Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
He was on the floor with her before the exclamation had completed.
She had never seen his face from this angle, and in almost four weeks she had never seen his face assembled in this particular order.
His hands went to her at once—her shoulder, her ribs, the uninjured leg—with the hurry of a man who had once carried her out of a freezing lake and had learned then, with a clarity he had not forgotten, how fast a body could be lost if one did not act at once.
“Are you—”
“I am not worse!” She caught at his sleeve to interrupt the checking. “Mr Darcy—listen to me. I am not worse than I was. Listen.”
His hand stilled on her shoulder. His face did not look persuaded.
"The wound did not open," she said, rapidly.
It mattered that this was the first thing.
"The bandage is intact. I would know if it had gone.
It was not the bone. The bone held through the whole crossing—standing, the three steps to the chair, the two after.
It was the other leg. The sound leg. Weeks of lying still has done what weeks of lying still does, and when I turned too fast the knee of the leg I have not been thinking about gave me no warning, because I had not been asking anything of it.
The chair was no foundation for what followed.
I did not land on the wound. I landed on my side. The wrist is turned. Nothing more."
He looked at her a long while without speaking.
One hand at her shoulder still. The other, now, had gone to the wounded leg and was tracing the position of the bandage, the shape of the thigh, the line of the bone beneath.
She held very still. She had just asked to be believed and could afford no motion that would argue against it.
The nightgown had moved when she fell, and again when she had braced her sound leg against the chair, and the cool of the air on her knee told her it had not come back into proper place.
His arm crossed the bare skin of her sound shin to reach the bandage.
The contact was incidental. Both of them were attending to the bone.
"The bandage?"
"It is not wet. Is it?"
He pressed, lightly, in the two places blood would first reach muslin if anything under had torn. Then again, more carefully. He brought his fingers back and looked at them. Clean.
"No."
"The bone?"
"Show me how it moves."
She moved it—a small tentative flex, a small extension.
The pain was substantial but it was not catastrophe.
It was nothing like the explosive agony of the surgery morning.
She could bend the knee and unbend it, as she had been doing in small private rebellions for a week, and the leg did what a mending leg did and not what a broken one did.
He watched the movement with an attention that pressed upon her body. Then he placed his hand at her ankle and rotated it a quarter turn, waiting for her breath to catch. It did not catch worse than she could hide.
"You can move it without grinding?"
"I can."
"You are certain?"
"I am certain, sir. The leg held through the whole of it. It did not fail me. The other did."
He closed his eyes briefly. Whatever passed across his face in that interval she could not read in full, but something in him yielded, and the hand at her shoulder eased. When he opened his eyes again the fear that had brought him through the door at a run had banked but not gone.
He looked at the foot he was holding. He lowered it to set it to the carpet, and his eyes went with it—down the line of the bandage, past the bandage, to the place where the nightgown had stopped on the sound leg, much nearer to him than the medical question had required him to look.
She saw his face change.
His forearm had been resting along her bare shin without his attention. He looked at it. He looked at her exposed knee. His eyes did not stay there; they moved on at once. But she saw that they had been there.
Colour rose at his throat, not much, only what could not be commanded. His hand left her shin. His hand left her shoulder. He had been kneeling beside her like a man with a task, and now he was kneeling beside her like a man who had only at this instant taken account of where he was.
She did not look down. To look down would be to acknowledge. To pull at the nightgown now would be to acknowledge twice. She kept her eyes on his and did not move.
"Miss Bennet," he said, "you have placed me, at this instant, in a position from which I do not yet know how to proceed."
"I know," she said quickly. "And I am about to ask you to be in it more thoroughly still."
“Miss Bennet—”
“Listen. My sister is coming.”
His head came up at once.
From above, across the boards of the upper floor, came the quick uneven tread of a woman who had been sitting still and was no longer—the unmistakable progress of someone crossing a bedroom toward a landing, stopping at a door, and deciding.
“She heard the fall,” Elizabeth said. “She is not far. Half a minute. Perhaps a little more, if Georgiana needed reassuring before she left the chair. Mr Darcy, please—I am asking you a favour whose cost I understand. If she sees me on this floor she will never permit me to attempt anything in this parlour again unsupervised. I will lose what I have gained. I will lose the fortnight’s mending I have begun, lately, to call my own. ”
“Miss Bennet. She is your sister. She has a right—”
“I am not asking you to deceive her.” Both of them knew this was not quite true.
“I am asking you to help me not to undo her. She has already carried almost four weeks of me on the point of dying. Every morning she has been given the one scrap of news she can hold—that I did not die in the night. I am asking you for one favour. Help me to the bed before she comes in. I will answer for this, to her, afterwards, in any terms you require. But not now. Not from the carpet. She will not survive another week of this kind of fear, and neither will I.”
“Miss Bennet, you are asking me to lie for you.”
“I am asking you to be quick.”
From the upper landing came the small telltale creak of the loose board on the second step down—which Jane had learned, over three weeks, to avoid when Elizabeth slept, and evidently had not troubled to avoid now. She was on the stair proper, and she was coming down in haste.
Darcy looked at Elizabeth once more. The face was not calm. It was also making a choice he had not, upon crossing the threshold, expected to be asked to make today. “Put your arms around my neck,” he said. “Quickly.”
“Thank you—”
“Thank me later.”
She did as he instructed. He slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and rose—and now the lift had no composure in it at all, only speed, because the boards at the turning of the stair had given twice and Jane was halfway down.
He crossed to the bed in three strides and set her on it with less gentleness than she had been handled with since Mrs Hadley had first laid hands on her.
He did not, in the half-second after he had laid her down, take his hand from beneath her shoulder at the speed his other hand had moved.
The other hand had already gone to the coverlet.
This hand, the one beneath her, stayed where it was for the breath he could spare it.
The press of his thumb at the back of her shoulder came through her, and the rest of his hand under her, and the perfect stillness with which he held both.
Then the hand left her and the coverlet came up over her legs by the brisk efficiency of a housekeeper clearing a table.
He crossed to the fender, righted the chair, returned it in one motion to its place by the writing-table.
With his other hand he scooped up the brass inkstand and set it on the desk.
His foot, in the same passage, nudged the survey map he had dropped on entering so that it came to rest folded near the fender as though it had been laid there on purpose.
He was standing by the fender with the map in hand, a gentleman who had just that instant come in at an ordinary pace, when the parlour door opened.
“Lizzy—what happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Darcy said, before Elizabeth could draw the breath to lie competently on her own behalf.
“I came in for the survey sheets and struck the fender going past, and the inkstand and the chair went with it. I am very sorry, Mrs Marsden, for the din. Your sister was dozing and is startled but not harmed. I shall convey my mortification to Mrs Reeves when I am next in the kitchen. There was no occasion for you to harm yourself rushing downstairs.”
Jane looked from him to Elizabeth. From Elizabeth to the fender. From the fender to the righted chair and the folded map and the inkstand in its place.
“I heard a cry.”
“My own,” Elizabeth said, and was never in her life more grateful for the absolute technical truth of the English language—a cry had been hers.
“Mr Darcy was more alarming in his arrival than he intended. I am not hurt. I am only—” She let her head fall back against the pillow with an impersonation of weariness a part of her privately disliked. “I had been dreaming.”
Jane’s eyes did not leave her face for a long interval. Then she crossed to the bed and laid the back of her hand to Elizabeth’s forehead.
“You are warm.”
“I was dreaming badly.”
“You are not hurt?”
“I am not.”
Jane looked at her a second longer. Whatever she weighed in that interval she weighed against several years of knowledge of her sister’s faces, and whatever she concluded she kept for herself.
She had opened her mouth to speak again when the knock came at the back door.