Elizabeth drew a breath to answer.
“No,” Jane said again, more tired than sharp now. “Do not. I know half of it will be left out or untrue.”
Elizabeth’s mouth fell slack. “Jane, it is not for want of trust in you!”
Jane only sat back in her chair, took up her sewing, and set the needle through the cloth as if she had not heard. “If you mean to keep this secret, keep it,” she said. “But then let us hope your leg mends fast, for I see no other miracle likely to serve us.” She bent again to her work and would say no more.
She watched Jane’s needle pass in and out of the cloth with a harshness that was almost reproach. The room had grown smaller since the quarrel. Even the fire was unwilling to interfere.
At length, Jane set the sewing aside, rose, and went to the little table. “You should take more laudanum before you sleep.”
“I am not certain I shall sleep.”
Jane turned with the bottle in her hand. “Then you should take it before you fail to.”
Elizabeth tried for levity and found none. “You are very tyrannical tonight.”
“Yes.” There was no softness in the word. Jane poured a little into the spoon and came to the bedside. “Take it.”
Elizabeth obeyed so far as opening her lips. The taste touched her tongue, bitter and familiar. She swallowed just enough to satisfy the eye, let the rest lie hidden an instant in her mouth, and when Jane turned to set down the bottle, she caught the edge of the handkerchief by her throat and let the laudanum disappear into the linen instead.
Jane looked back at her. It was not belief. It was not quite accusation either. It was only a long look which said that if Elizabeth meant to be deceived, she must do it without assistance.
“There,” Elizabeth said, because silence under that gaze was worse.
Jane set the spoon down. “Try to sleep.”
Elizabeth let her head fall back against the pillow and closed her eyes at once, more from self-defence than obedience. She heard Jane resume her chair, heard the small return of the needle to its work, and kept her breathing even in hopes her sister would take the performance for success.
For some minutes, she did not sleep at all. Pain moved through the leg in slow, malicious throbs, as if reminding her that it had not withdrawn its claim merely because the room was quiet. The pillow was wrong beneath her neck. The sheets were too heavy where they brushed the injured limb, and too cold everywhere else. She lay pretending to rest while every part of her body resisted it.
Yet exhaustion had more patience than pain. The fire sank lower. Jane’s sewing dwindled to something farther off. Thought loosened, broke apart, and ceased to hold together.What began as pretence altered somewhere beyond her notice into the thing itself, and she fell at last into sleep.
Sometimelater,Elizabethcame up out of sleep as if dragged through deep water by the leg itself.
Pain reached her before memory did. Not a mere flare, but a brutal inward wrench, hot and sickening, as though the bones had broken afresh in the dark and were grinding together under the blankets. Her breath caught. The whole length of the limb pulsed with its own monstrous heartbeat, each throb striking upward into her hip and downward into her foot until she could not at first tell where her body ended, and the pain began.
She lay still because stillness was the only defence left to her. Even that did not help at once. The ache kept coming in waves, each one leaving her weaker, damp at the temples, aware of the mattress beneath her as of an instrument designed for torment. For some time, there was nothing in the world but that burning, splitting misery and the effort not to cry out and wake the house.
Then other things began, slowly, unwillingly, to return. From above came faintly the tread of someone crossing Georgiana’s chamber. From farther off, the closing of the study door. Outside, the wind moved once along the eaves and then dropped. The mere’s mineral smell lingered even through the banked fire, so much a part of the air now that she could not imagine the room without it, or herself outside the valley.
Jane had taken the chair by the hearth instead of the bedside one. She sat with her hands in her lap and face turned to the low fire as if warmth alone sufficed. In the uncertain light, she looked older than twenty-four and younger than she had looked that morning when grief had stood her upright like a soldier at post.
“Jane?”
“Mm?”
“When you first came to the cottage here—before I wrote—did you expect to remain long?”
Jane was silent. “No. I thought illness had its method. I thought if one did every required thing in the required order—doctor, broth, linen, medicine, prayer, patience,water, accounts, more prayer—one eventually reached the room beyond where ordinary life waited all along.”
Elizabeth’s eyes grew unfocused from the strain of craning her neck. She blinked and squinted again. “And you did not.”
“No. I reached another room entirely.” Jane looked down at her hands. “One can live in another room. One simply ought not pretend it is the old one.”
Elizabeth knew the truth she spoke too well to answer.
After a while Jane rose, came to the bed, and touched Elizabeth’s hair back from her forehead with the automatic tenderness of long sisterhood.
