“Mrs Marsden, before you go in, I should tell you that the injury was severe. She has borne it with remarkable composure, but do not let her rather…” He stopped, searching for the word. “Her rather flippant tongue mislead you into thinking all is in hand. Her situation is grave, and the day has been a hard one.”
“Mr Darcy,” she said, and there was nothing soft in the interruption, only a woman holding herself upright by purpose alone, “I know my sister well. If she has breath to rebuke me for delay, I shall count us fortunate.”
He nodded and opened the door.
Mrs. Reeves, who had been seated near the hearth with her work untouched in her lap, rose at once. Miss Bennet lay half turned upon the pillows, colourless still, though less terrifyingly so than at noon. Her eyes moved to the doorway, then widened.
“Jane.”
The single word did more for Darcy than any assurance the surgeon had offered. There was strength in it. Weak strength, borrowed strength, but living.
Mrs Marsden crossed the room without another glance for him. Whatever fear had travelled with her from the village vanished into action the instant she reached the bedside. She knelt, took her sister’s hand with both of hers, and bent her head briefly over the blankets before mastering herself.
“Lizzy! I am here.”
He stepped back at once. This, at last, was no place for him.
Mrs Reeves came toward him quietly as he withdrew. “Sir, shall I bring up more broth?”
He glanced once more at the sisters. Mrs Marsden was already arranging the coverlet, already asking low practical questions, already taking charge with the practical competence of one accustomed to tending where tenderness alone could not serve.
Relief went through him with such force it left him almost light-headed.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Keep it warm. Mrs Marsden will know what is wanted now.”
He drew the door nearly closed behind him and stood in the passage, listening to the low murmur within. Not alone any longer. Not solely answerable. The house had taken one burden too many this morning. It had now been given another pair of hands.
He returned to the study and sat at the desk without taking up the unfinished letter. Above, Nan had begun reading again to Georgiana, her voice rising and falling through the floorboards in patient measure. He listened to it, to the fire settling in the grate, to the altered quiet of a house that no longer depended on him alone in the parlour.
Hewenttothestudy, cold. The fire he had laid at dawn—the small fire lit in this room every morning for six weeks, the only room in the house besides the south chamber and kitchen consistently warmed—had burnt to grey ash while occupied elsewhere. He rebuilt it. The wood was dry, the tinderbox where he left it, and the fire caught on the second strike—more success than on his first day here. He had learned the trick of this grate. Several in the house. The learning had become a minor accomplishment he allowed himself to note when nothing else went well.
He sat at the desk. The letter he had tried to write for a week lay in the top drawer—the one to the doctor at Buxton, the one that resisted clear question. He took it out and read what he had written. It was no better than on Monday. He returned it to the drawer, shut it, and laid his hands on the desk.
Above, Nan had begun reading again. The words were indistinct, only the measured rise and fall of a girl reading aloud to a listener too tired for conversation since breakfast. An improvement over silence—silence signified Georgiana was sleeping, and Georgiana slept more than she should. Every hour she slept was an hour she did not use her hands, voice, or mind. The sleeping was the burden Darcy had carried since December without naming it, for naming it would admit how much of her he was losing to rest.
He closed his eyes and listened. Not six months past, the sound from Pemberley’s upper floor at this hour would have been the pianoforte. Georgiana had practised scales and exercises since she was eight. She had loved the cold keys under her fingers, the slow progress of a phrase missed the day before, the private pleasure of a corrected mistake. The pianoforte was the first thing she touched in the morning and last at night.
She had not touched the ivory since August. Her fingers had been stiff through fever, then weak in recovery. The first morning she tried—in November, on the instrument in the small drawing room—she got through four bars, wept, and had not tried again since. The drawing room at Merebank housed a pianoforte that came with the house. Darcy had checked it in his first week—out of tune, with yellowed ivory, but playable. He had not mentioned it to Georgiana, and she had not asked.
The reading continued. A small patient offering from a cook’s daughter to a girl who once played Mozart from memory and now held herself together by being read to in bed. He listened until the voice finished a passage and began another, then opened his eyes and looked around—the desk, the unfinished letter, the fire taking properly—the study was his room and had been for six weeks, the seat of his work at Merebank, which was no longer simply waiting for his sister’s colour to improve.
A knock came at the door, and he turned. “Come.”
Mrs Marsden opened the door and stood on the threshold, cloak folded over her arm, sleeves pushed above her elbows.
“Mr Darcy. Forgive me. I did not wish to disturb, but may I remove my sister’s gown? The one she wore when she fell. It is still in the parlour, wet, and it smells of—of what it smells of. I cannot bear to see her lying beside it.”
“Of course. Dispose of it however you desire. Mrs Reeves or Martha will assist—burn it, if that is best. It has done its work. She is wearing one of my sister’s nightgowns at present which she may keep, and I will see that something more suitable is arranged for her when she is ready to wear it.”
“Thank you.” She did not move from the threshold. “Mr Darcy, there is a matter I should raise before we proceed, and I would rather do so now than later.”
“Yes?”
“My sister told me you wrote the letter I received—that the surgeon was called and paid—that the splint on her leg was fashioned from a walking stick and the lining of your waistcoat—that the room she lies in was cleared in the time it took Mrs Bannon to drag a linen press across the floor. All this, Mr Darcy, you did for a stranger.”
“She was a woman with a broken leg on my land.”
“She would have died if you had taken the western path this morning instead of the eastern.”
