“I know, ma’am. The water don't cure everything. But consumption is not a wound. The consumption lies in the lungs and blood and the water cannot reach it. A wound is on the surface. The water can reach a wound. I've seen it.”
The passage was quiet. Mrs Marsden looked at Darcy. Her eyes asked the question her voice would not—because her voice was occupied with the effort of not saying that the water was a lie, the hope a cruelty, and that she would not watch another loved one submit to a remedy that had already failed the one she loved most.
He looked to the closed door behind which Miss Bennet lay with fever, an infected wound, and a terror so large it had made her beg. The surgeon’s words returned—anything that would give her comfort. The tearing in his chest, the thing that had come apart when she begged them not to take her leg, was still raw and open. If the water gave her comfort—if it gave her one day of hope before Aldridge returned with his case—then the water was what she would have.
“I will bring it myself. Mrs Bannon, show me the nearest good spring on the bank. Mrs Marsden—I am not asking you to believe. I ask you to permit it.”
Mrs Marsden closed her eyes and opened them again. The composure held, but just barely.
“Do what you think is right, Mr Darcy. I have exhausted my capacity to prevent people from placing faith in that water.”
It was not permission. It was surrender. He took it because he had nothing better to offer.
Mrs Bannon led him down the slope. The January afternoon was bitter, the mere flat and grey beneath the white sky. She took him to the southern bank—not far from the birch cluster where he had found Miss Bennet the day before, the blood on the ice, the bone through the skin. The springs surfaced here, she said. The water was warmest where the limestone channelled the aquifer upward. He could see the places—faint disturbances on the surface, water moving where everywhere else was still.
He filled two buckets. The water was cold but not freezing—warmer than the air, carrying a mineral smell he recognised from the night he found Miss Bennet, the clean,old scent of water long underground. He carried the buckets up the slope, one in each hand, his boots slipping on the frozen path, water slopping against the sides.
He brought the water into the house, up the passage, and into the parlour, where Miss Bennet lay with eyes closed and hands clenched in the blankets and terror still in the lines of her face even in sleep. Mrs Marsden took the buckets silently. She heated the water on the bedroom fire—not to boiling, Mrs Bannon instructed from the doorway, just warm, as warm as the springs themselves—and soaked clean linen in it, laying the cloths against the wound, around the swelling, across the angry skin.
Miss Bennet flinched when the cloths touched her. Then she did not. Her hands, once clenched, relaxed. Her face, tight with fever and terror, eased by a degree—a fractional relaxation of the muscles around her eyes, the kind of change that might have been the water, or the warmth, or nothing at all.
It was enough. Not proof. Not medicine. Warm water from a mineral spring laid against an infected wound by a woman who did not believe in it, in a house keeping vigil over two patients, on the direction of a housekeeper who had waited four days for the right question.
He went back down the slope, filled the buckets again, carried them up—the path steep, footing treacherous, buckets heavy in hand.
On his third trip up, he sent Martha to the village with a message for Mrs Hadley. He instructed her to say that a young lady with a compound fracture lay at Merebank, the wound had turned, Mrs Bannon spoke of her knowing ways, and Mr Darcy would be grateful if Mrs Hadley could come at her earliest convenience. Martha ran. The frozen lane rang beneath her boots as it had beneath Norton’s mare that morning—the sound of a household sending outward into the valley for what it could not provide.
Darcy filled the buckets a fourth time. The light was fading. The mere was grey and still below as he climbed with the fourth load, the water catching the last light at its surface, the springs surfacing at his feet without announcement. He did not look at the mere. He looked at the path, at the buckets. He placed one foot before the other on the frozen ground, carrying water to a woman whose leg he was trying to save, in a valley he had intended to be in for a few weeks for one sister’s sake, at a house now keeping vigil for two women and a widow.
It was enough. He climbed.
When he had carried the last bucket, and dusk had begun to gather in the windows, he came upon Mrs Marsden in the passage outside the parlour with an empty basin held in both hands as if she had forgotten what to do with it.
She had not sat down since dawn. She had not eaten except what Mrs Reeves had forced on her at noon.
“Mrs Marsden.”
She looked up. It took her longer than it ought to have done to focus. In the interval he saw what the whole of the day had written into her face—the widow of five days, the nurse of many months before that, the sister who had come out of one grave and walked straight into another’s watch.
“Yes, Mr Darcy?”
“You will sleep tonight in my chamber upstairs.”
She blinked. “I will sleep on the cot, sir. It is—”
“The cot is not a bed. Mrs Bannon produced it in an hour and it is what the house had to hand. You have been two nights without rest and came to us already carrying the watching of a sickroom that ended four days ago. I will not have you on a cot.”
“It is perfectly—”
“It is not.”
She set the basin down on the passage table with the care of a woman who had learned never to drop what she carried, though her hands trembled a little as she did it. “Mr Darcy, I cannot displace you from your own room. You have given us the house already. I will not take your bed from you as well.”
“The linens were freshly replaced this morning, yet I have not slept in it this week. I have been on the settee in the study since the night I brought your sister in. My room has been aired and warmed to no purpose. It is the waste of a room, not the gift of one.”
“And if she wakes?” Jane’s eyes went to the parlour door. “If the fever rises again, if the wound—”
“I will hear her. I am ten paces down the passage and have heard her twice already. Mrs Bannon will come for you. The stairs are not long.”
