Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Darcy had been at his desk since breakfast and had written perhaps six lines.
They were the wrong six lines. He had begun a letter to his agent in Derby about the quarter-day revenues.
The letter required nothing of him but the numbers, which he had in a ledger at his left hand, and a standing civility toward a man who had known his father and did not deserve a neglected correspondent.
He had got through two paragraphs in the hour after Wainwright’s letter went into the drawer and Fitzwilliam’s into the sealed packet for Norton.
Since then he had not got through a third.
He had been listening for her.
There had been a great deal to listen for, these last two days, and none of it had been business he had any right to be listening to.
The study lay across the passage from the parlour where Miss Bennet slept and convalesced, and since the night of the rescue he had kept the settee in here rather than climb past Georgiana’s door at unchristian hours, and the arrangement had been plainly improper at the time and become, by slow degrees, something else he could not quite name.
He had heard more of that parlour in six weeks than any gentleman ought to hear of any woman’s chamber in a lifetime.
The low murmur of her voice at Mrs Hadley.
The creak of the bed when she attempted to sit up.
The catch in her breath at certain movements.
The small sounds of her eating, reading, laughing with Mrs Marsden when Mrs Marsden had still laughed.
Yesterday had been worse than usual.
Yesterday he had sat here, with Wainwright’s letter freshly in his drawer and Fitzwilliam’s freshly gone with Norton, and been obliged to listen to the tin bath being carried past his door, and the buckets of mere water, and Mrs Reeves commanding Martha along the passage as though she were provisioning a field hospital.
Then the parlour door had closed. Then he had sat at this desk unable to compose any sentence whose subject was not water, or the body in the water, or the specific indignities and kindnesses a woman at her age and in her situation underwent when a valley nurse declared her fit at last for a soaking.
He had put his hand over his eyes more than once.
He had stood. He had sat. He had opened the window for the cold of it and shut it again because the cold did nothing.
An hour into it Mrs Hadley’s voice had come through the wall—not words, he had not let himself make out words—at a pitch he had never heard from her in all the weeks she had been in this house.
Not alarm. Something quieter and more singular.
He had listened in spite of himself, and could not decipher it, and had never before heard Mrs Hadley say anything that sounded like that.
Some minutes later Old Bess’s voice had been audible in the passage for perhaps two minutes, and then gone again.
Later still—much later, near the end of the hour—Mrs Marsden’s voice had risen, briefly, to a pitch that was unquestionably hers and unquestionably not any Mrs Marsden he had heard before.
He had not caught a syllable. He had been able to hear, from the cadence, that what she was saying had the shape of an oath.
Then quiet. Then the ordinary sounds of women lifting a body from water and drying it and restoring it to a bed.
Then more quiet.
He had written no letters yesterday. He had got through the evening on the strength of not thinking about it, which was a method he had employed before on less hazardous subjects and which had served him no better now than on any of the others.
Mrs Reeves had come in before supper with the day’s reports.
The lamb was breathing easier. The copper wanted scouring and she was going to take the matter up with Ashby whether Ashby took instruction from a woman or no.
Martha was not to be blamed for the linen counts because the inventory was on Mrs Reeves’s own authority held to be four napkins light from the start of winter and no fault of Martha’s.
And—Mrs Reeves had permitted herself, on this item alone, a degree of hesitation he had not heard from her before—Miss Bennet’s leg had altered during the bath in a way Mrs Hadley did not know how to account for.
The swelling about the knee had gone down while the patient sat in mere water hot enough that it ought, by Mrs Hadley’s full understanding of what hot water did to a swelling, to have gone the other way.
Old Bess had come up and had seen it and had said she had known of two other cases in her lifetime.
Mrs Marsden had been present throughout and had not received the news easily.
Mrs Reeves had finished, waited, been dismissed, and gone.
Darcy had sat at his desk with the lamp unlit and thought about the knee he had himself seen under Mrs Hadley’s hands at intervals these five weeks.
He had thought about Georgiana, whose colour the valley had improved week by week beyond any medical account, and whose mending had tracked Miss Bennet’s in particulars that could not be attributed to coincidence unless one was a man determined to attribute them so.
He had thought about the mere lying dark in the middle of his property, a body of water whose name had been printed in a Chancery circular and whose workings his own steward could not explain.
He had thought about the woman in the parlour across the passage, who by Mrs Reeves’s account had received from that same water an answer her sister would not receive.
If she went, that answer went with her. He was not certain of much, at the end of that hour with the lamp still unlit, but he was certain of that.
And yet she could not stay.
Today he had heard the parlour door open twice, and each time had caught himself setting down the pen. The third time he had refused to set it down, and that was the time she came.
It was past three when the tap-thump of her crutch came down the passage—the hard set of the wood, the half-step of the sound foot following the swing, the small silence at the study door while she gathered herself to knock.
He knew the rhythm. He had been hearing it from across the passage for a week.
She knocked.
He stood before he had decided to stand.
“Come in.”
She came in on the crutch, the skirt of her morning gown pinned up at one side to keep it clear of the wounded leg, a shawl about her shoulders that he recognised as one of Mrs Marsden’s.
Her colour was high from the effort of crossing the passage.
Her eyes went first to the fire, then to the desk, then to him, in that order, as though she were cataloguing the room before she looked at the man in it.
He had wanted the first glance to cost him nothing.
It cost him everything he had prepared.
She was walking better than yesterday. The crutch was in her right hand now instead of under the armpit.
She was using it as a brace, not a pillar.
The wounded foot touched the floor once between swings.
At the sill of the door, while she worked the crutch around the threshold, she balanced on the sound leg without hesitation—the balance of a body beginning to be trusted again by the person inside it.
“I did not mean to interrupt your correspondence.”
“You have interrupted nothing that was proceeding.”
“Then I have interrupted your refusing to proceed, which is even more unforgivable. May I sit?”
“Please.”
She crossed to the chair opposite the desk—four small swings of the crutch, the last one braced by a hand on the back of the chair—and lowered herself carefully, sparing the wounded leg.
She no longer flinched in the lowering. That was new.
The wounded leg she eased straight out in front of her on the footstool he had, without thinking about it, kicked into position before she had cleared the desk.
He observed he had done this only after she was resting her leg on it.
She had seen him do it. Her mouth lifted slightly at one corner.
“You are very well-drilled, Mr Darcy.”
“Mrs Reeves holds drill in this house thrice daily.”
“She has been at you, then.”
“She has been at everyone. I have been easier to reach than some.”
Elizabeth regarded him longer than the exchange required. Then she said, in a lighter voice than he was prepared for, “Sir, you have been so invisible these two days that I was beginning to think the house had swallowed you. Has the study become its own county?”
He had meant to answer this kind of thing stiffly. “It has lately been a county requiring a degree of administration I had not anticipated.”
“Mm. Correspondence of such character that it requires a man of your size to remain pinned behind his desk for thirty-six hours? I hope nothing disagreeable.”
“Nothing disagreeable,” he said.
“Well. I am glad of it. I came to ask a favour.”
“By all means.”
Elizabeth’s eyes lifted to his. “I should like to walk to the mere.”
He did not at once answer.
She had said the word as anyone in the house said it—the nearest body of water, the one that had broken her leg in January. She did not know it was also the word written out in black ink on the paper in his drawer.
“To the mere,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Only to the mere, or to the lower meadow, or the full length of the eastern path?”
“To the water’s edge, I think. I should like to stand on it briefly. Then turn round and come back.”
“Alone?”
She gave a short laugh. “No, Mr Darcy. Mrs Hadley would have me drowned in the bath if I attempted alone.” A very slight hesitation. “I came to ask whether you would walk with me.”
There it was.
He had known she would ask. He had known from the instant he heard the crutch coming down the passage why it was coming.
A woman in her condition did not cross a floor she did not need to cross except to deliver a specific request, and he had been the person to whom she would deliver it for a month now.
It was not guesswork. It was arithmetic.
He waited a breath before answering, for the same reason a man waits a breath before drinking what he has reason to suspect is poisoned.
“And Mrs Marsden,” he said. “Is she agreeable?”
The hesitation was small. But it was there.
“Jane is—Jane has reservations. She is cautious where my leg is concerned, which is her privilege and her duty both, and I have told her that I mean to prove the leg in the shortest walk I can devise. I should be very grateful if my escort were a person she could trust to bring me back promptly if the leg proves the caution was warranted.”
“It is warranted. The last time you tried to leave this house—”
“I was trying to run away from the mere. She studied his face for a moment, letting him consider. This time, I propose to go toward it. To answer… whatever it is I must answer for.”
He watched her.
She was not lying, he saw. She had selected. Chosen the words most likely to provoke him into agreement.
He noted also that she was watching him with a degree of hope she had not entirely concealed. Her hand had come to rest on the crutch where it leaned against the chair, and the fingers had tightened very slightly on the wood.
“I should be glad to walk with you,” he heard himself say.
The fingers loosened on the crutch.
“Tomorrow?” she said.
“Tomorrow, if the weather holds. Mrs Hadley will give her opinion of the sky at breakfast and we may be guided by her.”
“You are very obliging, Mr Darcy.”
“I am, occasionally, useful.”
“Only occasionally?”
“I economise my usefulness. It lasts longer that way.”
She laughed—the short, low laugh he had heard at intervals over the past six weeks and never grown used to, the laugh that belonged to a woman who had been at ease in drawing rooms before his and would be at ease in drawing rooms after.
It went through him exactly as it had always gone through him.
He permitted himself to name it—once, coldly, as one names a recurring symptom—and moved on.
She began to rise.
She did it awkwardly. The crutch caught on the footstool and threatened to twist under her, and she made a small sound of vexation, and his hand was at her elbow before he had decided his hand should be anywhere.
He took her weight for the second it took her to find the crutch, and she leaned against his arm in that second and the second after it, which was longer than she needed to.
She did not mean anything by the second extra second. He knew she did not. Her balance was not yet what it was. She was simply taking help where it was offered.
“Thank you,” she said, placing the crutch under her properly and stepping back.