Not quickly. Not by anything one could have marked with a watch. Visibly, though, to anyone willing to compare the kneecap of three minutes ago to the kneecap of now. The thick blurred line of the joint was beginning to show its proper shape. Above the ankle, where Mrs Hadley had that morning pressed a finger and left a small dent that had taken more than a minute to efface, the skin was firming under the water.
Mrs Hadley pressed a finger to the same place now. Lifted it. The dent was gone almost before her hand was away.
She sat back on her heels.
“Well I never,” she said, very quietly.
She said it before she had perhaps known she would. She did not repeat it. She did not add to it. She looked at the knee and did not speak again.
Jane, holding the warmed towel across her arms, said, “That will be the warmth.”
Mrs Hadley did not answer at once. Then she said, “No, Mrs Marsden. Warmth does not take down a swelling. Warmth brings one up. I have bathed dropsied men in water hotter than this and watched their ankles fill while they sat. If that knee is reducing, it is reducing against the water’s nature, not by it.”
Jane had gone very still, the warmed towel still across her arms.
“Then the swelling was already going down.”
“Not this morning it wasn’t. I pressed it at eight o’clock and the mark held a full minute.”
“Then she was favouring it less after the lane.”
“She has been lying flat with the foot raised for three days. A flat foot has every chance to drain. It had not drained. I do not argue what I see, Mrs Marsden. I am telling you what I see.”
Jane laid the warmed towel across the back of the chair beside the bath.
There was a short silence in the parlour, filled only by the low sound of the kettle still on the hearth and the slight movement of the water where Mrs Hadley’s cloth lay against Elizabeth’s thigh.
The back door of the kitchen closed at some distance and there was a voice in the passage which Elizabeth knew.
Mrs Reeves looked at the screen and then at Mrs Hadley, and Mrs Hadley nodded once without taking her eyes off the knee, and Mrs Reeves went out.
Elizabeth heard her say, “Bess, if you’re about the lamb you may come in where the fire is,” and Old Bess’s low dry voice answering that she was about the lamb and also not about the lamb, and then the door of the parlour opened.
Old Bess did not come past the screen. She stood at its edge where she could be heard without crossing into a room where a lady was bathing.
“Miss Bennet.”
“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 thingis 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.
