They worked together for several minutes, Jane doing as she was bid, Mrs Hadley speaking only when speech served. Elizabeth watched the exchange with attention sharpened by immobility. She understood, with a suddenness that almost hurt, why Jane had looked at the woman who entered the room and yielded at once. There were people who offered comfort, and there were people whose competence was a form of comfort without naming itself so.
When the bandage had been redone, Mrs Hadley covered the leg again and straightened. Jane handed Elizabeth the cup from the tray. Broth, stronger than what had been offered before, smelling of marrow and pepper and the part of a kitchen awake since before dawn.
“Drink while it is hot,” Jane said.
Elizabeth took the cup. Her hand shook on the saucer. Jane, after one glance, set her own fingers under the rim and held it with her until the first swallowing was done.
Mrs Hadley turned to the fire and held out her hands to the blaze without quite warming them, her attention already shifting beyond the room.
“Tom Pemberton coughed blood-streaked this morning,” she said, as if continuing a conversation begun before Elizabeth entered the valley and to continue after she left it. “Not much. Enough. His mother has sat up half the night. Her own hands are near useless in the cold, and the damp does not spare them. Hadley says the lower carrier is taking less than it ought. If the meadows are not floated in time, they will feel it in March before the lambs are on the ground.”
Elizabeth lowered the cup. “All that depends on the mere?”
Mrs Hadley looked at her. “In one fashion or another, most things here do. The house higher than the village does not alter the direction of the water. It alters only who learns that lesson last.”
It was not said sharply. It did not need sharpness. Elizabeth thought, absurdly, of Mr Collins discoursing at Longbourn on the hierarchy of parishes and the civil arrangement of influence. There was no room in Northmere for that order. The water ran where the land sent it. Gentlemen might sign letters about hatches and repairs, but lambs and children and old women’s hands did not consult precedence before they ached.
“Mr Darcy was out with Hadley yesterday,” Jane said, still holding the saucer while Elizabeth drank. “He has sent for repairs to the channels.”
“He has sent for them,” said Mrs Hadley. “Whether the earth and the weather mean to wait upon paper is another matter. Still, a man who sends for repairs is more use than one who sends for excuses. We have had enough of the second kind.”
Elizabeth thought of the ledgers at Longbourn, what papers concealed and exposed, of a leather bag pushed back half out of sight at the side of her bed. The broth was cool enough to drink quickly. She finished it.
Mrs Hadley took the empty cup and set it down. “You will want occupation before many more days are done. I can see it in your face. Some patients prefer to be nursed. Others begin looking as though they mean to bite the first person who tells them to lie still. You are of the second sort.”
Elizabeth laid her head back on the pillow. “My sister has long maintained the same opinion.”
“Then your sister has eyes. When you are equal to sitting up for longer stretches, I will bring you news worth having from the village so you may stop staring at that ceiling crack as though it had written a sermon for your improvement.”
Elizabeth laughed then—not much, not freely, the laugh pulled through the remains of pain and surprise—but enough that Jane looked at her with something like alarmed relief, as if the sound had not been expected to survive the week.
Mrs Hadley heard it and nodded as though a point had been proved.
“There. That is better. If a patient can laugh, the body has not entirely forgot its business.”
She gathered her coat and hat. Jane walked with her to the door, and because it did not fully latch at once, Elizabeth heard rather more of their passage exchange than perhaps either intended.
“You should sleep this afternoon,” Mrs Hadley said in a lower voice. “Not in the chair. In a bed. I will come up after I have seen to Tom.”
“I cannot leave her.”
“You can leave her with the housekeeper, the cook, the master of the house, and, if it comes to extremity, with me. Widowhood does not make a woman inexhaustible. If you fall, there will be one more patient and no more nurses.”
Jane asked very quietly, “Did I do wrong to tell her about Mr Marsden?”
Mrs Hadley’s answer came at once. “You spoke as a frightened woman who had buried one person and could not bear the ground opening for another. That is not wrong. It is only human. Go and eat something while the broth is still hot in your own cup, if you have any sense left in your head at all.”
They kept walking, and Elizabeth heard no more. She lay still and looked at the fire.
Elizabeth had been running for eleven days when the ice broke beneath her. Before that, she had planned to run longer than eleven days. Running had narrowed the world to roads, names, money, concealment, weather, the bag’s weight. Northmere had, for two days, narrowed it further to pain, fever, water, Jane, the surgeon, Darcy’s chair in the dark.
Now the world widened by force.
There was a child in the village coughing blood into winter linen. There were ewes not yet lambed and meadows not yet set right, and an old housekeeper who knew the water’s method because the village knew it longer than gentlemen had owned the surrounding land. There was Mrs Hadley coming and going with her basket as if sorrow and skill were things to be carried together in one arm. There was Jane, five days widowed, being told to sleep by another woman who had seen enough grief to measure its limits. There was Darcy somewhere in the house or on the slope beyond it, writing letters or carrying water or doing whatever such men did when they could not control the largest dangers and therefore set their hands to the smaller ones.
And there was herself in the middle of it all, with the bag at the bedside and a promise to Darcy not to lie and a promise not yet spoken to Jane that she would tell her something before long, and a sudden, unreasonable reluctance to imagine this house without her in it.
Anhourlater,NanReeves came down with a book tucked under her arm and a folded note in her hand.
