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 likewhat?”
“To walk to the—”
“No.”
It was not the flatnoof Jane’s usual refusal. It was thenoof 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 towalk 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 asensationin 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,veryglad, 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.
“Youleftme. 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 sayJane, I cannot stay, I must go.Youwent. 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.
