Chapter Twelve
Mrs Bannon was the first to enter after Jane had gone to break her fast, and because it was Mrs Bannon, she came not with inquiry or condolence but bearing a steaming basin in both hands and the expression of a woman who had been right yesterday and expected, if not gratitude, at least a temporary suspension of criticism.
“Fresh from the spring,” she said, setting the basin on the table with only the care the heat required.
“Not so hot as to do harm. I put my wrist in it myself. That’s the measure.
” She glanced at the bandage on Elizabeth’s leg, at the bucket by the hearth, at the cooling cloths Jane had left folded on the chair.
“If the surgeon has given you another day, you will not keep it by letting the water stand.”
There were mornings at Longbourn on which Elizabeth might have answered in kind.
She had not yet recovered enough of herself for play.
The morning had already been too full. Jane’s widowhood sat in the room with as much substance as the chair by the bed, the book on the table, and the mineral smell that now belonged not only to the valley but to the whole of her altered life.
“Mr Aldridge has given me another day,” she said. “I am aware, from the frequency everyone has informed me, that the day is to be spent in linen and water and no little prayer.”
Mrs Bannon snorted, which might have been a laugh if she were a woman constructed for laughter.
“Better linen and water than saw and straps. Mrs Marsden will be back presently. I have sent Martha to the village for Mrs Hadley. She ought to have come yesterday, but Mrs Pemberton calved in the night, and there’s never any getting a woman off one labour and onto another before she has finished the first.”
She laid the cloths into the basin one by one with the brusqueness of a woman who had done this work for years and resented every year of it. She turned at once to the business of the room, brisk and unsentimental, and in stepping nearer the bed struck Elizabeth’s bag with the side of her shoe.
The bag tipped over. Papers slid half out in a pale untidy spill.
Elizabeth lurched before thought, a violent movement born whole from panic. Pain tore up her leg so sharply that the room whitened. She caught herself on her elbows with a strangled cry and would have gone farther if the pain had not broken the effort under her.
“Lord save us,” Mrs Bannon grumbled. “Lie still, you foolish girl.”
She stooped, not with curiosity but annoyance, scooped the papers together in a rough sheaf, thrust them back into the bag without reading so much as a line—assuming she could read at all—and shoved the thing with her foot farther beneath the little table and out of her own way.
“If you tear yourself open for the sake of a satchel, you may explain it to Mr Aldridge, for I shall not.”
Elizabeth could not answer. Her heart beat so hard it shook the mattress. She stared at the bag where it now sat crooked in shadow, one corner of a folded page still showing from the mouth. It was closed badly. Not safe. Not hidden enough. But Mrs Bannon had already turned back to the basin.
“Now then,” she said. “If you have done frightening us both to death, lift the blanket.”
Elizabeth obeyed because disobedience required strength she had just spent. Mrs Bannon wrung out the first cloth and laid the heat over the wound with more gentleness than her face admitted. The pain came sharp, then spreading, then dull.
Mrs Bannon said nothing more of the bag. She neither looked at it nor asked a question. Presently Elizabeth understood that whatever alarm had seized her belonged to herself alone. Mrs Bannon cared no more for the contents than for any other piece of clutter in the path of her work.
Even so, Elizabeth could not keep her eyes from straying to it while the treatment went on. When Mrs Bannon had done, she set aside the last cloth and began gathering up the basin and wrappings.
“Mrs Bannon?”
“What now?”
Elizabeth glanced at the hearth. “Would you leave me the fire tongs?”
Mrs Bannon turned and stared at her. “For what purpose?”
“For dropped things. I cannot very well fetch them myself.”
Mrs Bannon looked at the hearth, then at Elizabeth’s leg, then back again with the expression of one invited to cooperate in nonsense but unable to deny the practical case for it.
“You will get soot on the sheets, and then there will be a second grievance in the room besides your leg.”
“I shall bear the reproach.”
“You will bear it from Mrs Reeves, not me.”
Yet she went to the hearth, brought the tongs, and set them within reach along the coverlet. “If you pinch your fingers off, do not send for me to mend them.”
“I shall endeavour to keep them all.”
Mrs Bannon gave a grunt that might have been disbelief and went out with the basin.
Elizabeth waited until the door had shut. Then she lay still a little longer, listening to the retreat of the older woman’s steps, to the ticking quiet of the room, to the dangerous pounding of her own heart.
Only then did she take up the tongs.
The effort was absurd from the first. She could not rise properly, only inch herself higher against the pillows and turn enough to see the bag’s strap where it lay crooked in shadow.
The tongs were unwieldy in her hand, their length working against delicacy.
She stretched them toward the strap and missed.
The iron clicked against the floorboards.
She stopped at once, breath held.
No one came.
She tried again. This time, she caught the leather only to have it slip free at once. On the third attempt, the end of the tongs closed over the strap badly, not a grip but a precarious pinch, and when she drew it toward her, the bag moved no more than an inch before the strap slid loose again.
By then, sweat had broken along her upper lip. The movement itself was small, but every reach jarred her body and sent a protesting throb through the injured leg. She bit the inside of her cheek and tried once more, slower now, guiding the iron jaws until they held the strap near the buckle.
This time it came.
Not gracefully. The bag dragged over the boards in short reluctant starts, catching once on the table leg, then scraping free. By the time she had drawn it close enough to touch, she was trembling with pain and exertion, her breath so unsteady she could scarcely trust her fingers.
She let the tongs fall softly onto the blanket and reached at last for the bag itself.
Inside were the papers wrapped in linen, the little purse now too light to comfort, and the other poor remnants of a journey planned in haste and lived in greater haste still. She drew out the bundle of papers and held it without opening it.
She would burn them now, if burning could ever have served.
But it could not. If destruction had been wise, she would have contrived it long ago.
These were not scraps to be thrown into a grate and forgotten.
They were dangerous, yes, but they were also necessary, and necessity had kept them alive this long.
She put the papers back into the bag, smoothing the linen round them with hasty, careful fingers and settling the purse above them so that nothing looked disturbed at a glance. Then she took up the tongs again.
This proved worse than drawing the bag to her had been.
To push a thing away with any precision while lying half flat and guarding one shattered leg against the least jar was labour fit to make a saint swear.
The first attempt only turned the bag sideways.
The second caught the strap and dragged it back toward the bed instead of away.
She stopped, breathless and angry, then tried again more slowly, using the tong’s end to nudge first the base, then the buckle, inch by stubborn inch.
At last, she had it where she wanted it, deeper in shadow, nearer the bed, tucked behind the little table leg so that it looked less like an object set aside and more like something carelessly overlooked.
It was not perfect. Nothing in her present condition could be made perfect.
But it was closed, discreet, and no longer invited the eye at once.
She let the tongs sink onto the blanket and lay still, watching the bag until the hammering of her heart had eased enough to let her think again.
Aknock came at the door. Not a servant’s quick rap, but two measured taps with a count between, as though the person outside supposed pain might need warning.
Elizabeth’s eyes opened. “Come in.”
The woman who entered was not one Elizabeth knew.
This newcomer was not young. Nor aged in the sovereign fashion of an elder.
She belonged to that capable middle reach of life in which strength had ceased to advertise itself because it had long since become habit.
Broad-shouldered beneath a dark cloak, boots wet at the hem with thaw and lane-mud, she carried a basket on one arm and a small leather case in the other hand.
Her bonnet had slipped a little back from her brow in the climb, and the skin at her temple was red from wind.
She shut the door with her foot, set down the basket, and looked at Elizabeth with the directness of a woman accustomed to arriving where she was needed and determining for herself what manner of need it was.
“I’m Mrs Hadley,” she said, by way of introduction.
“A pleasure,” Elizabeth murmured. Her lips were cracking again.
“Aye. Mrs Marsden asked whether I would come up. She says she’s your sister, and you’re lately come all the way from Hertfordshire.”
Elizabeth’s heart gave a hard, ugly turn.