“I have said them now.” Jane’s hand tightened. “He was kind at the end, Lizzy. Not always—the marriage was not what I hoped.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes. “Jane, I told you not to marry him.”
Jane’s jaw ticked. “What choice did I have, Lizzy? What choice did any of us—” She cut herself off, her chest shaking, the cords of her arm gone rigid with the effort to keep from crushing Elizabeth’s hand. Her nostrils fluttered as she blinked back more tears.
“But at the end, he was kind, and he asked forgiveness for things I had not forgiven, and I told him I forgave because it was the right thing to give a dying man, and I think Imeant it. I am still working whether I truly meant it—in the chair beside his bed, in the walk home, sorting the papers, in the bed I finally have to myself. I have not found the answer.”
Elizabeth surveyed her sister. Jane was twenty-four, married seventeen months, a widow of six days now, sitting in a strange house in a valley she had not chosen, holding her sister’s hand and trying to frame a marriage Elizabeth had never understood, had never asked about, had let Jane carry alone because Jane never asked, and Elizabeth had been consumed by her own journey.
“Jane. I should have asked. Written more. Come north sooner.”
“You came when you needed to for your reasons. I do not yet know them. I suspect they were not merely sisterly affection. I have waited for you to tell me, and I am still waiting.”
Elizabeth drew a shuddering breath. “Yes… my reasons. I—”
“Not now, Lizzy. You are still pale to the roots of your hair, and you have not stopped shaking since Aldridge arrived. I cannot trust that you even know what day it is, even less that you can tell me with any degree of clarity what brought you here alone in January and on foot. You need laudanum and more sleep.”
Elizabeth quaked a little as she tried to force her muscles to relax. Trembling and fretting would do nothing to ease Jane’s mind, and looking as though she were at peace might persuade her sister that she did not need more laudanum. And for a quarter hour, a little peace was the two of them on that bed—the two girls who had grown in the same nursery, read the same books, learned the same songs, walked the same paths around Longbourn in long summer evenings now farther away than a week past.
Outside the door, Darcy and Aldridge conversed in the passage. Elizabeth heard their voices rise and fall, but not words. The words did not matter. The case was carried away. The leg remained. The day offered all it could, and it was not yet noon.
Chapter Twelve
MrsBannonwasthefirst to enter after Jane had gone to break her fast, and because it was Mrs Bannon, she came not with inquiry or condolence but bearing a steaming basin in both hands and the expression of a woman who had been right yesterday and expected, if not gratitude, at least a temporary suspension of criticism.
“Fresh from the spring,” she said, setting the basin on the table with only the care the heat required. “Not so hot as to do harm. I put my wrist in it myself. That’s the measure.” She glanced at the bandage on Elizabeth’s leg, at the bucket by the hearth, at the cooling cloths Jane had left folded on the chair. “If the surgeon has given you another day, you will not keep it by letting the water stand.”
There were mornings at Longbourn on which Elizabeth might have answered in kind. She had not yet recovered enough of herself for play. The morning had already been too full. Jane’s widowhood sat in the room with as much substance as the chair by the bed, the book on the table, and the mineral smell that now belonged not only to the valley but to the whole of her altered life.
“Mr Aldridge has given me another day,” she said. “I am aware, from the frequency everyone has informed me, that the day is to be spent in linen and water and no little prayer.”
Mrs Bannon snorted, which might have been a laugh if she were a woman constructed for laughter. “Better linen and water than saw and straps. Mrs Marsden will be back presently. I have sent Martha to the village for Mrs Hadley. She ought to have come yesterday, but Mrs Pemberton calved in the night, and there’s never any getting a woman off one labour and onto another before she has finished the first.”
She laid the cloths into the basin one by one with the brusqueness of a woman who had done this work for years and resented every year of it. She turned at once to the business of the room, brisk and unsentimental, and in stepping nearer the bed struck Elizabeth’s bag with the side of her shoe.
The bag tipped over. Papers slid half out in a pale untidy spill.
Elizabeth lurched before thought, a violent movement born whole from panic. Pain tore up her leg so sharply that the room whitened. She caught herself on her elbows with a strangled cry and would have gone farther if the pain had not broken the effort under her.
“Lord save us,” Mrs Bannon grumbled. “Lie still, you foolish girl.”
She stooped, not with curiosity but annoyance, scooped the papers together in a rough sheaf, thrust them back into the bag without reading so much as a line—assuming she could read at all—and shoved the thing with her foot farther beneath the little table and out of her own way.
“If you tear yourself open for the sake of a satchel, you may explain it to Mr Aldridge, for I shall not.”
Elizabeth could not answer. Her heart beat so hard it shook the mattress. She stared at the bag where it now sat crooked in shadow, one corner of a folded page still showing from the mouth. It was closed badly. Not safe. Not hidden enough. But Mrs Bannon had already turned back to the basin.
“Now then,” she said. “If you have done frightening us both to death, lift the blanket.”
Elizabeth obeyed because disobedience required strength she had just spent. Mrs Bannon wrung out the first cloth and laid the heat over the wound with more gentleness than her face admitted. The pain came sharp, then spreading, then dull.
Mrs Bannon said nothing more of the bag. She neither looked at it nor asked a question. Presently Elizabeth understood that whatever alarm had seized her belonged to herself alone. Mrs Bannon cared no more for the contents than for any other piece of clutter in the path of her work.
Even so, Elizabeth could not keep her eyes from straying to it while the treatment went on. When Mrs Bannon had done, she set aside the last cloth and began gathering up the basin and wrappings.
“Mrs Bannon?”
“What now?”
