But Jane was here, and Jane’s hands were on her forehead, and the agony yielded, just a fraction, enough to let the air in.
“Elizabeth.”
Jane had remained by her side since the broth, which Elizabeth had taken four spoonfuls of before nausea took hold, since the dressing change Jane performed with hands so competent and gentle that Elizabeth wept—something she had not done during the bone-setting, the splinting, or attending the man with shaking hands, but something Jane’s kindness unlocked as a key opens a door that force cannot.
“You wept for twenty minutes. Your body is exhausted. The wound is dressed and clean and need not be touched again for six hours. I am here. I will not leave this room. You should take the laudanum, Lizzy.”
“I do not want it.”
“I did not ask whether you want it. I asked you to take it.”
Jane’s voice bore the authority of an elder sister who had been gentle all her life and therefore never needed to raise her tone to be obeyed. The gentleness was the authority.Elizabeth had observed it work on servants, tradesmen, their mother—the soft certainty that what Jane requested was reasonable, that reasonable people did reasonable things, and that Elizabeth was being unreasonable about a brown bottle on a bedside table.
“If I take it, I cannot think.”
“You are not thinking now. You lie with a broken leg, grinding your teeth so hard I can hear it from across the room, refusing medicine because you believe suffering a form of control. It is not. It is suffering.”
The words had a firmness Elizabeth would have admired in another circumstance. Jane did not often speak so—direct, without the cushioning of qualification. When she did, it meant gentle appeals had been exhausted and the well of patience, deep as it was in Jane, had been drawn down to bedrock.
Jane sat in the chair Mr Darcy had carried from the passage—the hard-backed one that had stood outside the door. She had pulled it close enough to rest her hand on Elizabeth’s forehead without stretching. Her sleeves remained rolled above her elbows. Her hair, pinned when she arrived, had begun loosening at the temples. She looked tired in a manner familiar from the letters of the past six months—not the weariness of a single bad night but the accumulation of days spent tending someone who showed no sign of mending.
Mr Marsden. Elizabeth had not asked. The question lingered—since Jane’s arrival, since the sound Elizabeth had made when she saw her, since the first hour of Jane’s quiet, capable care. But the pain dragged her back into her body before the question could take shape, and Jane had volunteered no word, so the silence around Mr Marsden’s name remained unread.
Surely he was at the cottage—resting, too ill to come, preoccupied, or—she did not know. She would ask when the pain allowed her to hold a full sentence long enough to speak it.
“The laudanum will let you sleep.”
“I know what the laudanum will do.”
“Then you know that sleep is what your body requires, and refusing it to remain vigilant is not courage. It is stubbornness disguised as courage.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes. The pain persisted—the constant grinding below her knee, the heat of the wound, the deep ache radiating up through her hip into her spine. She had endured it for—how long? A day? Two? Time had lost its shape. Intervals of dark and light, the surgeon, the man with shaking hands—they existed in a sequenceshe could not reliably order. She knew the ceiling, the bag by the head of the bed, and the voice that had read through the boards all morning but ceased an hour ago.
“Jane. There is a girl upstairs in this house.”
Jane’s face moved slightly, the faint alteration of a woman revising a calculation long in progress. “Miss Darcy. Yes. Mr Darcy told me on arrival. She is sixteen. She has been ill since October. She is why he is in this valley at all.”
“What ails her?”
“A rheumatic affection following a fever. Her hands are stiff, her breathing weak, she tires climbing the stairs. London could not help. An old physician told him a tale about the Merebank waters, and he brought her north.” She paused. “He has carried water from the springs every morning for six weeks. Mrs Reeves mentioned it in the kitchen—not gossiping, but explaining what she was doing when I arrived.”
“He has been tending a sick sister.”
“Yes.”
“And now he is tending me.”
“He is not tending you. I am. He is keeping watch over the household that contains both of us. The distinction may matter to him, and we should allow him to keep it.”
Elizabeth turned her head on the pillow, despite the cost, to see her sister’s face. “How bad is she, Jane?”
“Mr Darcy said she has been unequal to much. She chose her own book this morning—he told me that, in the study, as if delivering a report to someone who understood what that meant.”
“Jane. There is something—”
“Not now, Lizzy. One thing at a time. Take the laudanum first.”
“If I take it,” Elizabeth said, “you must promise me something.”
