Chapter Three
He opened the door with his shoulder. The hallway beyond was warmer than the slope had been—the kitchen fire at the back of the house had burned since before dawn, and some warmth had reached the front rooms through the flags—but the warmth was insufficient for what she needed.
“Mrs Bannon!”
His voice carried, ringing off the stone and bare walls.
A door opened at the back of the hall—not the kitchen, the scullery—and Mrs Bannon came to it, wiping her hands on her apron with the unhurried air she gave to any summons from her master that had not yet been raised to a manner she deemed warranted.
She saw what he carried. Her hands halted on the apron.
“Sweet merciful—”
“Get Mrs Reeves. Get hot water boiling. Gather every clean cloth you can find. Now, Mrs Bannon!”
She remained still.
“Mrs Bannon!”
“Sir—Miss Darcy is asleep. Nan has just—”
“I know. The chamber at the end of the passage—the old housekeeper’s parlour—is it cleared?”
“It has the loom in it, sir. And the linen press. It has not been a chamber since—”
“Clear it. Now. I am going no further into the house than I must, because I will not have her carried past my sister’s door.
Send Mrs Reeves with hot water. Send Martha—the girl—with blankets.
Tell Norton to ride for the surgeon at Bakewell and say the words compound fracture, exposed bone, blood loss.
Tell him the surgeon must come tonight. Tell him I said so! ”
Mrs Bannon’s face, which had been the still blank of a woman calculating a refusal, changed.
Not softened—that would have been too much of a concession for Mrs Bannon, whose face had not softened in Darcy’s presence these past six weeks.
But the calculation ceased. The refusal withdrew wherever refusals went when Mrs Bannon set them aside.
She turned and sped down the passage, not running but faster than Darcy had seen her move.
He stood in the hall with Miss Bennet in his arms. Her head rested against his shoulder, her face turned to his neck, her breathing shallow against his collarbone.
He could not hold her here indefinitely—the longer he stood, the more blood she lost into the fabric between them.
But he could not carry her past the staircase either, for the stairs led to the first floor where Georgiana slept, and he would not endure a crisis near his sister’s door while Nan read to her with the patient, unhurried voice that was the sole thing restraining Georgiana from another swooning fit.
The old housekeeper’s parlour lay at the far end of the ground-floor passage, beyond the dining room and the little door that led down to the cellar.
He knew the room. He had walked through it in his first week, cataloguing which parts of the house might be of use and which must wait.
It was small—fifteen feet by twelve—with a fireplace on the inner wall and a single window onto the kitchen garden.
It had served as the housekeeper’s sitting room in the previous century, before the housekeepers of Merebank had been absorbed into the kitchen wing and the parlour had been relegated to storage for linens and broken furniture.
A bed-frame rested against the wall beneath the window, serving as a shelf for what Mrs Bannon had not known where else to place.
The bed-frame was how Darcy recalled the room.
Movement came from the far end of the passage—Mrs Bannon’s voice, shrill and quick, followed by Mrs Reeves’s deeper reply from the kitchen, then footsteps on the flags, and the sound of a pot lifted from a hook.
He adjusted his hold on Miss Bennet. Her hand on the back of his neck had gone slack, the ice fingers loosening, and he spoke to her without turning.
“Miss Bennet. Stay with me. A few minutes more.”
“I am with you, Mr Darcy.” A breath of a voice, thinner than on the bank. “I am merely resting my eyes.”
“Do not rest them. Keep them open.”
“They are open. It is the rest of me that becomes uncertain.”
Mrs Reeves emerged from the kitchen passage at a half-run, sleeves pushed above her elbows, cap askew.
A woman of fifty whom Darcy had brought from Pemberley six weeks before—she had been under-cook in Mrs Reynolds’s kitchen for twenty years and agreed to the northern posting because her husband was dead and her daughter Nan was her only remaining responsibility and she was pleased to keep Nan near her.
She took one look at the woman in Darcy’s arms, and her face took on practical competence rather than exclamation.
“The parlour, sir?”
“The parlour. Is Mrs Bannon clearing it?”
“She is, sir. I have water on the range and more heating. Martha is fetching linens. What do you need me to do first?”
“Carry the blankets ahead of me. I need her laid down and wrapped before anything else. The bleeding has slowed but not ceased.”
“At once, sir.” She was past him and down the passage before he finished speaking.
He followed. The passage was narrower than he remembered—or had become narrower because he carried a body that resisted being carried. Miss Bennet’s splinted leg cleared the walls by inches—he had to tilt her, angle her, watch each step carefully for doorframes and uneven flags.
At the parlour door, Mrs Bannon hauled the linen press away from the bed-frame with more force than Darcy had ever seen her apply to any task, and Mrs Reeves was already at the frame, spreading blankets across the thin pallet on the slats.
The loom stood in the corner, shoved aside but not removed—there was no time, and the loom would have to be borne.
The window lacked curtains, and the grey light was flat.
No fire had burned in the grate for months.
The air smelled of dust, cold stone, and the faint mineral edge that seeped into every room of the house from the valley beneath.
Mrs Reeves folded back the blankets, and Darcy laid Miss Bennet upon them.
He forced himself to release her. His arms had braced so long for her weight that, when it was gone, they did not at once remember emptiness.
He straightened. His shirt was dark down the front, and his hands were slick with what she had left upon them.
“I need a fire in this room. Mrs Bannon, can you get one started?”
“I can get one going, sir.”
“Then do. Mrs Reeves, she must be warmed. Her clothing is soaked through.”
“I know, sir. Step outside, please.”
He turned toward the door.
“No.”
The word came thin and torn. Miss Bennet’s hand clutched at the blanket as she tried to shift herself higher against the pillows.
The attempt broke her. Pain went through her so violently that her whole body arched, and a low, raw sound escaped her clenched teeth.
Fresh blood welled beneath her and spread, bright and immediate, over the turned-back blankets.
“Do not move, miss!” Mrs Reeves said, catching her shoulders.
Miss Bennet’s breath came in shallow, broken pulls. Her face had gone white to the lips. Still, her eyes found his.
“My bag,” she whispered.
He stared at her. Just then, the thing meant nothing. The ice, the dark, the labour of getting her out alive, all had made such a trifle beneath notice.
Another spasm seized her. Her fingers knotted in the blanket. Blood marked the linen again. When she spoke this time, the plea was hardly more than air forced through pain.
“Please. You left it on the ice.”
Mrs Reeves looked up sharply. “Sir, go. I will see to her.”
But he did not move at once. She was half senseless with agony, staining the bed under her, and still she spent what little strength remained on that bag.
Whatever lay in it had crossed the lake with her, and nearly gone under with her, and mattered enough now to survive pain that should have driven every other thought from her mind.
“I will fetch it,” he promised.
Something within protested that the woman upon the bed had not left his sight for an hour, and he was unprepared to put her out of sight now. The protest availed nothing. He stepped through the door, pulling it closed behind him, and went back into the dark for what she could not bear to lose.
Martha came down the passage then, arms full of folded sheets and a bundle resembling a winter cloak. She was fourteen, the kitchen girl from the village, hired in early December because Mrs Bannon refused additional work herself. Her face was pale. She had seen the blood on Darcy’s shirt.
“Go in with Mrs Reeves. Help her. Do as she directs.”
“Yes, sir.” She slipped past him into the parlour and he closed the door again.
He stood in the passage. Inside came the low voices of women and the rustle of wet fabric, then Miss Bennet’s voice—thin, controlled, saying something indistinct—and then silence.
The fire had yet to catch. The cold killed faster than the blanket could warm her.
Each second mattered and he could do nothing from the passage.
Above, the reading ceased.
He waited, but Nan did not resume. He heard her voice, faint through the ceiling—the tone, not the words—and Georgiana’s answer, weaker yet clear enough to signal she was awake and alert and likely asking what had occurred. Darcy closed his eyes. He had moments to decide what to do.
He ascended the stairs two at a time. The first-floor corridor was warmer than the ground-floor passage—the south chamber held a good fire and warmth leaked under the door—and at the door he paused, knocking softly before entering.
Georgiana sat up in bed against a stack of pillows, her face towards the window.
She had been lovely as a child and remained so, though illness had altered that beauty—the colour heightened in her cheeks beyond health, eyes brighter than they should be, and her whole person slightly translucent in the winter light.
Nan sat in the chair beside the bed, book closed with thumb marking the place, her face alert and eyes immediately on Darcy and the front of his shirt.
Georgiana saw him and the shirt and parted her lips.
“Fitzwilliam—”
“It is not mine. I am unhurt. There has been an accident at the mere—a traveller, a woman who fell through the ice. Her leg is broken. She is downstairs in the old housekeeper’s parlour and Mrs Reeves and Martha tend her.
Norton has gone for the surgeon at Bakewell.
I did not want you to hear the disturbance and imagine something wrong without explanation. ”
Georgiana’s eyes widened. Her hand gripped the coverlet’s edge. “Who is she?”
“A Miss Bennet. She gave me her name on the bank. I know no more. She travelled alone, seeking a cottage somewhere in the village, probably.”
“Is she—will she—”
“The surgeon will come. She has lost blood, but the splint holds. I will know more when Aldridge has seen her.” He moved closer and took his sister’s hand—careful of its usual morning tenderness, aggravated by the winter.
Her fingers were cool but not icy, the joints beneath his thumb less swollen than the past week.
A small observation he stored. “Dearest, I need you to remain here. You must not come downstairs. Not because I withhold anything—I will tell you all you wish—but because the passage is cold, the parlour crowded, and no place for you in any case. Nan will stay with you. I will come when I can. Just now, I am returning to the place where I found her to retrieve a bag she had been carrying.”
“Of course.” Her voice held. Her gaze held more than he had seen for weeks—the focus of a mind engaged beyond itself. “Fitzwilliam. Go. I am well.”
He squeezed her hand and turned to Nan. “Send word if she needs anything. Anything at all. Do not hesitate.”
“I will, sir.”
He left the chamber. On the landing, hand on the banister, he exhaled.
Georgiana’s colour had been better than in London—whatever the morning cup foretold, he had not imagined it.
The focus in her eyes was the clearest sign—a girl recovering, not fading.
A small mercy from a morning begun with a half-finished cup and having yielded a bleeding woman on the bank.
The first faint trace of progress Merebank had offered in six weeks, and it came on a day when he could not rejoice over it.