Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
The morning after he had carried Miss Bennet back to the bed she should not have left, Darcy woke at an hour he could not afterwards have described as either late or early, and discovered that he had not in fact slept at all.
What came back to him first, at the edge of whatever dawn it was, was the sound of his own voice in the parlour the evening before, asking her to move the leg—show me how it moves—and then his fingers pressed lightly, then more firmly, against the two places blood would first reach muslin if anything underneath had torn, and the clean fingers drawn away.
Clean. He had pressed a leg that four weeks ago he had carried into the house half-frozen and broken open to the bone, and the muslin over the wound had been dry.
That image, by itself, he might have made behave.
The other image he could not, by any discipline, make behave.
It came back to him without his asking. The nightgown that had moved when she fell and had not returned to its proper place.
The line of her sound leg from above the knee down.
The bareness of her skin in the firelight.
His own forearm crossing the inside of her shin, where it had been resting unattended while he tested for blood at the bandage.
The instant, when he had looked at last at his own hand, in which he had not at once moved it.
Three seconds. Four. He had looked at her exposed knee for the time it took a sensible man to count to four, and had not been counting.
His discipline had not stopped him. The sight of the colour rising in himself had.
He sat up in the dark. He could not stay in the bed with the image.
There was a response his body had in answer to it that he had no use for and no business owning at the present hour, in the present house, where the woman in the image was a guest under his roof with a broken leg and a sister upstairs, too far removed for true decency.
He had been examining her because the bone might have torn again.
He had no claim, in law or conscience, to have seen what he had seen, and no right at all to be carrying it like this in his mind.
He stood. He walked to the window. He drew the cold of the glass against his forearm and held it there. The image came back. And his body's answer came back with it.
He had gone down at three because he could not stay upstairs with it.
He had stood at the parlour door a long minute.
To enter, at three in the morning, was a thing he would not do.
He stood because the quiet on the other side of the door was the one quiet in the house that had any meaning for him, and he could not, for reasons he was not ready to examine, be away from it.
The small sounds of Miss Bennet turning in her bed had been audible to him only because he was standing nearer the door than any gentleman ought. At four, he had gone back upstairs.
The rest of the night he had spent rehearsing, against his will, what he knew about broken bones.
The fibula. The tibia. The femur. The malleolus.
He had recited them as a man recites a prayer he has lost faith in, hoping that the recitation will do the work of the belief.
Sometimes it worked. More often, somewhere between the malleolus and the next breath, the image of the bare knee came back unbidden, and so did the body's response, and he began the recitation again.
He knew that a fracture such as Aldridge had first described—the tibia driven against something unyielding under the ice, the wound taken in the thigh from the same blow—required the better part of two months to heal in a strong man under the best conditions a surgeon could contrive.
He knew what the colour of such a wound looked like in its first week, because he had seen it.
He knew what the colour looked like in its second, because he had been present when Mrs Hadley had changed the dressings.
He knew what the colour looked like in its third, because he had pressed the bandage for blood twelve hours ago and the fingers had come back clean.
None of the things he knew about such injuries agreed with any of the other things he knew.
A leg did not close in three weeks. A woman did not stand on such a leg at four weeks and walk.
A bandage pressed firmly over the site of the fracture did not answer with clean muslin.
These things were, in the ordinary courses of English medicine, not difficult to describe because they did not occur.
He did not know what to do with a woman he was housing who was healing at a pace his training in the ordinary arithmetic of bodies had no answer for.
He got up. He dressed and went out.
Mrs Reeves was in the kitchen, flour to the elbows. He asked her if Miss Bennet had passed a quiet night. Mrs Reeves said she had slept better than expected. He did not ask what she meant by expected.
He went back into the study and wrote to Aldridge in Bakewell.
The letter ran to three lines. He did not say why he wished Aldridge to return. He said only that Miss Bennet had been uneasy and that he would value the surgeon’s further opinion at the earliest convenient hour. He sealed it and gave it to Hadley’s boy and watched him ride out through the yard.
Then he stood in the yard for another minute and looked at nothing.
Because the truth was that he did not wish Aldridge to return either.
He wished Aldridge to confirm what he had already half-concluded in the small hours, which was that the leg was not simply mending but mending in excess of what mending ought to be.
If Aldridge confirmed it, Darcy would be obliged to do something with the information.
If Aldridge denied it, Darcy would be obliged to consider whether he had begun to see things in his own house.
Neither course led to any hour of that day in which he would sleep better than last night.
Mrs Hadley came at ten with the crutches.
She had been told, by Darcy, in a study interview engineered to resemble consultation about the lower carrier rather than what it was, that Miss Bennet was soon to be taught the use of aids.
Standing while supported, he said, ought to improve the circulation in her good leg only, while the other remained splinted and immobilised, safe from bearing weight.
Mrs Hadley had raised one eyebrow, said nothing, and agreed.
Whether she was persuaded by the plausibility of his account or by his own unwillingness to be questioned upon it, she did not disclose.
She measured the crutches against her patient’s height, pronounced the height workable, delivered her instruction with the brevity of a woman who had trained rougher hands, and told Miss Bennet the first rule of crutches was humility.
He watched from the passage.
Miss Bennet received the rule with a gravity that would have moved him on any previous afternoon. Today it could not. His mind was still in the yard at nine, sealing a letter he had not wanted to send about a leg he could not explain.
Then Mrs Hadley unwrapped the bandage for her inspection.
He had positioned himself where he could see. He was not proud of having positioned himself where he could see. He had, however, done it, and he now saw what Mrs Hadley saw—what, on his walking into the parlour, he had to school his face out of an ungentlemanly unmasked response to.
The wound that on the afternoon of the ice had opened the thigh from mid-way to knee in a manner Aldridge had counted five separate tears within was, at three weeks, a single united line.
Pink at the edges. Clean through the middle.
The colouration a solid month ahead of where it ought to have been, and the tissue round it behaving as flesh did when flesh had reached an understanding with itself that none of the authorities in the passage or the parlour could explain.
“Well!” Mrs Hadley breathed.
Miss Bennet did not look at the leg. She looked across the room at Darcy, once, with an expression he was also unprepared for—an expression that asked him, plainly, not to speak.
He did not speak.
Mrs Hadley wrapped the leg again and said, “We shall need the bandage less tomorrow.” She was not a woman given to pronouncements in the hearing of patients, and Darcy understood that this one had escaped her. She gathered her basket and went.
He stood in the passage. His hand was against the wall.
That was the first day.
The second and third days were easier and worse at once.
They were easier because Miss Bennet practised under Mrs Hadley’s eye at noon and at six.
She had chosen those hours because they were the times when her sister would go out, and between those hours kept, more or less, to the bed.
The particular paralysis of the first day—the surgeon not yet returned from Bakewell, the bandage not yet reinspected, the leg not yet pronounced upon by any voice Darcy was willing to call authoritative—held in abeyance for two days.
They were worse because in the hours between Mrs Hadley’s visits he began, against his better judgment, to understand.
It was at breakfast on the second day that he understood Georgiana.
She had come down to the table at an hour she had not held, before Miss Bennet, for most of the last three months.
She had done so without being coaxed, without Nan’s elbow at her back, without the small white line round her mouth she had worn every morning of October and November.
She passed him the toast and teased him, in a voice Darcy had not heard his sister employ since the spring, about the colour of the blue shawl matching his eyes better than hers, so he ought to be the one wearing it.
The laugh had breath behind it. The laugh had colour behind it.
The laugh was the laugh of a sixteen-year-old girl, not a convalescent in her sixth month of decline.
He sat with his tea and watched.