Chapter Five #2
He rose. For some time, he stood looking down at her, at the narrow face against the linen, at the dark lashes on a cheek too white, at the hand lying outside the coverlet because she had not strength enough to move it farther.
A few hours earlier, she had been walking on the mere with both boots on her feet and opinions ready in her mouth.
Now her life hung by means so poor and mean they might have shamed a stable yard.
He took up her hand and laid it more carefully beneath the blanket.
“Your sister had better make haste,” he said, though there was no one waking to hear him.
He left the parlour and shut the door with care. The passage was empty. No one called to him. No new demand had yet found him. He went to the study because there was nowhere else to go with what had got into him.
Inside, with the door closed, the shaking began.
Not visible enough, perhaps, to be remarked by another man at ten paces.
Enough to make the tinder slip from his fingers when he tried to mend the fire.
Enough to send a hard bright fury through him at the weakness of his own hand.
He set the flint down and stood gripping the mantel until the worst passed.
He knew the look of a patient who might be kept and the look of one who might be lost. He had taught himself the distinction by candlelight beside Georgiana’s bed.
Miss Bennet had strength of mind, insolence enough to answer him, courage enough to keep from crying out when even the movement of breathing tore at her.
None of it signified against blood already spent, fever waiting in the wound, and the long cruelty of recovery if recovery came at all.
He had pulled her out of the lake. He had held her down while her leg was set. He had fed her like a child. He had no right to be frightened by her now, yet fright had him by the throat.
He went to the desk and braced both hands against it until the room held still.
A stranger.
That was the proper word. A stranger with a broken leg on his land. A burden he had taken up because no decent man could have done otherwise.
The word would not hold.
The afternoon had gone a long way toward evening before the front door opened again.
By then, the light had altered. The panes of the study window held that thin winter dimness which had less of descent in it than of withdrawal.
He had mended the fire twice. He had gone up to Georgiana and down again.
He had taken no dinner worth naming. Once, not half an hour earlier, he had stopped outside the parlour and heard nothing within but the low murmur of Mrs. Reeves and the occasional answer from the bed.
When the bell rang in the hall, he was already on his feet.
The woman on the threshold had come fast and apparently without stopping for breath.
Snow clung in a whitening band to the hem of her dark cloak.
Her gloves were damp. A few strands of fair hair had worked loose at her temple under the bonnet that had plainly been tied in haste.
She was not handsome in the polished style some women cultivated, but there was an elegance in the face, breeding in the carriage, and urgency so severe it had burnt all self-consciousness away.
“Mr Darcy?”
“Yes.”
“I am Mrs Marsden. I had your letter. My sister is here?”
Thank heaven.
The name altered everything at once. The sister was real, had come at his summons and in apparent concern. Married. Established and respectable, and someone else to fret and grieve over that poor woman’s bedside when her wound… No, he would not think of that.
What he had now, standing in his doorway, was every form of comfort and decency for all concerned.
Miss Bennet could not be moved, but Mrs Marsden must have some resources of her own, must she not?
She would not be another soul thrust into his keeping.
She could make decisions… the ones that inevitably must come.
He bowed. “Mrs Marsden. Yes, your sister is here. Pray come in.”
She stepped inside at once. “How is she?”
“Alive.”
Mrs Marsden tore off her bonnet and stared at him with wide blue eyes. “That is a very strange reassurance. What has happened?”
“She has broken her leg, and the bone went through the skin. She lost a deal of blood.”
The woman gasped and reeled faintly. Darcy took her arm before she could be yet another collapsed figure on his property today. “Doctor Aldrige has seen her. The leg is set. She has taken some broth. She remains in great pain, but her senses are clear.”
“I must see her.”
“This way.”
She followed him down the passage with swift contained steps.
She must have walked thus all the way from her cottage, for she had come more quickly than he would have believed possible when the note left the house.
The efficiency of a household prepared to move at once when called.
A servant left with orders. A husband informed.
All the solid machinery of established domestic existence. Thank God for it.
At the parlour door, he turned back to her.
“Mrs Marsden, before you go in, I should tell you that the injury was severe. She has borne it with remarkable composure, but do not let her rather…” He stopped, searching for the word.
“Her rather flippant tongue mislead you into thinking all is in hand. Her situation is grave, and the day has been a hard one.”
“Mr Darcy,” she said, and there was nothing soft in the interruption, only a woman holding herself upright by purpose alone, “I know my sister well. If she has breath to rebuke me for delay, I shall count us fortunate.”
He nodded and opened the door.
Mrs. Reeves, who had been seated near the hearth with her work untouched in her lap, rose at once. Miss Bennet lay half turned upon the pillows, colourless still, though less terrifyingly so than at noon. Her eyes moved to the doorway, then widened.
“Jane.”
The single word did more for Darcy than any assurance the surgeon had offered. There was strength in it. Weak strength, borrowed strength, but living.
Mrs Marsden crossed the room without another glance for him. Whatever fear had travelled with her from the village vanished into action the instant she reached the bedside. She knelt, took her sister’s hand with both of hers, and bent her head briefly over the blankets before mastering herself.
“Lizzy! I am here.”
He stepped back at once. This, at last, was no place for him.
Mrs Reeves came toward him quietly as he withdrew. “Sir, shall I bring up more broth?”
He glanced once more at the sisters. Mrs Marsden was already arranging the coverlet, already asking low practical questions, already taking charge with the practical competence of one accustomed to tending where tenderness alone could not serve.
Relief went through him with such force it left him almost light-headed.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Keep it warm. Mrs Marsden will know what is wanted now.”
He drew the door nearly closed behind him and stood in the passage, listening to the low murmur within. Not alone any longer. Not solely answerable. The house had taken one burden too many this morning. It had now been given another pair of hands.
He returned to the study and sat at the desk without taking up the unfinished letter.
Above, Nan had begun reading again to Georgiana, her voice rising and falling through the floorboards in patient measure.
He listened to it, to the fire settling in the grate, to the altered quiet of a house that no longer depended on him alone in the parlour.
He went to the study, cold. The fire he had laid at dawn—the small fire lit in this room every morning for six weeks, the only room in the house besides the south chamber and kitchen consistently warmed—had burnt to grey ash while occupied elsewhere.
He rebuilt it. The wood was dry, the tinderbox where he left it, and the fire caught on the second strike—more success than on his first day here.
He had learned the trick of this grate. Several in the house.
The learning had become a minor accomplishment he allowed himself to note when nothing else went well.
He sat at the desk. The letter he had tried to write for a week lay in the top drawer—the one to the doctor at Buxton, the one that resisted clear question.
He took it out and read what he had written.
It was no better than on Monday. He returned it to the drawer, shut it, and laid his hands on the desk.
Above, Nan had begun reading again. The words were indistinct, only the measured rise and fall of a girl reading aloud to a listener too tired for conversation since breakfast. An improvement over silence—silence signified Georgiana was sleeping, and Georgiana slept more than she should.
Every hour she slept was an hour she did not use her hands, voice, or mind.
The sleeping was the burden Darcy had carried since December without naming it, for naming it would admit how much of her he was losing to rest.
He closed his eyes and listened. Not six months past, the sound from Pemberley’s upper floor at this hour would have been the pianoforte.
Georgiana had practised scales and exercises since she was eight.
She had loved the cold keys under her fingers, the slow progress of a phrase missed the day before, the private pleasure of a corrected mistake.
The pianoforte was the first thing she touched in the morning and last at night.
She had not touched the ivory since August. Her fingers had been stiff through fever, then weak in recovery.
The first morning she tried—in November, on the instrument in the small drawing room—she got through four bars, wept, and had not tried again since.
The drawing room at Merebank housed a pianoforte that came with the house.
Darcy had checked it in his first week—out of tune, with yellowed ivory, but playable.
He had not mentioned it to Georgiana, and she had not asked.