Chapter 22 #2
It was not a knock requiring answer by any ordinary household order.
It was three short raps followed by a fourth—the Hadleys’ signal for haste—and Martha, who had been in the scullery, came into the passage so quickly that her slippers made no second sound on the boards before she was at the parlour door.
“Mrs Marsden—it’s the Pemberton boy. From the cottages. Mrs Hadley sends word Tom’s fever has turned and she must have the poultice you were wrapping before she was called out, and the boy’s on the step and he was told not to come in out of the cold and he’s on the step nonetheless.”
Jane went very still.
Elizabeth saw in her sister's face the quick transit of every calculation a widow trained in sickrooms made without effort.
Tom Pemberton was six, thin in October and thinner in January.
The poultice lay half-wrapped on the kitchen table; Mrs Hadley had been summoned out before Jane could finish the linen.
A fever turned was not a fever risen—it must be answered within the half-hour or not at all.
The boy at the step was cold and would be colder standing.
The parlour she was being asked to leave contained a sister who had given her a suspicious account of a crash and a gentleman who had given her another.
The two together would keep for the half-hour the poultice would not.
“Tell him to come into the kitchen,” she said to Martha. “The wrap wants the last turn and the cord. Two minutes. He is not to stand out there another breath.”
Martha went.
Jane crossed to the parlour door and opened it wider—not by a little, but plainly, so that the whole passage lay exposed from the foot of the stair to the parlour hearth.
She turned in the doorway. Her eyes went to Darcy, once.
They did not speak the whole of what she thought, but they spoke some of it.
“Mr Darcy. I shall be at the kitchen table for two minutes finishing a poultice and then at the back door handing it to a boy whose mother is not equal to walking up here herself. Mrs Reeves is in her rooms and has instructed the household she is not to be disturbed, which I shall disturb on my way past if I consider it necessary. I trust I shall not. I trust I shall find this parlour, when I return, no more disordered than I leave it.”
“Mrs Marsden—”
“I have heard you.” The two words, low. “You may speak with my sister while I am gone, if she wishes it. The door will remain as you see it.”
She looked once more at Elizabeth—a long unhurried look that was not the look of a sister deceived—and went. Elizabeth heard her step cross the passage, quick and competent, and the kitchen door open and close upon the business that could not wait.
For a long interval neither of them spoke.
Elizabeth lay with her eyes closed because opening them would commit her to the next thing and she was not ready for the next thing.
She heard him cross, quietly, to the fender.
She heard him lay the map down. She heard him take a breath, let it out, take another.
When at last she opened her eyes he was standing at the foot of the bed, one hand on the post, the composure of the last five minutes at last failing him around the edges.
“She knows,” Elizabeth said, very quietly.
“She knows something.”
“She will not say so.”
“No.” His voice had gone lower. “She will not.” He fell silent for a moment. “Miss Bennet.” The voice was low. It was also no longer composed. “I would like, if I may, to speak to you now.”
“Yes.”
“You have taken, in the space of a single afternoon,” he said, very low because the door was open and Georgiana was directly above, “more risks with your own body than any patient I have observed recover from anything. You were alone. You were walking. Without warning. Without a companion. Without a stick or a crutch or a hand for support. Twenty feet from a bed you have not been cleared to leave, even if you were carried. Yet you were walking. While every soul in this house believed you resting!”
“I—”
“Do you understand that you could have struck your head on that fender? Do you understand that you could have reopened the wound that has cost five people an hour of labour every morning for more than three weeks to keep clean? Do you understand that I would at this instant be riding for Aldridge at a gallop on a road still half ice had anything turned a quarter inch differently in your fall?”
“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”
“Do not say yes to me as if to pacify—”
“I am not pacifying you. I am agreeing. I did not think, and I should have thought, and I am paying for it now.”
He looked at her. She could not, even with the humiliation fresh and the pain still radiating up from the leg, look away. She had earned whatever he meant to say, and she had no intention of spending her gathered breath on avoiding any of it.
He took a breath. The banked fury did not leave his face. It agreed, a second time today, to wait a little.
“You will not test alone again. That is the condition of my silence.”
“I cannot promise—”
“You will. That is the condition of my silence.”
“And what am I to do? Lie in this bed until Mrs Hadley pronounces me walkable like a lamb? I am almost four weeks buried, sir.”
“I will speak with Mrs Hadley. Not of this. Of crutches. She has been withholding them because she mistrusts your patience, which is a diagnosis I share. You ought not even be attempting movement for another month, but if you will be so headstrong, I will tell her I have observed you grow restless and suggest supervised leaning, daily, on your good leg to promote its strengthening. She will agree if she thinks the idea originates with me.”
“You will lie for me a second time.”
“I will omit for you. That is the favour I have already half performed.”
“That is not a difference you would have conceded a month ago.”
“No,” he said, very quietly. “It is not.”
She looked down at the coverlet because she was not able to do anything else with her face.
He said, after a time, “Miss Bennet. May I speak plainly?”
“It has not previously required my permission.”
“I say this because I have been thinking it since I came in, and because if I do not say it now I shall arrange it into something easier, which will be a worse service. You are unjust to yourself.”
She kept looking at the coverlet.
“You treat your body as an opponent. You have done so since the morning I met you. I understand some of the reason for it and none of the wisdom. Pain is not a defect in you. Three weeks’ confinement is not a failure of character.
Your sister has not been wronged by your possessing a leg that needs five or six more weeks.
And whatever you are running from—whatever I have not been told—is not best served by punishing the only body you have for not being fast enough. ”
She did not trust her voice to answer. She did not trust her face not to show what she had not prepared it to show.
“Is that all?” she asked after a time, and was startled by how quiet her own voice came out, and by the fact that she could not say whether she hoped he would answer yes or no.
“Is it too much?”
“No.” The word came small. “It is only more than I was prepared for.”
He stepped back. Not far. She had the sense that he had only now understood he was standing nearer the bed than a gentleman permitted himself, and that standing any nearer now would demand an explanation he would not make or a retreat he would not dignify.
“I will find Mrs Hadley before dinner,” he said. “The crutches will be in the parlour by tomorrow. You will use them when she permits it and not before.”
“Yes.”
“And you will not test alone.”
“I give you my word.”
“Your word, Miss Bennet, has lately become a matter of some interest to me.”
A coldness sank in her stomach, even as her cheeks heated. “You must be easy to interest.”
“On the contrary. I am notorious for the difficulty. You, however, have proved… an enigma, Miss Bennet. And I do not trust enigmas.”
A small half-undone breath escaped her—half-embarrassed, unexpectedly grateful for the narrow opening he had provided back into the ordinary weather between them. “I understand you, sir.”
He inclined his head. He went, and the door closed.
She lay back against the pillow. Her hand shook. The coverlet would not lie straight. The wounded leg, informed at last that the afternoon was over, reopened its account with her in full, and she let the pain come because she had earned it.
Behind her closed eyelids the afternoon reassembled in the order the body chose—his hand at her back, his chest against her forehead, the way he had lifted her without hurry because any hurry would have shamed her further.
She could not leave Northmere because of a leg.
She could not leave Northmere without carrying this afternoon out of it with her—which was only another way of saying that whatever direction her escape might one day take, she would be carrying pieces of these people inside her when it did.
She had been saved, and was grateful. She had kept a secret, and he had joined her in it.
She had been told plainly, by the one man in the house whose judgment she trusted more than her own, that she was unjust to herself.
She wished, absurdly and against every prudence, that he should say it again.
Dusk came in at the windows. Jane came down, laid the back of her hand to Elizabeth’s forehead, frowned at the warmth, and asked no question Elizabeth could not honestly answer.
The leg burned. The rest of her burned too, on a different account, untouched by pain and refusing the pretence of being a symptom.
She lay with the coverlet bunched in her fist and thought of the man ten paces down the passage who had given her his silence and asked nothing but her word.