“The fever began night before last. Mr Aldridge returned yesterday afternoon. He examined the wound. Mrs Bannon—the housekeeper—gave instructions for treating it with water from the mere. We have been applying fomentations since yesterday evening.”
The mineral taste in her mouth. The mere’s water. They had been washing her wound with the water that had broken her leg.
“Has it helped?”
“I am not qualified to judge. But the discharge has changed, and the swelling decreased. Mrs Marsden has monitored it through the day. Mr Aldridge will return at first light.”
He was careful. Every sentence measured, every fact delivered in order, nothing omitted but nothing volunteered beyond her question. She recognised the discipline—the management of information, the art of answering without answering the question behind it.
“Mr Darcy. In the morning. The surgeon. He means to take my leg.”
He did not deny it.
The silence told her enough. It was not cruelty. It was worse. It was the silence of a man who would not give false comfort because the hour for it had passed.
Tears came before she could master them. Not the blurred leaking of fever, not the weak helpless tears that had slipped from her half conscious all day, but tears with judgment in them, tears that belonged to a mind fully awake at last and forced to reckon with the morning. Her leg. Her own leg. The one that had carried her over muddy lanes and frozen ruts, up inn stairs, across market squares, into coaches and out again. The leg by which she had danced half the night at Meryton and walked off temper in gardens and fields when home grew too small for bearing. They meant to cut it from her body as if the loss were a problem in carpentry.
Dancing was gone first. Not because it mattered most, but because the thought came swiftest. No reel, no turn, no stepping out with music under her feet and laughter near at hand.
Then walking.Properwalking. Not crossing a room with a cane while people praised her courage, but walking because one wished to walk, taking a lane for no reason beyond the lane itself, choosing speed, distance, solitude. No climbing a hill simply to see farther. No striding away from a disagreeable room under her own power. No running down steps because Jane called. No careless standing at a window for an hour because the evening was pleasant and the world below it worth watching.
And if they did not take it, fever might yet do the work more slowly.
His hand was there.
She did not remember him crossing the room, or reaching for his hand when he arrived. She remembered only that her fingers had closed upon his with desperate violence, and that he let them. She crushed his hand as if bone and tendon in another body could hold her together when her own body had turned traitor. He neither flinched nor withdrew. He sat beside the bed and let her hurt him while she wept.
“I shall never dance again,” she said into the pillow, the words broken by breath. “Never walk where I please. Never go up a hill for the sake of being contrary. I shall be led about like an aunt in a family anecdote.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know enough.”
“Enough for fear. Not enough for certainty.”
“That is a distinction for healthy people.”
Another wave of weeping seized her, thinner now and more exhausted, but it left her shaking worse than before. Sweat cooled on her temples. Her injured leg burned with a heavy, sickening throb that came up out of the mattress itself. Her whole body had become a battleground of heat, chill, pain, and the queasy rise and fall of laudanum.
Rest was impossible. So was wakefulness of any unbroken sort. She wanted to sleep and could not bear to close her eyes. She wanted silence and could not endure it when it came.
At length, the crying passed through her and left her hollow.
She came up out of sleep into pain rearranged. It was still in her, but it had become a thing that could be borne rather than a thing that bore her. The light at the curtain was grey. The room was the same room.
Her hand was around his.
She knew it before she knew the rest of where she was. Her fingers were closed on his—three of hers around three of his—and he had let it stand. She did not know for how long.
She loosened her hand. Releasing him proved harder than clutching. Her fingers had to be persuaded. They unbent slowly, joint by joint, as if they had taken on the shape of his while she was somewhere else.
“I am sorry.”
“Do not apologise.”
She looked at his hand where it lay on the coverlet, just clear of hers now. It was unmarked. She had been certain there would be marks.
“I have injured you.”
