He carried the tray down the passage. Mrs Marsden opened the parlour door at his knock and received it with composure returning, recovery rebuilding swiftly—both admirable and terrible, as this composure was a practiced skill, a wall rebuilt rapidly only because it had fallen often before.
Three.He came to care for the one young woman in his keeping. Now there were three.
Chapter Nine
Aldridgearrivedatnoon,grey-faced from the ride, his leather case in one hand and his temper in the other. Norton had found him between patients in Bakewell, delivered the message with the urgency of a man who had borne messages for Darcy for nine years and knew the difference between an errand and a summons, and the surgeon had come at once, which told Darcy all he needed to know about how seriously Aldridge took the wordturning.
He went straight to the parlour. Darcy followed to the door but did not enter. Mrs Marsden was already inside—had been since dawn, since the conversation in the passage, since the weeping and the revelation and the bare confession of her situation. She had rebuilt herself in the hours since. The composure was back, sleeves rolled, hands occupied. She stood at the bedside while Aldridge unwrapped the dressing, and her face, when the wound was exposed, held the same controlled blankness Darcy had seen that morning.
Aldridge’s face held nothing of the kind. He examined the wound for some time—the swelling, the discharge, the angry discolouration spreading from the site—and when he straightened, his expression matched that of a man who had reached a conclusion he did not wish to deliver.
“The infection has taken hold. The tissue around the wound is necrotic at the margins. The discharge is purulent. If the blackening spreads—and in my experience, it will—the amputation will be necessary to save her life.”
Mrs Marsden did not move. Darcy, in the doorway, gripped the frame.
“When?”
“I would take the leg today if she would permit it. Tomorrow at the latest. Every hour the infection advances brings her closer to the point where the leg cannot be taken cleanly and the risk to the patient escalates beyond what surgery can address.”
Miss Bennet was awake. Darcy had not been certain—her eyes had been closed when Aldridge began, the laudanum and fever conspiring to keep her afloat between consciousnessand sleep. But the word amputation had reached whatever depth she inhabited. Her eyes were open. The pupils were still wrong—dilated, the fever’s mark—but behind them was the intelligence he had seen on the bank, in those first terrible minutes of tending. Battered, diminished, burning with fever, but present.
“No.”
The word came from her as if dragged from the bottom of a well. Thin, hoarse, but beneath the weakness lay a force entirely disproportionate to the body producing it. She fixed Aldridge—not her leg or her sister or Darcy—and her face was white with something deeper than pain.
“No. You will not take my leg.”
“Miss Bennet—”
“I will not permit it. I will not sign. I will not consent. You will not take my leg.”
Her voice shattered on the last word—the way ice shatters into pieces that cannot be reassembled. The terror was naked and absolute—the terror of a woman who had governed herself through a compound fracture and bone-setting and a night of fever by sheer force of will, whose will had just met the one thing it could not govern. She shook—not with the convulsive shaking of fever but a finer tremor, the vibration of a body held at its breaking point. Her eyes were the worst—begging. Miss Bennet did not seem the type to beg, and the fact she did meant the woman behind the composure was more frightened than Darcy had witnessed in any living creature.
Something in his chest came apart. Not the cracking of the earlier day—the ice-fracture, the thing that broke open when she dryly joked about the leg’s opinions. This was different. This was a tearing, a rending, the sound made when pulled apart along a seam it did not know it had. He gripped the doorframe harder. His knuckles went white against the wood.
Aldridge, to his credit, did not argue. He looked at his patient with the weary patience of a man who had heard this refusal before, in other rooms, from other patients, and knew that refusal was not a medical opinion but a human one, requiring a different instrument than the bone saw in his case.
“I understand your reluctance, Miss Bennet. I will not take the leg against your will. But I must tell you plainly—if the blackening spreads past the margin I observed today, refusal will not save the leg. It will cost you both the leg and your life.”
She said nothing. Tears ran silently from her eyes into the pillow—the weeping of a woman who could not spare breath for sobs. Mrs Marsden took herhand. The grip that closed on Mrs Marsden’s fingers was the same as had closed on Darcy’s in the night—desperate, blind, the body’s last hold on something solid.
“One day.” Aldridge packed his instruments, movements brisk. “I will return tomorrow morning. If the blackening has not spread—if by some grace it has retreated—we will discuss alternatives. If it has spread, Miss Bennet, I will take the leg, whether you consent or not, because I will not watch a woman die of gangrene when the remedy is in my hands.”
He turned to Darcy. The look they exchanged was the look of two men who understood each other perfectly and wished they did not.
“A word, Mr Darcy. In private.”
They went to the study. Aldridge closed the door behind them. In the cold of the small room, with the unlit grate and the folded letter to Buxton on the desk between them, the surgeon’s professional composure slipped slightly—not to alarm, but to the candour he denied himself before the patient.
“The infection is quite serious. I will not mislead you. In seven cases out of ten, at this stage, I would take the limb at once. Much delay may cost her the option of a clean amputation above the knee. If the gangrene reaches the thigh, I cannot help her.”
“And in the other three cases?”
“In three out of ten, the body fights the infection off. The tissue stabilises. The blackening retreats rather than advances. I have seen it happen. I cannot explain why in some patients and not others. Youth is a factor. General constitution before injury. Fortune.” He said the last word with the tone of a man who did not traffic in fortune, but had recognised its existence after long practice.
“Is it safe to wait one day?”
“I would not have agreed if it were not. One day will not kill her. Two days might. Tomorrow I will examine the wound. If the margin of blackening has advanced by so much as a finger’s breadth, I am taking the leg. Her consent or otherwise. And… I will require someone to hold her. It… is not a pretty thing.”
