It broke not in ripples—there were none—but in the surface giving up the unnatural flatness it had insisted on while he had been speaking. The grey water, which had refused to register him through the whole of his wading, registered him now, and her, and the place at his palms where the cold had been only cold and was instead a cold that was nearly warmth, and then was the warmth itself, moving up the wet of his sleeves into his shoulders and down the line of him to where his feet stood firm on the uneven bottom. Her hand on his face took the same change.
He brought his forehead to hers. His hands, where they had hung in the water beside his coat, took something the water gave them—a prickling first, then a small heat rising from the water into his palms, up his wrists, staying.
Her other hand had risen to the side of his face, and he had no memory, in the rising, of her hand having travelled.His arms were around her before he had ordered them. She put her face into the wet of his coat above his heart.
“I love you,” she said into the wool. “I have. I should have said it some weeks ago.”
What came up in him then had no word in his vocabulary. Joy was the word, but joy was thin—joy made multiple by every year he had not allowed himself to know he was waiting for it. He took her face out of the wool of his coat in both his hands and kissed her, without method, without restraint, without any care for whether he was the man he had been raised to be.
The mere brightened.
Not as morning brightens into noon—this was a brightening particular to itself, beginning at the edges where the late snow had been crusted along the bank, the snow rising from the bank in a soundless steam, the brightness moving across the surface inward to where they stood. The grey lifted. The bottom showed clear, the stones at depth visible as plain as in August water. He could no longer find their faces in the surface. The brightness had taken them.
She cried out and the world stopped. The sound went up into his coat where her face was, a sound he had not heard her make since the morning at Lambton, when the womanwho had made it had been bleeding out at the leg on a bank he could not yet reach. Not her, not now, not in his arms!
Her body went rigid against him. She would have gone under, but he caught her.
Good God, the bone had opened. The bone had opened in the cold, on a leg that had only been mending, after he had let her stand in cold water for the better part of an hour. The morning had been the lie. What he had taken for healing had been the bone giving way under cold and weight, by inches, while he had stood with her in it.
“Elizabeth, no…” His hands were already on her, already gathering her up out of the water, already arranging the wet of her cloak so it would not drag. He would carry her up the path as he had carried her down it. The doctor would be at Northmere before evening if Hadley had to ride all night for him.
“My leg!” she said. “Mr Darcy—my… myleg—”
She was laughing. He understood that an instant before he understood the laugh. Her hands had come up under his arms and were turning him, holding him in place against what he had been about to do.
“Look,” she said. “Look at it. Look!”
He looked. She had set both feet flat on the bottom of the mere—the bad foot too, weight on it, weight she had not given the bad foot in eleven weeks. Then she stamped. She stamped the bad foot into the water as if she were daring it to ring. It rang. She stamped again, and laughed at how it rang, and put her free hand against his coat over his heart again as if to keep herself upright through the laughter, and stamped a third time.
“It is well,” she said. “It is well, Mr Darcy. The leg is well!”
She looked up at him with the colour high in her cheeks and the wet of his coat on her chin and the laughter coming and going in her beyond her control. Her body was no longer broken.
Neither, this morning, was he. The eye he had been taught for twenty years to disbelieve was the eye that had carried her to him, and the woman it had carried was the woman in his arms with the laughter still on her, and they were both, this morning, where they had been meant to be all along.
Chapter Forty
Shelethimtakeher up out of the water onto the bank. The cane was still where she had set it against the willow—the cane she had walked down on, and would not walk back up on. After some breaths she said, “I shall not need that. But what I do need… I need to see Jane.”
His brows rose. “Now? But you are soaked through. Surely—”
“I need my sister. Please, I have made her wait on me long enough. Surely, I can bear a little humility for her.”
Darcy nodded and bent to help her wring the worst of the water out of her petticoat. She did not put her feet into her stockings or her boots. She put the stockings into the boots, and Darcy carried them. She drew her cloak tight at the throat for the wet, and put her arm through his, and they went.
The lane to the Hadleys’ was not long. In any other condition it would have been a thing of ten minutes. This morning she had no measure for what ten minutes was. She was a woman walking a lane, in cold air, on a leg that bore her, with her hair down and her cloak heavy with mere water and her arm through the arm of a man who had, an hour ago, told her he had been right about her and asked her to confirm it. She could not, walking, have said what time it was. She had only the lane, and the cold, and the wet at her hem, and the arm.
She had been afraid of this walk before she had set out on it.
She had been afraid since the morning Jane had sent up the note with the signature in initials, and the fear had grown through the wade and the laughter at the leg and the kiss in the water, because she had known, all the time the joy was working in her, that she had to come to Jane. Joy did not absolve her of Jane. Healing did not absolve her of Jane. Jane had been at the cottage three days now in the company of Mrs Hadley, and Jane had been weeping at hours when no one was with her, and Jane deserved what she was owed.
What Elizabeth meant to say at the cottage door she did not have words for. She had only the wish, and not a word that would carry it.
Then she heard her sister laugh.
She stopped. She put her hand on his sleeve, harder than she had been holding it.
“Mr Darcy.”
