Chapter Eight
Dawnbrokeuponthevalley without colour—a slow greying of darkness, the parlour window assembling itself from nothing, the furniture’s shapes returning as light found them. Darcy still sat on the floor beside the bed, back against the mattress side, her hand loosely curled in his. She had not released him. The grip had slackened as the night wore on, the iron of the early hours giving way to a light curl of fingers, but whenever he tried to withdraw, she tightened again—a sleep-bound reflex—and he ceased trying.
He counted her breaths. He listened to the house grow cold as the temperature outside the window sank toward whatever January reserved for this valley. He listened, too, for Georgiana overhead—for a sound of her waking, or Nan ascending the back stairs to tend her, or any call demanding he leave the parlour and go up. None came. Georgiana had slept through the night, as she chiefly did now. The absence of a call was absence of crisis, a small mercy he filed among others.
The fever had not broken. When he laid his free hand on her forehead as dawn thinned, skin burned hotter than at midnight. The flush had deepened into something less like colour and more like damage—dry, tight skin, cracked lips. She had not spoken since—the fractured words of the laudanum’s shade giving way to silence, tears dried, thrashing stilled. But the stillness was not rest. It was the body conserving, spending nothing on movement, speech, or dreaming, hoarding its reserves for the fight beneath skin, in the wound, where infection consolidated.
He needed Aldridge today, not tomorrow, not when roads improved. The wound was turning. He had seen it in the dim firelight when lifting the bandage’s edge before dawn—skin around the dressing angry, swollen, heat radiating beyond fever’s general warmth. The linen was damp with something not blood. The scent was altered—still faint, still mistakable for old blood, but different—sweeter, darker—the first whisper of what Aldridge had warned him to watch for.
He withdrew his hand slowly, finger by finger, easing from her grasp as one frees a foot from a stirrup without unsettling a horse. She slept on. Her hand, released, curled on the blanket where his had been, fingers closing on nothing, holding the shape of a hand no longer there.
He rose, knees stiff from the hard floor, his back protesting six hours on boards. Crossing the parlour to the door, he opened it. The passage beyond was still dark, the house silent, first light not yet reaching these ground-floor rooms.
The steward’s office was two doors down. He knocked—not the firm summons of a man commanding a servant, but a lighter tap that would not startle a woman from sleep, yet would not allow her to remain sleeping.
“Mrs Marsden?”
A sound echoed within—movement, a cot creaking, the disorientation of waking in an unfamiliar room after insufficient rest. The door opened. Mrs Marsden stood in the gap, hair loose about her shoulders, eyes heavy with exhaustion. She glanced at him, then at the open parlour door behind him. Her face changed.
“What has happened? Is she—”
“A fever. It began during the night—I heard her cry out and went to check. She was delirious. The laudanum, I believe, combined with—” He stopped, restraining speculation. He was no surgeon. “She sleeps now, but the fever has not broken. The wound shows signs of turning. I must send for Mr Aldridge.”
Mrs Marsden passed him, entering the parlour. She approached the bed, laid her hand on her sister’s forehead, drew back the blanket, and lifted the bandage’s edge. Her face held the controlled blankness of one familiar with illness, who permitted no alarm until it was justified.
The alarm was justified. He saw it in the stillness of her hands on the bandage, the care with which she replaced the linen, the breath she took before speaking.
“Send for the surgeon at once. Norton knows the road?”
“Norton does. I will send him within the quarter-hour.”
“Tell him there is fever, the wound discharging, the surrounding skin hot beyond the general temperature.”
He went. The kitchen was stirring—Mrs Reeves tending the range, rebuilt from banked coals as she had these six weeks past, and Nan slicing bread for Georgiana’s tray at the table. He told Mrs Reeves what had occurred and asked her to delay thetray by half an hour—Georgiana could take breakfast later if Nan sat with her until the parlour crisis passed. Nan and Mrs Reeves both nodded. The household adjusted silently.
Norton was in the yard, harnessing the chestnut mare, summoned by Mrs Reeves’s back-kitchen bell the instant Darcy entered. Norton had been Darcy’s valet for nine years. He asked no questions when the gravity was clear. Darcy gave his message and the coin for the day’s expenses, then waited in the cold yard until Norton was mounted, through the gate, and down the lane at a brisk canter. The frozen ground rang beneath the mare’s hooves. Darcy watched until the horse vanished around the first bend, then returned inside.
He boiled water himself and carried it to the parlour. Mrs Marsden took it at the door. The exchange mirrored that of the broth the day before—the water received, the door gently closed, the parting of man and room. He stood in the passage, not sitting in the chair posted by the door.
An hour passed before she emerged. She had changed the dressing, washed her sister’s face, built up the fire, rolled her sleeves above the elbows, pinned back her hair in haste. In the shadows beneath her eyes and the haggard set of her jaw, he saw weariness rooted in weeks, months—a toll predating Miss Bennet’s fall, Darcy’s kitchen, and the mere. She lowered herself into the chair with the movement of one long in service, collecting debts.
He stood opposite her in the passage. The conversation was necessary but unwelcome, yet morning demanded it, indifferent to comfort.
“Mrs Marsden, I must speak of what may occur when Mr Aldridge arrives.”
She looked up, and her features had already taken on a yellowish cast. “I know.”
“The wound is turning. You have seen it. If the surgeon finds the infection beyond his instruments—” He chose his words as one testing uncertain ground, “there is a possibility he will recommend amputation.”
Mrs Marsden regarded this without flinching, revealing more of her sickroom experience than words could.
“I understand.”
“If the leg must come off, she will require recovery before moving. But once bleeding is contained and healing begun—perhaps weeks—transport to somewhere more… familiar may be possible. To your cottage, if the distance permits. Somewhere more comfortable than here, certainly. Is your husband able to assist with arrangements? I will certainly provide a carriage and a nurse for the journey, but as to the household, she will require bedding sufficient to keep the limb immobile and ample linens and… Mrs Marsden?”
Mrs Marsden’s composure broke in a way he had not observed in anyone before. The dam gave way—a fissure, a tremor, sudden collapse, silent and complete, the water pouring forth with the force of all it had been held back. Her hand rose to her mouth, and her eyes filled—not the slender tracks of permitted weeping, but a flood from emptied reserves.
“Mrs Marsden—”
