“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 wewalk to the mere, as a littletest, because you haveformed 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 ina 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.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Darcyhadbeenathis desk since breakfast and had written perhaps six lines.
