Chapter Twelve #2
If Jane had told this woman there was a sister newly come from Hertfordshire, that alone was bad enough.
If the name had gone with it, worse. The town already knew too much.
A strange lady dragged half-dead from the mere could not be kept from local talk.
Add Hertfordshire and Bennet to the tale, and every careful mile of her journey would begin to come undone.
She had not crossed England in secrecy only to be found because a village learned to connect county, Christian name, and a sickbed.
Mrs Hadley was still looking at her, not impatiently, but with the calm expectation of one who had spoken and meant to be answered.
“You are very good to come,” Elizabeth said.
“Goodness has little to do with it. I was told there was an injured lady at the house who wanted the waters.” Mrs Hadley glanced toward the chair, the fire, the folded cloths by the basin, taking stock of the room in a single sweep. “What am I to call you?”
The question fell exactly where Elizabeth had feared it would.
Not a falsehood. She had promised that much, and the promise mattered more now than ever, because lies bred other lies and must be remembered. But not the whole of it either, not if the whole might travel beyond this room.
“Elizabeth,” she said after the smallest count. “If you please.”
“Aye. Elizabeth, then. I am Hadley’s wife, the drowner. Mrs Bannon says the surgeon has left the leg on for another day. I came to see whether he has done right.”
“And if he has not?”
Mrs Hadley’s hands were red with cold, broad in the palm, knuckles enlarged by work, nails cut short. “Then there will be no mending it by discussing his judgment after he is eight miles away. Lift the blankets and let me look.”
Elizabeth obeyed. Mrs Hadley bent over the bandage with the concentration of a craftswoman.
Her fingers, when they touched the skin above the wrappings, were cool.
She did not begin unbinding at once. She first felt for heat, then swelling, then pressed two fingers lightly to the pulse at Elizabeth’s ankle as if the limb had its own language and she meant to hear it before anyone translated.
“Pain?”
“Yes.”
“That was not a useful answer. Where?”
Elizabeth, having spent two days being spoken to by surgeons and gentlemen as if the broad fact of suffering exhausted all practical enquiry, found the question almost cheerful in its precision.
She described what she could. Mrs Hadley listened.
When she had heard enough, she unwrapped the outer folds and looked long at the wound in silence.
“Mrs Bannon has done no harm,” she said at last. “That will vex me less than it vexes her. The water has taken some heat out and drawn some foulness down. But they have been laying the cloths too thick. It traps what ought to escape. And if the water is allowed to stand after it is drawn, it goes dead in the linen before the linen reaches the flesh. Fresh every time. Warm by the skin, not by the kettle. If a woman cannot bear her own wrist in it, she has no business putting it on another body.”
She turned her head toward the door. “Mrs Marsden. You may come in. I heard you on the stair three boards ago.”
The latch moved. Jane entered, colour high in her face, a tray in her hands, and the look of a woman caught in the act of listening and too tired to pretend otherwise.
“I was not listening.”
“No,” said Mrs Hadley. “You were standing in the passage with broth, waiting to hear whether I cried out that the leg was a lost cause. Set down the tray and come here.”
Jane set it down. Elizabeth had never seen Jane obey another woman’s summons with so little instinctive resistance.
Mrs Hadley pointed at the bandage and began, in the tone of a woman teaching a younger one how to save time without losing care, to explain how the cloths must be folded, how often changed, how the water carried, how the skin around the wound must be kept dry so the flesh did not soften where it ought to knit.
Jane listened as if the instruction were prayer.
“You know nursing work well enough, Mrs Marsden,” Mrs Hadley said without looking up.
Jane’s hands lay still on the folded linen. “Yes.” Jane did not flinch, but something in her mouth altered.
Mrs Hadley nodded once, not in pity but recognition.
“I was at the cottage the third week of Christmas when his chest took a turn. I thought then he would not see Twelfth Night. He surprised me by a fortnight. Men will sometimes stay longer out of sheer spite than all the skill in Christendom could have bought them.”
Jane gave a sound that might have been a laugh if laughter had been possible in the room. “That resembles him more than any other account I have yet heard.”
“Aye. I thought it might. Hand me the clean cloth. No, not that one. The thinner. There is no sense smothering a wound because one is afraid of seeing it.”
They worked together for several minutes, Jane doing as she was bid, Mrs Hadley speaking only when speech served.
Elizabeth watched the exchange with attention sharpened by immobility.
She understood, with a suddenness that almost hurt, why Jane had looked at the woman who entered the room and yielded at once.
There were people who offered comfort, and there were people whose competence was a form of comfort without naming itself so.
When the bandage had been redone, Mrs Hadley covered the leg again and straightened. Jane handed Elizabeth the cup from the tray. Broth, stronger than what had been offered before, smelling of marrow and pepper and the part of a kitchen awake since before dawn.
“Drink while it is hot,” Jane said.
Elizabeth took the cup. Her hand shook on the saucer. Jane, after one glance, set her own fingers under the rim and held it with her until the first swallowing was done.
Mrs Hadley turned to the fire and held out her hands to the blaze without quite warming them, her attention already shifting beyond the room.
“Tom Pemberton coughed blood-streaked this morning,” she said, as if continuing a conversation begun before Elizabeth entered the valley and to continue after she left it.
“Not much. Enough. His mother has sat up half the night. Her own hands are near useless in the cold, and the damp does not spare them. Hadley says the lower carrier is taking less than it ought. If the meadows are not floated in time, they will feel it in March before the lambs are on the ground.”
Elizabeth lowered the cup. “All that depends on the mere?”
Mrs Hadley looked at her. “In one fashion or another, most things here do. The house higher than the village does not alter the direction of the water. It alters only who learns that lesson last.”
It was not said sharply. It did not need sharpness.
Elizabeth thought, absurdly, of Mr Collins discoursing at Longbourn on the hierarchy of parishes and the civil arrangement of influence.
There was no room in Northmere for that order.
The water ran where the land sent it. Gentlemen might sign letters about hatches and repairs, but lambs and children and old women’s hands did not consult precedence before they ached.
“Mr Darcy was out with Hadley yesterday,” Jane said, still holding the saucer while Elizabeth drank. “He has sent for repairs to the channels.”
“He has sent for them,” said Mrs Hadley. “Whether the earth and the weather mean to wait upon paper is another matter. Still, a man who sends for repairs is more use than one who sends for excuses. We have had enough of the second kind.”
Elizabeth thought of the ledgers at Longbourn, what papers concealed and exposed, of a leather bag pushed back half out of sight at the side of her bed. The broth was cool enough to drink quickly. She finished it.
Mrs Hadley took the empty cup and set it down. “You will want occupation before many more days are done. I can see it in your face. Some patients prefer to be nursed. Others begin looking as though they mean to bite the first person who tells them to lie still. You are of the second sort.”
Elizabeth laid her head back on the pillow. “My sister has long maintained the same opinion.”
“Then your sister has eyes. When you are equal to sitting up for longer stretches, I will bring you news worth having from the village so you may stop staring at that ceiling crack as though it had written a sermon for your improvement.”
Elizabeth laughed then—not much, not freely, the laugh pulled through the remains of pain and surprise—but enough that Jane looked at her with something like alarmed relief, as if the sound had not been expected to survive the week.
Mrs Hadley heard it and nodded as though a point had been proved.
“There. That is better. If a patient can laugh, the body has not entirely forgot its business.”
She gathered her coat and hat. Jane walked with her to the door, and because it did not fully latch at once, Elizabeth heard rather more of their passage exchange than perhaps either intended.
“You should sleep this afternoon,” Mrs Hadley said in a lower voice. “Not in the chair. In a bed. I will come up after I have seen to Tom.”
“I cannot leave her.”
“You can leave her with the housekeeper, the cook, the master of the house, and, if it comes to extremity, with me. Widowhood does not make a woman inexhaustible. If you fall, there will be one more patient and no more nurses.”
Jane asked very quietly, “Did I do wrong to tell her about Mr Marsden?”
Mrs Hadley’s answer came at once. “You spoke as a frightened woman who had buried one person and could not bear the ground opening for another. That is not wrong. It is only human. Go and eat something while the broth is still hot in your own cup, if you have any sense left in your head at all.”
They kept walking, and Elizabeth heard no more. She lay still and looked at the fire.
Elizabeth had been running for eleven days when the ice broke beneath her.
Before that, she had planned to run longer than eleven days.
Running had narrowed the world to roads, names, money, concealment, weather, the bag’s weight.
Northmere had, for two days, narrowed it further to pain, fever, water, Jane, the surgeon, Darcy’s chair in the dark.
Now the world widened by force.
There was a child in the village coughing blood into winter linen.
There were ewes not yet lambed and meadows not yet set right, and an old housekeeper who knew the water’s method because the village knew it longer than gentlemen had owned the surrounding land.
There was Mrs Hadley coming and going with her basket as if sorrow and skill were things to be carried together in one arm.
There was Jane, five days widowed, being told to sleep by another woman who had seen enough grief to measure its limits.
There was Darcy somewhere in the house or on the slope beyond it, writing letters or carrying water or doing whatever such men did when they could not control the largest dangers and therefore set their hands to the smaller ones.
And there was herself in the middle of it all, with the bag at the bedside and a promise to Darcy not to lie and a promise not yet spoken to Jane that she would tell her something before long, and a sudden, unreasonable reluctance to imagine this house without her in it.
An hour later, Nan Reeves came down with a book tucked under her arm and a folded note in her hand.
“From Miss Darcy,” she said, with the grave importance of a girl carrying intelligence between two invalid kingdoms. “She asked if you were awake enough to read. I said I did not know and had better ask before I promised anything on your behalf.”
Elizabeth held out her hand.
The note was small and carefully folded. The hand on the outside was neat but visibly tired, as if the writer had paused more than once with the pen between fingers that stiffened when held too long. Elizabeth opened it.
Miss Bennet,
Mrs Reeves tells me you are improved this morning and that the surgeon has given you another day, which I hope signifies better things than it would have yesterday.
If you would like a book, Nan can bring one down from my room.
She says you have already had Cowper, which I think was Papa’s favourite and Fitzwilliam’s when he wants to pretend he is not anxious.
I do not know whether you prefer history or poetry or something else entirely.
If you are too tired to answer, I shall not be offended.
Yours, Georgiana Darcy
Elizabeth read the note twice.
When she looked up, Nan Reeves still stood at the foot of the bed with the book under her arm, watching her with the conscientious patience of a girl who had been made a reader, messenger, and witness all in one winter and had not yet learned to be careless in any of the roles.
“Tell Miss Darcy,” Elizabeth said slowly, “that I am not too tired to answer. Tell her I should like very much to borrow whatever book she most wishes another person to read, which is not the same as asking for the best book in the room. And tell her that Mr Cowper has already been of service to me in the small hours, though I cannot claim acquaintance strong enough to know whether he excels in anxiety or only its management.”
Nan considered this. “That is rather a lot to remember.”
“Then come to the table and write it down for me.”
The girl’s face brightened in a way that made her all at once fifteen rather than merely useful.
She crossed to the table, found paper in the drawer with the confidence of long service to one house, and held the ink for Elizabeth while she wrote from the bed with awkward care and a hand that tired before the second line was done.
By the time the note was folded, and Nan had gone upstairs with it, Elizabeth had done more writing than she had in a fortnight and was exhausted as if she had walked ten miles.
But the exhaustion was companionable. It belonged to effort. It belonged, astonishingly, to the beginning of something.
She lay back. Outside, beyond the window, the winter light sat pale upon the valley.
Somewhere below the house, the water that had not taken her leg ran under stone and ice toward people she had not yet met.
Somewhere above her, in the south chamber, a sixteen-year-old girl with painful hands was opening a folded sheet of paper and reading Elizabeth’s answer.
For the first time since leaving Longbourn, Elizabeth found herself thinking not only of how to get away, but of what might happen before she did.