Chapter Twenty-Five #2
She cried out again against his coat—a small broken sound she had plainly tried to keep to herself and failed—and her face pressed briefly against his shoulder before she remembered to resist it.
“Forgive me,” he said, very low. He did not know what he was asking forgiveness for. He only knew he could not have held her without saying it. “Forgive me—stand as still as you are able. Let the pain through.”
Her breath, jarred, came unevenly against his coat, and each time she drew it a small sound caught in her throat that she mastered before it could become a word. One of her hands had closed, apparently without consulting her, in the cloth at his shoulder. “Let me go!”
“I cannot.”
“Mr Darcy—”
“Elizabeth, I cannot. You will go down if I let go of you, and you are already bleeding into the dressings. Stand. Only stand.”
“I am standing.”
“You are held upright.”
She did not answer that. He did not let her. She tried once more to straighten wholly away from him.
The wound answered with a hot pull he could trace through the arm at her back, and this time the sound she made was not small. It was the sound a woman made when she had been bearing something beyond bearing for the last hour and had at last been required to bear it a measure more.
“Enough!”
His voice dropped again at once, but what remained in it was no longer command. It was strain barely mastered, and fear barely mastered, and something beneath both that he was not prepared, in this lane, to put a name to.
“Enough. Do not punish yourself because I have seen you fail.”
She looked up at him. Her face, at that distance and for that length of time, he would be unable afterwards to put out of his mind.
“You should let me go,” she said. “If anyone sees—”
“Hadley has seen. He is at present too occupied with the bank to care how I bring you in. If the village sees, let the village see I have more sense than to leave an injured woman in a lane out of misplaced delicacy.”
“You do not understand.”
“Then make me understand.” The words came lower and harsher than he meant them, the words of a man offering rescue and asking, at last, not to be made a fool in the act of giving it.
She looked away from him toward the turn of the lane she had not reached.
“I cannot.”
His face hardened then. Not into cruelty. Into the narrower reserve that came to him whenever truth was withheld where he had asked plainly.
“No,” he said. “That, I think, has become evident.”
He bent—the movement so swift she barely protested before he lifted her.
One arm behind her shoulders, the other under her knees above the wound.
She clutched his coat because not clutching meant falling.
The blue cloak slipped partly open. Cold air struck the bandage where the dampness had begun to show.
She was sobbing now. He had not seen her cry since Aldridge brought his bone saw. “Put me down!”
“No.”
One fist beat weakly on his shoulder. “I shall hate you.”
“You may do it indoors.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
He carried her up the lane.
The house grew larger with every step, its south wall pale against the damp sky.
Below, from the meadow side, men shouted over water and wood.
A flock of rooks rose from the far trees all at once, as though some disturbance had passed unseen.
She made no more effort to argue with him.
She lay against his chest with the silence of a woman who had been stripped of every reasonable argument by her own body and had decided to conserve what small dignity she could by not adding unreasonable ones.
Mrs Reeves met them at the step with one look at the two of them and no waste of speech.
“Parlour,” she said over her shoulder to Martha. “Hot water. Clean cloths. Find Mrs Hadley if she’s not already halfway here by Providence or malice.”
Mrs Marsden came out of the passage then and stopped as though struck.
Her face went first white, then filled with a pain so swiftly mastered that only a sister could have measured the effort—though Darcy, who had been measuring her for a month, measured it too, and would not afterwards have forgotten what he saw.
“What happened?”
He answered before Miss Bennet could.
“She attempted too much ground. The wound has opened.” Not a lie. Not the whole truth.
Mrs Marsden paled, her eyes sweeping his and then her sister’s bleeding bandage. “Bring her in.”
He did.
Mrs Hadley arrived before the dressings were fully cut away, mud still on her skirts from the field and a basket always containing exactly what disaster required.
The reproof she reserved for later. First came work—clear water, pressure, examination.
When the last bandage came away she was still.
The discoloration was not the clean red-purple of fresh tearing.
It ran deeper, bruised green-black at the wound’s margins, the colour of the first terrible days after the ice, as if something had turned a fortnight’s mending back in the space of a lane.
“This is not ripped knitting,” she said at last, binding the clean layers with hands brisk and warm. “This wants to go backwards. Three days at the least, and maybe five if the inflammation rises.”
Miss Bennet, white now in earnest and with cold at her temple, said, “I am perfectly aware I have behaved like a fool.”
“Good. It saves me one speech. Not the next six.”
Mrs Marsden stood at the head of the bed holding the basin. Darcy stood farther back near the hearth, muddy at the hem and silent enough to change the pressure of the room.
When at last Mrs Hadley and Mrs Reeves conferred in the passage over poultice timing and what ought to be sent up to the Pembertons if the water continued wrong, Mrs Marsden set down the basin, turned, and looked at him.
“Thank you,” she said.
He inclined his head. “I am sorry it was necessary.”
Whatever Miss Bennet did in the bed behind him at that exchange he did not turn to see.
Mrs Marsden looked once at the mud on his coat, at the place where Miss Bennet’s hand had crushed the cloth at his shoulder, at his face, then away. “So am I.”
She went out to follow Mrs Hadley. The room, when the door closed, was emptier and less certain.
He did not come closer at once. He stood by the fire looking not at Miss Bennet but at the rain-dark window.
“Why?”
He watched the colour of her face alter as whatever pain she had held at bay, in order to quarrel with him in the lane, took proper possession of her now the quarrel was ended.
“Because every day I remain here, I put more upon you than you have any right to bear. Upon Jane. Upon Miss Darcy. Upon this house. Upon a valley already foolish enough to invent consequences where perhaps there are only coincidences. Because I am not a harmless guest who stayed too long. Because if the thing I carry breaks over your head, it will not care that you meant only kindness.”
The last sentence hung in the room like a cut rope. “There is something, then.”
“Yes.”
“And you still will not tell me what it is.”
“I cannot.”
“Cannot,“ he said, and now the anger came through—not loud, only sharpened to a blade. “Or will not?”
“Do not ask me that as if the distinction were simple.”
“It is simple where truth is concerned.”
She turned her face away. That, more than any other answer, told him how fully the blow had struck.
When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. Wounded, colder, more controlled. “I told you once I would not ask what you could not yet safely say. I did not understand that in return I was to be made party to consequences I could neither judge nor refuse—to my sister, to my house, to myself.”
She closed her eyes. “I know.”
“Do you?”
The question was not harsh. That was what made it unbearable—less for her, perhaps, than for him, for whom the years of discipline that had taught him to ask such a question plainly had no procedure to offer him for what might come next.
He drew breath.
“Rest,” he said at last. The word had gone formal, almost stripped of intimacy by effort. “Mrs Hadley will want the swelling watched. I shall see what has gone wrong below.”
He moved toward the door.
“Mr Darcy—”
He stopped. He did not turn fully. “Yes?”
There was no safe answer to an address with no sentence after it. He waited for it anyway.
“I am sorry,” she said.
He stood a short while longer. “So am I.”
Then he left.