Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
“Bess.” Elizabeth did not trust her voice at once. Then—”Will you come nearer? There is something—Mrs Hadley says this should not be happening. And it is.”
Old Bess did not move past the screen, but her voice came a step closer.
“Mrs Reeves told me in the kitchen what was being done. I came up to see whether it was what I suspected. I will not embarrass a gentlewoman in her bath by coming round. Tell me what the nurse says.”
“That hot water does not take down a swelling. That this is going down all the same. That the—the bone itself is drawing heat from somewhere deeper than the water. I have no better words. Nor has she.”
“Aye. It has no easy words.”
“You know what it is.”
“I have seen it twice in my life. Once in a mill-girl of fourteen who had been kicked in the ribs by a carter’s horse. Once in a woman older than I was, who came into the valley to die of a chest complaint and did not. I did not expect a third. And yet here you are.”
Elizabeth looked down at her own knee in the mere water, which was now, to her eye and to Mrs Hadley’s, the knee of a woman who might in time walk without limping. She did not know how to answer that.
“Bess—what am I to do?”
“You already know, or you would not have asked your nurse to pour it on you. In my experience, Miss Bennet, what takes notice of you would rather be faced than fled. A thing is not mended by your turning your back on it from inside a house. If the water is willing to mend what it tore, you will not mend further at a distance.”
She turned from the screen. The tap of her stick went back down the passage.
Elizabeth heard her exchange a word with Mrs Reeves in the passage and then the back door again, and then the parlour held the kind of after-quiet it held when Old Bess had been in it, which was slightly thicker than the quiet before.
Jane had not moved from her place beside the bath.
Elizabeth turned her head toward her sister and said, “Jane.”
“No.”
“I have not yet asked.”
“I know what you are going to ask.”
“Then you will also know that I am going to ask it whether you answer or not.”
Jane took the warmed towel from the chair-back, laid it over the rim of the bath—carefully, because her hands had been careful with everything in this room for six weeks and were not going to fail of care now—and sat down in the chair.
She sat very upright, her hands folded in her lap because her hands wanted otherwise. She did not look at the water.
“Ask,” she said.
“When this is finished and I am dried and warm, I should like to walk to the mere.”
Jane’s head came up.
“You should like what?”
“To walk to the—”
“No.”
It was not the flat no of Jane’s usual refusal. It was the no of something arriving at its end—of a patience that had, for perhaps the first time in Jane’s adult life, stopped being willing to pretend itself further.
“You should like to walk to the mere, Lizzy? Three days ago you should like to have walked out of this valley altogether, and the ground would not have you, and you were brought back with one leg half torn off your body and Mr Darcy in such a state Mrs Reeves was giving him tea like a shock-case in the kitchen, and Mrs Hadley was closing that wound again with hands that shook, and I—” She stopped.
She would not give herself that sentence.
“And now, three afternoons later, you should like to walk to the mere. Because a woman of eighty whom you met twice has told you that water answers to those who face it, and because you have had a sensation in the bath.”
“Jane—”
“I have not finished.”
She had not raised her voice. She had not needed to. The quiet in her was pressure—pressure that had been building since the afternoon of the lane and whose seals, one at a time, had at last begun to give way.
“Look at it,” Elizabeth said again, because she did not know what else to do with the scene she had begun.
She lifted her knee slightly out of the water. The movement asked of her less than it had asked a week ago, less even than it had asked this morning, and Mrs Hadley’s hand came up automatically to brace the back of the joint, and Elizabeth leaned into the brace and showed her sister the knee.
“Jane, look. Mrs Hadley says hot water does not take down a swelling. She is the nurse. She has said it twice. I am not inventing a sensation to justify a scheme. Something is working in this leg that was not working in it an hour ago, and that something is the water I am in, and the water I am in is the water out of doors, and if I go to it directly I believe—”
“I do not believe it. I do not! Mrs Hadley may say what she likes. I am sorry, Mrs Hadley—I know you are telling me what you see, and I know you have forty years of seeing it—but I do not believe it. Hot water, cold water, mere water, conjured water, the water of Bethesda itself come north with an angel to stir it, I do not believe that walking to the edge of the thing that broke your leg is the course of any sensible patient in any century. I do not believe a woman of eighty has given you permission to risk a second injury by telling you that flight is not freedom. I do not believe your improvement in the last five minutes, of which I am very glad, very glad, Lizzy, warrants your walking out of this house on the same afternoon.”
She stood, and her arms were already crossed over her chest—not in refusal but in the gesture of holding her own ribs together.
“I have nursed you for six… seven weeks. I have washed linen that would have made a ward matron pale. I have sat beside that bed every hour Mrs Hadley was not sitting beside it and some she was. I have had my nights in the chair and my days on my feet and my meals at whichever end of the tray you had not wanted.”
She drew a breath that shook once and came clear.
“And three days ago, while I was upstairs with Miss Darcy, while Mrs Hadley was in the village, while Mrs Reeves was at market—three days ago, without a word to me, without a word to anyone, you took up a crutch I did not know you possessed, out of a room I did not know you had been practising in, and you walked down that lane. You left this house, Lizzy. Without telling me. On a leg that could not bear you. In weather that would have killed Tom Pemberton in an hour. You left me!”
The word shattered.
“You left me. In this house. In this valley. Without notice. While I was folding Miss Darcy’s shawl.
You did not come to my door. You did not knock.
You did not say Jane, I cannot stay, I must go.
You went. And if Mr Darcy himself had not gone after you—the master of this house, Lizzy, not his steward and not a groom—if he had not gone out in that weather and carried you back up the lane in his own arms, if the wind had turned one degree colder or the fall one inch different, you would have died three miles from a sister who was warming a shawl. ”
Elizabeth heard in her sister’s voice a heat she could not fully name, a pressure larger than the words themselves were carrying, a great deal that Jane was choosing not to say in this room and whose outline Elizabeth could trace without needing it spoken.
Whatever it was would come. Not today, and not before these women.
Later. In private. And she would have to bear it then.
Jane drew another breath. This one did not shake.
“And now you stand—sit, forgive me—in warm mere water with Mrs Hadley’s hand behind your knee and Mrs Reeves’s second towel ready and Martha watching you from the door as though you were a thing in a story, and you propose to me that we walk to the mere, as a little test, because you have formed a theory.
No. No, Lizzy. I do not believe it. I cannot believe it. I will not hear it.”
Mrs Hadley’s sponge lay in the bathwater where her hand had stopped moving it. Mrs Reeves had her hands folded very tightly at her apron. Martha stood with fresh linen half-raised against her breastbone as though she meant to use it for defence.
Elizabeth did not, for some seconds, speak.
“Jane,” she said at last.
“Hear me now, because I shall say it once, and I shall say it in front of everyone in this room so that I cannot afterward be persuaded to unsay it.”
“Jane—”
“If you put that leg to the ground outside this house today, or tomorrow, or while Mrs Hadley has not given her written permission, I will go. I will pack what I can carry into the smaller bag and I will walk to the Hadleys’, and if Mrs Hadley will not have me I will walk to the Pembertons, and if the Pembertons cannot take me in I will go on as far as my legs will carry me, which is further than you credit because I have not spent five weeks in a bed.
Do not suppose I will not. I swear it on our father, and on Mr Marsden, and on whatever good opinion of myself remains to me after this winter.
I will not watch you carried into this house a third time, Lizzy. I could not bear it. I will not try.”
Mrs Hadley’s hand was still behind the knee. Mrs Reeves had not moved from the door. Martha, returned with some fresh thing Elizabeth had not marked her leaving for, stood in the doorway with her eyes very wide.
Elizabeth stared. “You cannot go. You have nowhere.”
“That is my difficulty.”
“It is mine too. You know it is.”
“Then do not make me go.”
The cotton of the bath-shift clung to Elizabeth’s arms where the steam had wet it. The mere water, which half an hour ago she had taken for the clearest friend she had in this valley, held her leg with an affection she could no longer take quite so simply.
She did not answer Jane.
Mrs Hadley, after another breath, lifted the sponge once more and resumed her long slow passes over the scar as though the argument had concluded itself and the bathing-time must now proceed to its natural end.
Mrs Reeves closed the door behind Martha and began quietly unfolding a second warm towel at the fire-screen. Jane did not move from the chair.
The twenty minutes ran out in silence.
When Mrs Hadley said it was enough, the three women lifted Elizabeth out of the bath between them as they had lifted her in—Jane helping again, because Jane would not let her sister be lifted without her hand even while refusing her everything else—and Elizabeth stood dripping on the folded sheet while Mrs Reeves dried her with the warmed towel and Mrs Hadley wrapped fresh linen about the wound and Jane passed the dry shift and they eased it over her head.
She was put back into bed with clean sheets turned.
The pillow was fresh. The towel round her hair was warm.
The leg, re-bandaged, was lighter under the linen than it had been when the bandage had come off.
She was pinker than she had been in weeks.
Her mind was clearer than it had been since Hertfordshire.
Jane picked up the used towels, folded them, and carried them out.
She did not look at Elizabeth as she went.
When the door had shut behind her, Mrs Hadley straightened, considered Elizabeth a minute, and said, “She will soften. Give her the afternoon.”
“Will she?”
“No,” said Mrs Hadley, who did not believe in soft lies. “Perhaps the evening. She is the sort of woman who bleeds inwardly and must be let alone to do it. I will send up tea.”
She went out after Mrs Reeves. Martha followed with the last of the buckets.
Elizabeth lay in the clean linen looking at the ceiling.
She had her answer. The leg had told her.
Mrs Hadley had confirmed it. Old Bess had named it.
Jane had refused to stand by it, and would not stand by her through it, and had said so in front of everyone in the room.
All of that had happened in less than an hour, and all of it was now in her possession, and not one part of it was going to change her mind.
She was going to walk to the mere, but she was not going to ask Jane again. She would have to ask someone else.
There was only one someone else in the house.