Chapter Nine
Aldridge arrived at noon, grey-faced from the ride, his leather case in one hand and his temper in the other.
Norton had found him between patients in Bakewell, delivered the message with the urgency of a man who had borne messages for Darcy for nine years and knew the difference between an errand and a summons, and the surgeon had come at once, which told Darcy all he needed to know about how seriously Aldridge took the word turning.
He went straight to the parlour. Darcy followed to the door but did not enter.
Mrs Marsden was already inside—had been since dawn, since the conversation in the passage, since the weeping and the revelation and the bare confession of her situation.
She had rebuilt herself in the hours since.
The composure was back, sleeves rolled, hands occupied.
She stood at the bedside while Aldridge unwrapped the dressing, and her face, when the wound was exposed, held the same controlled blankness Darcy had seen that morning.
Aldridge’s face held nothing of the kind. He examined the wound for some time—the swelling, the discharge, the angry discolouration spreading from the site—and when he straightened, his expression matched that of a man who had reached a conclusion he did not wish to deliver.
“The infection has taken hold. The tissue around the wound is necrotic at the margins. The discharge is purulent. If the blackening spreads—and in my experience, it will—the amputation will be necessary to save her life.”
Mrs Marsden did not move. Darcy, in the doorway, gripped the frame.
“When?”
“I would take the leg today if she would permit it. Tomorrow at the latest. Every hour the infection advances brings her closer to the point where the leg cannot be taken cleanly and the risk to the patient escalates beyond what surgery can address.”
Miss Bennet was awake. Darcy had not been certain—her eyes had been closed when Aldridge began, the laudanum and fever conspiring to keep her afloat between consciousness and sleep.
But the word amputation had reached whatever depth she inhabited.
Her eyes were open. The pupils were still wrong—dilated, the fever’s mark—but behind them was the intelligence he had seen on the bank, in those first terrible minutes of tending.
Battered, diminished, burning with fever, but present.
“No.”
The word came from her as if dragged from the bottom of a well. Thin, hoarse, but beneath the weakness lay a force entirely disproportionate to the body producing it. She fixed Aldridge—not her leg or her sister or Darcy—and her face was white with something deeper than pain.
“No. You will not take my leg.”
“Miss Bennet—”
“I will not permit it. I will not sign. I will not consent. You will not take my leg.”
Her voice shattered on the last word—the way ice shatters into pieces that cannot be reassembled.
The terror was naked and absolute—the terror of a woman who had governed herself through a compound fracture and bone-setting and a night of fever by sheer force of will, whose will had just met the one thing it could not govern.
She shook—not with the convulsive shaking of fever but a finer tremor, the vibration of a body held at its breaking point.
Her eyes were the worst—begging. Miss Bennet did not seem the type to beg, and the fact she did meant the woman behind the composure was more frightened than Darcy had witnessed in any living creature.
Something in his chest came apart. Not the cracking of the earlier day—the ice-fracture, the thing that broke open when she dryly joked about the leg’s opinions.
This was different. This was a tearing, a rending, the sound made when pulled apart along a seam it did not know it had.
He gripped the doorframe harder. His knuckles went white against the wood.
Aldridge, to his credit, did not argue. He looked at his patient with the weary patience of a man who had heard this refusal before, in other rooms, from other patients, and knew that refusal was not a medical opinion but a human one, requiring a different instrument than the bone saw in his case.
“I understand your reluctance, Miss Bennet. I will not take the leg against your will. But I must tell you plainly—if the blackening spreads past the margin I observed today, refusal will not save the leg. It will cost you both the leg and your life.”
She said nothing. Tears ran silently from her eyes into the pillow—the weeping of a woman who could not spare breath for sobs.
Mrs Marsden took her hand. The grip that closed on Mrs Marsden’s fingers was the same as had closed on Darcy’s in the night—desperate, blind, the body’s last hold on something solid.
“One day.” Aldridge packed his instruments, movements brisk.
“I will return tomorrow morning. If the blackening has not spread—if by some grace it has retreated—we will discuss alternatives. If it has spread, Miss Bennet, I will take the leg, whether you consent or not, because I will not watch a woman die of gangrene when the remedy is in my hands.”
He turned to Darcy. The look they exchanged was the look of two men who understood each other perfectly and wished they did not.
“A word, Mr Darcy. In private.”
They went to the study. Aldridge closed the door behind them. In the cold of the small room, with the unlit grate and the folded letter to Buxton on the desk between them, the surgeon’s professional composure slipped slightly—not to alarm, but to the candour he denied himself before the patient.
“The infection is quite serious. I will not mislead you. In seven cases out of ten, at this stage, I would take the limb at once. Much delay may cost her the option of a clean amputation above the knee. If the gangrene reaches the thigh, I cannot help her.”
“And in the other three cases?”
“In three out of ten, the body fights the infection off. The tissue stabilises. The blackening retreats rather than advances. I have seen it happen. I cannot explain why in some patients and not others. Youth is a factor. General constitution before injury. Fortune.” He said the last word with the tone of a man who did not traffic in fortune, but had recognised its existence after long practice.
“Is it safe to wait one day?”
“I would not have agreed if it were not. One day will not kill her. Two days might. Tomorrow I will examine the wound. If the margin of blackening has advanced by so much as a finger’s breadth, I am taking the leg.
Her consent or otherwise. And… I will require someone to hold her. It… is not a pretty thing.”
Darcy's stomach turned, and he tasted bile. “I understand.”
“Mr Darcy.” Aldridge paused—his hand on the door, case under his arm.
“The young woman is terrified. Terror is not a medical condition, but it is a complication. A patient fighting the surgeon as well as the infection spends resources on resistance rather than recovery. If there is anything—anything at all—that would give her comfort while we wait, I recommend it. Comfort is not medicine. But absence of comfort is poison.”
He opened the door, then paused again. “I should look in on your sister before I go. Five minutes.”
“Thank you, Mr Aldridge.”
The surgeon went up the back stairs to the south chamber.
Darcy did not follow. He stood in the study with Aldridge’s words turning over in his mind—Comfort.
Anything that would give her comfort. He had carried her from the mere.
He had splinted her leg with a broken walking stick.
He had sat on the floor of her parlour all night holding her hand while she wept in her drugged sleep.
He had made broth, carried water, washed bowls, lit fires that would not catch.
None of it was comfort. All of it was the best he could do, which was not enough, which would never be enough—the infection was in her leg, the bone saw in Aldridge’s case, tomorrow morning the surgeon’s return. The decision would be made by the wound, not the woman.
He stepped into the passage, where Mrs Bannon stood.
This was remarkable in itself—Mrs Bannon, who had spent her days occupying the periphery of the household with the devotion of a woman who had refined avoidance to an art, now standing just outside the parlour door.
She was not polishing anything, not examining anything, but with hands folded before her and a face wearing an expression Darcy had not seen before—neither aggrieved patience nor studied blankness. She looked worried.
“Mrs Bannon.”
“Mr Darcy, sir.” She addressed him directly, which was also remarkable. Her usual mode involved speaking to the middle distance while Darcy occupied the foreground. “I could not help but hear what Mr Aldridge said. About the young lady’s leg.”
“You could not help because you were listening at the door, Mrs Bannon.”
She neither denied it nor looked ashamed. If anything, impatience showed—the impatience of a woman with information to deliver and no intention of being diverted by an accusation of eavesdropping.
“The water, sir. The mere water. It should be brought to her.”
“The mere water?”
“For the wound. Fomentation—hot cloths soaked in it, laid against the skin. And for drinking. A cup every hour, warm, no additions. The old families knew. When the flesh turned, they brought the water up. It drew the poison. I have seen it work, sir. Not every time. But I have seen it.”
“Mrs Bannon. You have lived in this valley all your life. You have seen the water applied to wounds of this nature. And you did not tell me this when I brough Miss Bennet up from the lake?”
“You did not ask, sir.”
“I am asking now.”
“I know you are asking now, sir. I am telling you now.”