressed on the wound instead. Her noises grew dense, throttled, stifled behind teeth, all she would not or could not release.
The cloth soaked through. He needed more. Another strip tore from his waistcoat—the lining hanging in ribbons—layered over the first, pressed again. The bleeding slowed—not ceased, but the cloth sufficed, or the cold, or both in tandem, buying minutes the body could not.
He could not set the bone. Pushing it back risked filth in the wound and infection deadlier than cold.
Yet the bone must not be free. Every movement drove it deeper.
He needed rigid splints on either side of the break, bound tightly above and below with clean cloth to immobilise.
He had none. The tools lay in the house.
He was quarter-mile downhill at the water’s edge. A stranger bleeding in his hands.
What he had was himself. The walking stick he carried—an old blackthorn from the previous owner—had dropped when he ran, fifty feet back along the bank. He looked at her, at the distance, at her fingers sinking into his arm.
“I need to fetch the stick. Ten seconds. Do not move.”
Her jaw shivered, and her eyes glazed. “I am not going anywhere, sir.”
He pulled free and sprinted. The stick lay where he dropped it.
Back by her side within three breaths, his hands already working.
He broke the stick over his knee, bound the halves to either side of her shin with what remained of his waistcoat, above and below the break, wrapping as tightly as his cold fingers could manage.
The binding was rough, desperate—the work of a man who did not know what he did, who knew it, but did it anyway—for the alternative was to kneel in snow and watch her die.
“What is your name?”
Her gaze wavered, lost focus, then held on his face. For the first time, their eyes met without wound or blood between them—without fractured bone or mechanical focus on the next task.
She saw him. He saw her. Two people sharing more physical contact in fifteen minutes than many relatives do in a lifetime, yet no shared currency of acquaintance.
“B-Bennet.” Her body quaked with cold. “Elizabeth Bennet.”
The name meant nothing. No family he knew. From the south—the vowels bore no northern tint. A woman with a shattered leg on land he had owned six months, inhabited six weeks. All that mattered was her blood on his hands. His ruined waistcoat around her shin.
“Miss Bennet. I am going to carry you to the house. The distance is perhaps a quarter-mile, uphill. I must not jostle the leg. I will go as carefully as I can.”
“The leg has been vocal today. I expect it will have more to say.”
Something inside him broke—the ice on the mere cracking beneath her, surface giving way to unfathomable depth. The composure. The wry edge, delivered through grey lips with shin bone jutting through stocking. He did not know her. He knelt in her blood. Yet something cracked and would not close.
He gathered her. One arm beneath her knees—careful, hand hovering beneath splint, braced against jolts—the other across her back.
She was lighter than a woman of her stature should be.
Not frail, but reduced—lightness born of insufficient food, a body that spent more than it took.
Her hand moved to the back of his neck, her fingers cold as ice against his skin.
The leg swung as he rose. She clenched her jaw. A small sound escaped, torn away, traveling not through ears but through the hand’s grip, the contact of bodies. Her eyes grew distant, focused gaze hazing, pupils dilating.
“Stay awake, Miss Bennet. Stay awake.”
“I am awake.” A whisper. “Merely calculating whether consciousness is worth the cost.”
He began uphill. Every step a negotiation—fast enough to shield her from cold before blood loss finished her, slow enough to keep the leg still.
Every step catalogued what the house could not offer her.
Upstairs in the south chamber, his sister lay, attended by a kitchen girl.
Below, a cook fully occupied at the range, a valet whose duties did not extend to nursing, Mrs Bannon, who, confronted with a bleeding woman in the hall, would retreat to the scullery and find a pot to polish.
He had himself—and what he had been for six weeks—the man carrying water every morning for the patient already here.
Now a woman bled in his arms, and this house was all he had to give.