Chapter 21 #2
The winter light came through the glass with the tired quality the hour always had, pale and low and declining to be admired.
She had looked at it perhaps a hundred times in three weeks.
She had looked at it more often than she had ever, in any previous life, looked at any view.
And because she had looked at it a hundred times without doing anything about it, she was growing aware of a second, harder fact that had been ripening beneath the first.
She did not know whether her own leg was still hers.
Nearly four weeks of other people’s hands.
Almost four weeks of a body held open for inspection, cleaned like a plate, dressed like a doll.
Mrs Hadley’s palm at her ankle. Aldridge’s fingers at her knee.
Jane, Mrs Bannon, Nan—every woman in the valley had, by now, taken a turn at the limb that had once carried her three miles across a field before breakfast. Somewhere in the procession of careful strangers the leg had stopped being a thing that did what she asked and become a thing others made decisions about.
And yet she knew something else, too—something no one had asked her and she had not volunteered.
Every time Jane laid the mineral cloth against the bandage, the wound answered with a warmth that was not the water’s warmth.
A second heat. A quiet exact activity beneath the skin, as though the flesh were being worked on by some intelligence below the instruments of any surgeon in Derbyshire.
She had said nothing of it out of caution.
She was not certain the experience was reliable, and less certain how to describe it without sounding credulous.
But the thing had been consistent for a fortnight, and Aldridge’s own astonishment, last week through the open study door, had confirmed in a professional voice what her body had been telling her in a private one.
Something was mending her faster than medical wisdom allowed for. The household had continued to treat her as if the margin were Aldridge’s to govern rather than hers to test.
The next part of the thought she refused to say plainly even to herself, because once said it could not be unsaid. But it was there. She needed to know.
She sat up.
The movement was answered by a hot ache from mid-thigh to heel, but the ache stopped short of the white wall it had once been.
She had not feelt that horror for days. This, she could think through.
She could think past it. She waited until the pain dimmed to the small familiar torment she had learned to carry, and drew the coverlet back.
The bandaged leg lay bulkier than its twin—stiffer, swaddled, wrong to look at. For an instant it was not hers at all. She had a wild, undignified thought that she might have to be introduced to it afresh, like a cousin last seen as a child.
Very well, she told it. Let us see how much of you is still mine.
She swung the good leg over first—easy, nothing.
Her good leg remembered how to be a leg.
Then, with a care so slow it surprised her out of her own breath, she slid the other after it.
The wound answered with a shuddering protest but nothing extraordinary.
She had asked it a question and it had not refused.
She set her foot to the floor.
Cold through the stocking. The small, completely ordinary sensation of a floor beneath a foot.
She had forgotten, in the purely bodily sense, the plain physical knowledge of a floor beneath a foot.
Her throat tightened absurdly. She was ridiculous.
She was going to weep at the temperature of the parlour floorboards.
The wounded foot she rested only on the ball. Pressure without weight. The leg confirmed, with brief reluctant candour, that it was there. Intact. Waiting for instructioins.
That was not the same as its being hers.
She put both hands to the bedpost and pushed up.
For a single luminous instant, the world gave no trouble at all.
The good leg took her weight, the wounded one bore a portion it had not borne in weeks, heat bloomed under the bandage—warning, not yet pain—and the parlour, which had been a ceiling and a fire and a row of tiresome objects arranged within her sight, became all at once a room that could be crossed.
She was standing.
The word was so small and so outrageous that she had to press her lips together to keep from laughing aloud at nothing.
A grown woman, upright on two feet in her own chamber.
The commonest act of the human species. And she stood there clutching a bedpost as if she had just recovered the use of a continent.
The window was eight feet off. The chair by the writing-table was four.
From her new vantage both distances looked generously conspired against her—the floor sloped where no slope had been visible from the bed, the carpet’s edge was a small Alpine pass, the fire, rearranged into a squatter creature by the change of perspective, had repositioned itself on purpose to obstruct her.
She set her jaw and braced her hand on the bedpost. The whole of her body sang, at one pitch, with the astonishing fact of its verticality.
If this was all she got, it was already more than the household had offered her.
If this was not all she got—
She thought of Jane coming to this bedside every morning for twenty-six mornings with that same controlled face.
She thought of Mrs Hadley’s disapproval.
She thought of Darcy, who had kept every bargain with a gentleman’s dedication to duty, and would disapprove of the present venture from the first step.
None of them had asked her whether she was willing to spend a month inside another woman’s idea of her own condition.
She let go of the bedpost.
The first step was slow and mostly successful.
The second was less successful and more necessary.
By the third she had reached the chair, her hand closing over its back with a grateful ferocity the chair had not earned in any other way in the weeks it had occupied this parlour.
Her breath came short. The wound was giving her warnings she could not now pretend away.
The window was still four feet off. She thought, recklessly, that four feet was scarcely a distance at all.
She thought, more carefully, that the first four feet had been the easier and the second four would not be.
She thought, underneath both, that she had not come this far to turn back at a chair. She had come to a window.
She took the first of the four. The second foot had barely committed when her weight went wrong.
It was the sound leg that gave. She would trace the fault backwards afterwards, at leisure enough to see it clearly—that the leg she had trusted through weeks of holding still was less prepared for turning than the one she had been negotiating with every day, and that a knee which had not been asked to do anything for almost a month had forgotten how to refuse an instruction from a mistress in a hurry.
She turned too fast. The sound knee gave without warning.
The chair, which had never been party to a fair alliance with her weight to begin with, went with her.
She heard herself cry out—a small sharp sound that did not sound like her and for which she would have been humiliated in advance had she known it was coming—the chair went out from under her—and after that the ordinary laws of falling arranged themselves with tremendous efficiency.
The chair went over against the fender with a wooden crack.
The brass inkstand on the writing-table followed it to the floor.
She was on the carpet before the idea of falling had quite completed itself in her mind, her wrist bent beneath her, her wounded leg tucked at an angle she did not yet have the courage to examine, the pain arriving in a white flash that closed out the parlour entirely for whatever interval pure pain required.
When she could see again she was staring at the underside of the chair.
The parlour itself had gone very loud and then very quiet.
A door in the passage flung open. Footsteps crossed the passage at a pace no gentleman would permit himself inside a house. The parlour door came open so hard that it bounced lightly against the wall.
“Good God—”