Chapter Fourteen #2
Jane set down the linen more sharply than necessary.
“You look improved,” she said.
“Do I?”
“Yes. I cannot determine whether the improvement owes to broth, Mrs Hadley’s severity, or Mr Darcy’s drainage estimates.”
Elizabeth heard the words—and the care with which they had been arranged not to sound like more than sisterly observation. Yet there was an edge she could no longer ignore.
“The broth was excellent,” she said, the safest answer.
Jane came to the bed and drew back the blankets. Her hands moved without tremor or waste. Widowhood had made her more exact, as grief sometimes sharpens what it cannot soften.
Jane laid the heat over the wound. Elizabeth drew breath and let it out slowly.
“Lizzy.”
“Yes?”
“You need not tell me anything tonight if tonight is too much, but we must talk. Very seriously. Why did you refuse to let me send my letter to Uncle Gardiner?”
Elizabeth looked at the fire rather than her sister.
The bag was where she had put it. The papers remained wrapped.
The thing she had done at Longbourn had not diminished because the water at Northmere had taken pity on her leg.
It remained what it was—a fact capable of altering every relation in the house if spoken aloud.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
Jane’s hands paused only briefly. “Very well. Tomorrow.”
The next note from Georgiana came just as Jane finished the bandage. Nan arrived with cheeks pink from the stairs and a triumph in her manner fitting a messenger whose correspondence had not yet failed on either side.
Miss Bennet,
Nan says you threaten to observe my brother as if he were an experiment in natural philosophy. I should like to hear the results when obtained.
I laugh more easily on paper than in company. I do not know whether that is cowardice or convenience. Perhaps both.
If you do not object, I should like to know whether Hertfordshire is flatter than Derbyshire. Fitzwilliam says all counties south of us are featureless, but he has a way of believing the landscape improves in direct proportion to his own distance from London.
G. D.
Elizabeth did not smile.
The page trembled once in her hand. She stilled it at once, but not before Jane looked up.
Hertfordshire.
So, he had told his sister. Or Jane or Mrs Hadley had let it fall again on other ears, without understanding what she spent.
“Elizabeth Bennet” first, the place of her birth next, then some neighbour, some servant, some passing traveller with a good memory and an idle tongue would hear them both together.
Every careful mile of secrecy began to look childish beside the ease with which a household might undo her.
She must get away.
The thought came as sharply as pain. It was answered at once by the weight and heat of her own body, by the leg stretched helpless beneath the blankets, by the simple fact that wanting and doing had become two different countries.
“Miss?” asked Nan, more softly.
“What did Miss Darcy say?” Jane asked.
Elizabeth yielded it. Jane read the lines that concerned Hertfordshire and frowned, not with suspicion but belated recollection.
“Oh. She is curious. That is… well, that is very generous of her, Lizzy, to ask about…” Jane’s brow furrowed as she stared hard at Elizabeth. “She seems a kind girl.”
Elizabeth lifted her eyes to her sister’s face and saw the instant understanding reached her. Not all of it. Jane did not know everything that was feared or followed or hidden. But enough.
Nan looked from one to the other. “Have I said something wrong?”
“Miss Darcy must not suppose me so devoted to county pride,” she said lightly. “If we begin a debate of Hertfordshire or Hampshire versus Derbyshire or Yorkshire from floor to floor, we shall have the whole house at war before supper.”
Nan looked alarmed. “I did not mean—”
“No, no. You meant only to carry a letter, and did it very well.” Elizabeth produced something near a smile.
“But if Miss Darcy asks again, you may tell her only that flat countries have their uses, mountainous ones their vanity, and Mr Darcy is unjust to both when he puts the north against the south so. Let us say no more of featureless counties.”
Nan bobbed a curtsey. “Yes, miss.”
Jane gave Elizabeth a look that said she was not deceived, though she did not know by what. Nan went out with the note still in her hand, walking more carefully than she had entered.
Jane waited until the door had shut.
“Lizzy.”
Elizabeth kept her eyes on the counterpane. “It was nothing.”
“It was not nothing.”
“No,” Elizabeth said after an instant. “But it was not Nan’s fault, and not Miss Darcy’s either.”
Jane came nearer. “What would you have me do?”
The question touched her more nearly than inquiry might have done.
“Only be careful,” she said. “About where I am from. About me… us, rather, since we are now widely known to be sisters. I cannot make it plainer yet.”
“Be careful of what, Lizzy?”
“I only mean that if anyone asks too much—”
“No.” The word was not loud, but it stopped her. Jane almost never spoke so. “Do not give me a fragment and call it an explanation. I have been patient, and I know you are hurt, and I know you are frightened, but I cannot help you with shadows.”
Elizabeth stared at her. “Jane—”
“Whatever this is, we had better hope you are granted a miracle. Because you cannot run, you cannot leave, and you will not tell me what pursues you.”
Elizabeth drew a breath to answer.
“No,” Jane said again, more tired than sharp now. “Do not. I know half of it will be left out or untrue.”
Elizabeth’s mouth fell slack. “Jane, it is not for want of trust in you!”
Jane only sat back in her chair, took up her sewing, and set the needle through the cloth as if she had not heard.
“If you mean to keep this secret, keep it,” she said.
“But then let us hope your leg mends fast, for I see no other miracle likely to serve us.” She bent again to her work and would say no more.
She watched Jane’s needle pass in and out of the cloth with a harshness that was almost reproach. The room had grown smaller since the quarrel. Even the fire was unwilling to interfere.
At length, Jane set the sewing aside, rose, and went to the little table. “You should take more laudanum before you sleep.”
“I am not certain I shall sleep.”
Jane turned with the bottle in her hand. “Then you should take it before you fail to.”
Elizabeth tried for levity and found none. “You are very tyrannical tonight.”
“Yes.” There was no softness in the word. Jane poured a little into the spoon and came to the bedside. “Take it.”
Elizabeth obeyed so far as opening her lips.
The taste touched her tongue, bitter and familiar.
She swallowed just enough to satisfy the eye, let the rest lie hidden an instant in her mouth, and when Jane turned to set down the bottle, she caught the edge of the handkerchief by her throat and let the laudanum disappear into the linen instead.
Jane looked back at her. It was not belief. It was not quite accusation either. It was only a long look which said that if Elizabeth meant to be deceived, she must do it without assistance.
“There,” Elizabeth said, because silence under that gaze was worse.
Jane set the spoon down. “Try to sleep.”
Elizabeth let her head fall back against the pillow and closed her eyes at once, more from self-defence than obedience. She heard Jane resume her chair, heard the small return of the needle to its work, and kept her breathing even in hopes her sister would take the performance for success.
For some minutes, she did not sleep at all.
Pain moved through the leg in slow, malicious throbs, as if reminding her that it had not withdrawn its claim merely because the room was quiet.
The pillow was wrong beneath her neck. The sheets were too heavy where they brushed the injured limb, and too cold everywhere else.
She lay pretending to rest while every part of her body resisted it.
Yet exhaustion had more patience than pain. The fire sank lower. Jane’s sewing dwindled to something farther off. Thought loosened, broke apart, and ceased to hold together. What began as pretence altered somewhere beyond her notice into the thing itself, and she fell at last into sleep.
Some time later, Elizabeth came up out of sleep as if dragged through deep water by the leg itself.
Pain reached her before memory did. Not a mere flare, but a brutal inward wrench, hot and sickening, as though the bones had broken afresh in the dark and were grinding together under the blankets.
Her breath caught. The whole length of the limb pulsed with its own monstrous heartbeat, each throb striking upward into her hip and downward into her foot until she could not at first tell where her body ended, and the pain began.
She lay still because stillness was the only defence left to her.
Even that did not help at once. The ache kept coming in waves, each one leaving her weaker, damp at the temples, aware of the mattress beneath her as of an instrument designed for torment.
For some time, there was nothing in the world but that burning, splitting misery and the effort not to cry out and wake the house.
Then other things began, slowly, unwillingly, to return.
From above came faintly the tread of someone crossing Georgiana’s chamber.
From farther off, the closing of the study door.
Outside, the wind moved once along the eaves and then dropped.
The mere’s mineral smell lingered even through the banked fire, so much a part of the air now that she could not imagine the room without it, or herself outside the valley.
Jane had taken the chair by the hearth instead of the bedside one.
She sat with her hands in her lap and face turned to the low fire as if warmth alone sufficed.
In the uncertain light, she looked older than twenty-four and younger than she had looked that morning when grief had stood her upright like a soldier at post.
“Jane?”
“Mm?”
“When you first came to the cottage here—before I wrote—did you expect to remain long?”
Jane was silent. “No. I thought illness had its method. I thought if one did every required thing in the required order—doctor, broth, linen, medicine, prayer, patience, water, accounts, more prayer—one eventually reached the room beyond where ordinary life waited all along.”
Elizabeth’s eyes grew unfocused from the strain of craning her neck. She blinked and squinted again. “And you did not.”
“No. I reached another room entirely.” Jane looked down at her hands. “One can live in another room. One simply ought not pretend it is the old one.”
Elizabeth knew the truth she spoke too well to answer.
After a while Jane rose, came to the bed, and touched Elizabeth’s hair back from her forehead with the automatic tenderness of long sisterhood.
“What time is it?” Elizabeth asked.
“Past eleven. The rest of the house is dark.”
Elizabeth blinked again. “Then you should be asleep, too.”
“I heard your breathing change and thought you would wake soon. Mrs Hadley said the bandage ought to be changed again once you were properly roused.”
Elizabeth stared at her. “You waited up for that?”
“For that, and because I was not easy.”
Jane sat down on the bed’s edge with the basin near to hand.
In the softened light, her face looked tired enough to make the hour plain.
“I was sorry to be short with you before,” she said, not looking at Elizabeth while she folded back the blanket.
“I am still angry, which is inconvenient, but I was sorry.”
The apology, offered so plainly, went through Elizabeth worse than reproof had done. She caught Jane’s hand before it could draw away and pressed her lips to her sister’s knuckles.
“I deserved worse.”
“You generally do, when you are bent on being impossible.”
Elizabeth almost smiled.
Jane’s fingers tightened once about hers, then slipped free to the work. “Now hold still, and let me mend what I can.”