Above, the reading ceased.
He waited, but Nan did not resume. He heard her voice, faint through the ceiling—the tone, not the words—and Georgiana’s answer, weaker yet clear enough to signal she was awake and alert and likely asking what had occurred. Darcy closed his eyes. He had moments to decide what to do.
He ascended the stairs two at a time. The first-floor corridor was warmer than the ground-floor passage—the south chamber held a good fire and warmth leaked under the door—and at the door he paused, knocking softly before entering.
Georgiana sat up in bed against a stack of pillows, her face towards the window. She had been lovely as a child and remained so, though illness had altered that beauty—the colour heightened in her cheeks beyond health, eyes brighter than they should be, and her whole person slightly translucent in the winter light. Nan sat in the chair beside the bed, book closed with thumb marking the place, her face alert and eyes immediately on Darcy and the front of his shirt.
Georgiana saw him and the shirt and parted her lips.
“Fitzwilliam—”
“It is not mine. I am unhurt. There has been an accident at the mere—a traveller, a woman who fell through the ice. Her leg is broken. She is downstairs in the old housekeeper’s parlour and Mrs Reeves and Martha tend her. Norton has gone for the surgeon at Bakewell. I did not want you to hear the disturbance and imagine something wrong without explanation.”
Georgiana’s eyes widened. Her hand gripped the coverlet’s edge. “Who is she?”
“A Miss Bennet. She gave me her name on the bank. I know no more. She travelled alone, seeking a cottage somewhere in the village, probably.”
“Is she—will she—”
“The surgeon will come. She has lost blood, but the splint holds. I will know more when Aldridge has seen her.” He moved closer and took his sister’s hand—careful of its usual morning tenderness, aggravated by the winter. Her fingers were cool but not icy, the joints beneath his thumb less swollen than the past week. A small observation he stored. “Dearest, I need you to remain here. You must not come downstairs. Not because I withhold anything—I will tell you all you wish—but because the passage is cold, the parlour crowded, and no place for you in any case. Nan will stay with you. I will come when I can. Just now, I am returning to the place where I found her to retrieve a bag she had beencarrying.”
“Of course.” Her voice held. Her gaze held more than he had seen for weeks—the focus of a mind engaged beyond itself. “Fitzwilliam. Go. I am well.”
He squeezed her hand and turned to Nan. “Send word if she needs anything. Anything at all. Do not hesitate.”
“I will, sir.”
He left the chamber. On the landing, hand on the banister, he exhaled. Georgiana’s colour had been better than in London—whatever the morning cup foretold, he had not imagined it. The focus in her eyes was the clearest sign—a girl recovering, not fading. A small mercy from a morning begun with a half-finished cup and having yielded a bleeding woman on the bank. The first faint trace of progress Merebank had offered in six weeks, and it came on a day when he could not rejoice over it.
Chapter Four
Thepainwasfirst.It had been first when she woke—if she had woken, if this was waking and not some crueller passage into a new province of the same country she had travelled since the ice broke. The pain lived below her left knee. It did not come or go. It occupied the territory as an army occupied a town, without negotiation, and everything she tried to think or see or remember had to pass through it first, and most of it did not reach her.
She lay in a bed. A narrow bed in a small room she did not recognise—a room pressed into service rather than prepared for her, the walls bare, a loom shoved into the corner beneath a heap of old cloth, a single window onto a kitchen garden visible through the half-drawn curtain. A house she had seen—she had seen it, from somewhere, the chimneys, the stone—but could not recall entering it. She wore only her shift. Blankets, many, all mismatched. The smell of a house closed too long, and beneath it a faint scent she could not place—clean, old, mineral, like water long underground.
Her left leg was immobilised below the knee, rigid material on either side of the shin, the binding tight, the whole apparatus fashioned by hands that…
Hands.She remembered hands. Shaking when they touched the wound. Not shaking when the task demanded stillness. A voice—level, low, urgent—uttering things she could not recall, the words gone, only the tone remaining like a fire’s warmth once the flames had died.
She had told him something. Her name. Had she given it?Good heavens, no…The memory would not hold still. It slipped away as the ice had from beneath her feet, and when the pain surged, the memory fled with it.
She tried to move. The leg answered with a hot, bright flare detonating behind her eyes. The world turned white, and she stopped, lying still while the white receded slowly, grudgingly, like a tide unwilling to withdraw.
The break was worse than a break. She had refused to look—on the ice, in the carrying, in this bed—but the body’s report was detailed enough without visual confirmation. The wound was open. Something had torn through the skin. The binding covered a site of damage that produced its own heat, pulse, and weather independent of the rest of her body, answering to nothing she could do, endure, or will into submission.
The bag.
Awareness arrived fragmented—the bag, the leather, the weight of it in her hand, the way she had carried it for eleven days without letting go. And now she had.
She turned her head. The rotation sent a wave of nausea through her that ended in her leg, and the leg punished the intrusion with a flare that turned her vision to bright sparks.
But when the sparks cleared, she saw it. On the floor by the head of the bed, within reach if her arm could be roused to obey, the leather handle visible above the dark bulk. Someone had brought it in and placed it where she would find it upon waking. Air filled her lungs and left slowly.
The bag was safe, three feet from the bed, but she could not walk. She could not leave this room, this house, this bed. Whatever was happening beyond this valley—the thing she had fled, that had put her on the road, that would not stop because she had—was still happening. Still ticking. Still advancing toward a discovery she could not prevent.
She could not consider it now. The pain refused the full shape. Each time she reached for the whole picture—the reason she fled, the reason the bag mattered, the danger coming whether she lay in this bed or not—the leg dragged her down into the body, into the heat, throbbing, and the white noise consumed her capacity for strategy, planning, or anything beyond the next breath.
She may have slept. She did not know. There were intervals of dark, intervals of grey, times when the pain flared into something that erased the distinction between sleeping and waking. In one such interval, the door opened. A voice spoke of a surgeon. She replied, or tried, the words thick in her mouth. The door closed. The interval ended. She was alone with the ceiling and the familiar reading voice, marked only when it ceased.
