Chapter Eleven
Jane had arrived twenty minutes earlier, summoned by Darcy from the chamber upstairs, her hair half-pinned and her sleeves still down. She had taken one look at Elizabeth, crossed to the bed, put her hand on Elizabeth’s forehead, and held it there for five slow breaths.
She spoke no more after the “Good morning, Lizzy,” she offered upon entering, but needed no speech, for the work was the language.
She moved with the controlled skill of a woman who had practised this care recently elsewhere and was now doing so again, in different rooms, for a different patient, with the same hands.
The fire was stoked. The fomentation cloths replaced—fresh water from the bucket Darcy had brought at midnight, reheated on the grate.
The cup of water at the bedside refilled.
The book Darcy had been reading lay set aside on the table, glanced at once by Jane without comment, and untouched.
Darcy’s chair remained pulled close to the bed, also undisturbed.
Footsteps sounded in the hall outside. Not Mrs Bannon’s slow, complaining shuffle. Not Mrs Reeves. Not Darcy’s quieter tread.
Aldridge.
Her whole body began to shake.
It came without dignity and without permission, a violent inward trembling that ran through her chest, arms, even her teeth.
The bone saw. The bottle. The straps, if he used straps.
Men would call it necessity and get on with it.
She knew what this morning meant. She had known it in broken pieces all night, but knowledge gathered itself differently when the man himself was on the other side of the door with his case in his hand.
Do not cry. Do not begin before he enters.
The command was useless. Tears were already spilling into her hair.
Jane bent over her at once. “Lizzy?”
“I know,” Elizabeth whispered, though she knew nothing that could help her. “I know.”
Voices reached them through the door. Aldridge, brisk and professional. Darcy, lower. The latch turned.
Aldridge entered with his case in one hand and his hat in the other, looking rested, which struck her as monstrous. He might have slept well, broken his fast, ridden over in the clean morning air, and come now to alter the whole shape of her life before noon.
Darcy came in after him.
He did not look first to the table, the bandages, the fire, or the surgeon’s hands. His eyes went straight to hers.
She was shaking too hard now to master it. Her fingers had twisted themselves in the sheet. She could not seem to draw a full breath. The room had narrowed to the distance between the bed and Aldridge’s case.
Darcy crossed to her before Aldridge had set it down.
He came to the bedside and took her hand out of the linen she was crushing, his grasp firm enough to hold her, careful enough not to startle. He bent without decency, without a gentleman’s formality, as though there were no one else in the room to witness it.
“Courage,” he said under his breath. “He looks first. Nothing is done before you hear him speak.”
It was almost nothing. A whisper. A few plain words. Yet they were the only thing in the room not drowning in terror, and she clung to them as if they had physical substance.
Her hand closed hard upon his. His thumb pressed once against her knuckles.
Then Jane moved quietly into that place.
It was done with such gentleness that it might have been mistaken for chance.
Jane came nearer from the other side of the bed and laid her fingers over Elizabeth’s wrist, then over Darcy’s hand, and in another instant, Elizabeth’s hand was in Jane’s keeping instead.
A sister’s place. The proper place. Darcy yielded it at once and stepped back, though not far.
That small withdrawal hurt absurdly, because it was proper.
Aldridge set down his case beside the laudanum bottle and the little leather volume on the table, removed his gloves, and came forward.
“Miss Bennet. How do you find yourself this morning?”
Her mouth trembled before the words came. “Pray do not ask me that, sir.”
His face altered by a degree, enough to acknowledge that he had asked out of habit and would not ask again. “Very well. I must examine the leg.”
Jane’s hand tightened round hers. Elizabeth fixed her eyes on the tester of the bed and failed to keep them there. She had to know. If this was the last morning she possessed her own leg entire, she would not meet ignorance in place of horror.
Aldridge drew back the blankets and began to unwrap the bandage.
Each turn of linen uncovered not merely flesh but dread itself.
Beneath came the wet cloths steeped through the night in water drawn from the southern springs where she had fallen and laid on by hands that hoped because they had nothing else to offer.
They peeled away with that intimate, dreadful sound she had already learned to fear.
She did not cry out. She shook and bit the inside of her lip and tasted blood.
The wound lay open. The bone, set two days earlier amid screaming and force, held where he had put it. Around it, the flesh was swollen, angry, discoloured. But the blackened margin was not where she had expected.
It had drawn back.
Not by miracle enough to erase what had been done, nor enough to be trusted at once, but enough that even in terror she knew it. The dark edge Aldridge had marked as advancing had retreated toward the wound instead of climbing higher.
Aldridge went still.
Then he bent closer.
His fingers examined the damaged flesh with grave, deliberate care, sending white flares through her leg that she bore in broken breaths against Jane’s hand. Darcy had moved no farther than the bedside. Though she did not look at him again, she knew exactly where he stood.
Aldridge straightened, looked again at the wound, then at the removed cloths—the linen, the mineral scent, evidence of the fomentations he had not prescribed.
“What has been applied to this wound?”
“Water from the mere.” Jane’s voice was flat and carefully controlled. “Mrs Bannon advised it after you left—hot fomentations—cloths soaked in the spring water, laid on the site. We have applied them through the night. We even coaxed her to swallow some.”
Aldridge’s face remained unchanged, but something behind his eyes—the professional part that had practised for decades—was working.
“I did not recommend this treatment.”
“No.”
“The water from the mere?”
“The mineral springs. The water the locals credit with curative properties.”
“I am familiar with local claims, Mrs Marsden.” He said this without inflection—neither endorsing nor dismissing.
He examined the wound again, tracing the blackening’s margin with his finger, measuring the distance between dead and living tissue.
His lips moved silently—counting, measuring against a standard Elizabeth could not see.
“The margin has not advanced,” he said. “It has retreated. By approximately a quarter-inch.”
The words filled the room—a quarter-inch—the distance between fingertip and first knuckle. The measure between keeping her leg and losing it.
“Mr Aldridge.” Jane spoke first, the voice Elizabeth knew best—the voice that read her stories, reasoned with their mother, spoke calmly through every crisis.
The voice trembled. “My husband bathed in that water for five months. Drank it every day. Followed every local recommendation. Yet he was buried in the churchyard less than a week ago.”
The ground beneath everything Elizabeth believed moved. Jane’s husband was… dead?
Mr Marsden was dead!
The household she’d sought for eleven days—the cottage, the safety, the married sister with a roof, a husband, a life to absorb her burden—did not exist. Jane was alone.
Alone when the letter arrived. Alone when she rushed to the house.
Tending Elizabeth’s wound with the competence of one who had just tended a dying man, and—
“Jane?”
“Not now, Lizzy.”
“Jane—Mr Marsden—when—”
“Not now.” Jane did not meet her eyes. She looked at Aldridge, the wound, anything but Elizabeth’s face.
Her jaw was set. Her eyes glistened with tears she refused to shed.
Clearly, she had not meant to say it. The words were pulled from her by the argument, by Aldridge’s hand on the case, by the terror of watching another loved one risk a remedy already failed.
The gentle delivery planned—tomorrow, Elizabeth, all tomorrow—lay in ruins, and Jane stepped over the wreckage because the leg was more urgent than grief, and grief had to wait.
“The water did not save him. I do not believe it is saving Elizabeth’s leg.
The fever loosens because fevers loosen, wounds improve because wounds sometimes improve, and if we wait another day, hoping on a quarter-inch that could be swelling’s trick, we risk—” Her voice caught, and she restrained it.
“We risk everything! I have already lost my husband. I will not lose my sister to chance or vanity, sir. Take the leg now, while it can be taken cleanly. I would rather my sister live without a leg than die with one.”
Elizabeth could not speak. The two devastations—the leg and the husband, the saw and the churchyard—weighted into one space in her mind, neither yielding.
Jane was a widow. Penniless. Standing beside the bed arguing for amputation because she had already buried someone. Elizabeth could not speak because her mouth was full of grief that was not hers and terror that was—not dread, but something—too large for words.
Aldridge nodded—not agreement, but weighing.
His hand rested on his case, the saw within.
A careful man, a professional who had seen infections advance and retreat, knowing that a quarter-inch of improvement was no cure, no guarantee, only a single data point in a disease that moved swifter than hope.
Elizabeth’s body shuddered again, head to toe, and she tasted blood again from her tongue. The shaking would not stop.
“Mrs Marsden makes a reasonable argument,” he said. “The improvement encourages, but it is not—”