Chapter Four #2
“Eight weeks before you can leave the bed, at earliest. Twelve more likely before you can be moved, and perhaps four or five months before you can walk. I am afraid it will never be as strong as it once was, even in the best if circumstances. And you must not bear weight on that leg until I say.”
Eight weeks at least. The number fell into the fog, enormous and incomprehensible. Eight weeks confined. In this bed. In this house. Unable to walk, leave, reach the bag, or Jane, or safety. The thing she fled did not cease because she had stopped.
Aldridge gave his remaining instructions while washing his hands. A brown bottle of laudanum was set on the table beside her. Then he repacked his case and paused, as though remembering one task still unfinished.
“Mr Darcy tells me his sister is no worse than last week. I will look in on her briefly before I go. I do not wish to tire you more, Miss Bennet, but if you need anything before I leave, say it now. I shall not stay beyond half an hour.”
His sister? Mr Darcy had a sister here? A sister Aldridge attended. A sister upstairs unwell while the morning, until now, had belonged elsewhere.
“No. Thank you, Mr Aldridge. I need nothing.”
Aldridge inclined his head and withdrew. Mr Darcy was still at the bedside when the door closed.
She lay in the wreckage of the last half-hour, breathing, the pain vast but no longer impossible, the kitchen garden beyond the narrow window. She heard Aldridge’s footsteps retreat down the passage, then climb a staircase beyond the wall. She had arrived in a house already a sickroom.
That thought arrived slowly, each implication settling into place.
The Mr Darcy who had carried her from the mere—whose hands she recalled—was not alone here.
He had a sister, ill, presumably the reason he was at Merebank this winter, for men of Mr Darcy’s sort did not spend January in Derbyshire stone houses for scenery’s sake.
He had come for the waters. Someone had told him about the mere’s cure.
He brought his sister here for it. The pallet, blankets, hot water, linen—all came from hands well versed in such ministrations.
The cook was ready. The maid was ready. The master of the house was ready because he had lived in a state of prepared response.
She had fallen into a household already expended on a patient. She heard movement in the hallway—the chair creaked as a man rose, floorboards giving beneath his weight.
“Mr… Darcy?”
He stood across the room now, not gone, only driven back from the bed at last. Tall, white-faced, one shoulder disordered where she had clutched at him, he looked as though the act of remaining upright demanded all his composure.
He had had her screams in his ear, her face buried against his chest, her hands raking his shoulder while the bone was forced back into place.
He looked, absurdly and unmistakably, as if he might be sick.
“Yes, Miss Bennet?”
“I need— need to send word to my sister. Jane Marsden. Her husband—Blackthorn Cottage, near the village. Can you write it?”
He crossed to a small writing table against the wall. Drawers opened, and he searched the unfamiliar room for paper and ink and found both.
She struggled to compose the message. The words would not align.
She grasped the shape—that she was injured, here, under Mr Darcy’s care, the surgeon forbidding movement, Jane should come—but the words slid sideways, pain intervening, and she had to begin twice before sentences stayed long enough to be spoken.
Silence, then the scratch of the pen, then his voice, careful and neutral.
“That is all?”
“That is all.”
It was not all. But all she could hold at once. All she was willing to commit to paper that would travel a road she did not control. The reasons for these limits were reasons she could not examine—not now, not with the leg and fog and the laudanum beside her like a dare she would not accept.
He folded the letter and paused at the door.
“Miss Bennet. Mr Aldridge mentioned my sister. Perhaps I might explain. She has been unwell since autumn, and is why I am at Merebank this winter. I will not trouble you with her circumstances. I mention only because you will hear her, and us speaking of her, and I do not want you to wonder whose footsteps you hear overhead. Her name is Georgiana. She is sixteen.”
“I hope she will not be disturbed by my presence.”
“She will not. She knows of your arrival. She asked after you an hour ago.” A small hesitation. “She is generous, Miss Bennet. The presence of another invalid has not alarmed her. If anything—I think she is interested. I hope you may both feel well enough to keep one another company soon.”
Elizabeth thought about smiling in reply, but there was no mastery of her face to be found.
“Well.” He turned, then made a quick bow. “I will see this sent, Miss Bennet.”
He left with the letter. She heard him in the passage, speak briefly—Mrs Bannon, perhaps, or one of the others whose names she did not know—and then the front door opened and closed.
She reached for the laudanum, her hand closed on the bottle, and she held it—its weight, its promise, the oblivion it offered—and then set it back.
She needed her mind. Broken, fogged, wrecked by pain, sleeplessness, and cold still in her bones—she needed it. The mind was the only thing still hers, and she would not surrender it—not for comfort, not for sleep.
The pain remained. She lay in the stranger’s bed with the bag three feet from her hand and the unseen girl somewhere beyond. She held on to the one thing the ice, the bone, the screaming had failed to take—the knowledge, dim now, battered, barely a flame, that she had run for a reason.
The reason was still there.