Old Bess came to the bed without haste. She stood over Elizabeth and looked at her closely, long enough that a lesser woman might have fidgeted or filled the silence with apology.
Elizabeth, having met Lady Catherine de Bourgh, did neither.
At length Old Bess said, “You’ve been touched by it proper.”
Elizabeth blinked. “It?Do you mean… the fever? The water?”
“Don’t act simple with me. The water’s only the hand of it. I mean the place.”
Mrs Reeves gave a small cough, which might have been warning or a cold caught in the chest. Old Bess ignored it.
“I am afraid I do not understand,” Elizabeth said carefully. “I can see that… some people hold strong opinions on the matter. The water, that is.”
“I have strong eyes on the matter. Opinions come after. Lift the coverlet.”
Elizabeth did not move. “Why?”
“Because I said so, and because if you were the sort to obey every old fool in a bonnet, you would not have fallen through the mere with half the north country chasing after you by now.”
The answer, so nearly insolent and yet so oddly shrewd, startled Elizabeth into complying. Old Bess did not look first at the leg, as Aldridge had, nor touch the bandage as Mrs Hadley always did. She laid two fingers lightly against the pulse in Elizabeth’s wrist.
The touch was dry, cool, and brief. “Aye,” she said again. “Woke to you, it did.”
“Bess,” said Mrs Reeves, this time with real warning.
“Oh hush. If the girl’s to stay in the valley long enough to have every fool and wiseacre talking round her, she’s best served hearing plain sense once at the start.” The old woman released Elizabeth’s wrist and looked toward the window as if the mere itself lay just beyond the wall. “It hasn’t answered in years save by fits. Not right. Not cleanly. Warmed a child and failed a grown man. Took offence where it should’ve had patience. That comes when keeping goes wrong.”
Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You speak as if the mere has intention. As if water chooses arbitrarily.”
“No. I speak as if a place can fall out of right relation as a body can. You put bad management on land long enough—lies in the books, wages kept back, gates hanging, grief in the house—and folk say the water’s changed because they lack another name for the feel of wrong settling over ground they once knew.” Old Bess turned her sharp gaze back. “Then you go through where it rises, not where it merely lies—you break yourselfopen in the spring-mouth half-broken in body and wholly driven by fear—and it takes notice. That isn’t intention. It’s waking.”
Mrs Reeves drew her chair closer and sat as one might before weather that would not pass soon.
“And you think… that waking has something to do with… with me?”
“Aye. Mrs Hadley sent word that the southern lady had bled half her body's warmth into the mere and the surgeon was after her leg. I said let the surgeon do his filthy work if the house came to that. Then Hadley’s wife sent word again that the water took some heat and gave back some ground. That put me in my boots.”
Elizabeth looked at Mrs Reeves. “Do you all speak in these terms? Or has the whole valley agreed to confound outsiders?”
Old Bess snorted. “Now listen, girl, because I won’t come twice to say once. The water hasn’t chosen you for some ballad. It has noticed you because you’re the newest knot in trouble. You’ve come into a place where keeping went wrong. The man named to mend it is in the house. The woman marked by the water is in the house. Truth’s thin as ice and every one treads careful. That’s a dangerous and hopeful arrangement both, and the mending fails when you break from here, as you will.”
Elizabeth’s fingers tightened on the coverlet. The bag nestled between mattress and wall, the papers within suddenly feeling not like dead sheets but live coals. “You presume far too much. You know nothing about me.”
Old Bess gave a look almost pitying. “I know enough. You flinch when the door opens and sleep with one hand ready to the wall. You look at the floor as if you might have to cross it running. I don’t need words to know secrets are what you’ve brought.”
Silence followed. Nan’s eyes rounded as saucers. Mrs Reeves said nothing. Elizabeth bore the rare and unpleasant sensation of being read by one who neither admired nor wished to use the knowledge, but only placed it where it belonged.
At last she said, with a quiet exceeding her feeling, “If you know so much, perhaps you know whether I ought to leave.”
Old Bess’s face changed—not softened, but sharpened into a kind of sadness.
“Ought’s a Sunday word,” she said. “I’m talking about can. You may mean to leave. You may even be right to. But leaving clean’s not the same as leaving with your body, nor either the same as leaving without cost. Folk keep thinking distance is cure because distance is simple to picture. Then lambs die lean or cough deepens or water runs wrongand they say who could have known. I tell you now—some part of this place has set itself to the knot you’re in. Pull one strand ignorant and others answer.”
Elizabeth thought of the day at the mere, the first plunge of cold, the splitting pain, Darcy’s arms under her, water later in the cloths against the wound, Jane’s husband dead despite months of the same remedy, the quarter-inch of flesh saved or merely delayed. The whole valley revealed itself, for an instant, as alarmingly interconnected rather than romantic.
“And Mr Darcy?” she said before fully deciding to ask.
Old Bess turned toward the door, as if the name altered the room’s direction. “He’s warden if he’ll warden. That’s all. Not haloed by anything except duty and the chance to fail. Which is enough for any man. If he means to hold house and water and folk together, he must do it truthfully. If he tries patching wrong with gentleman’s silence or protecting one creature by letting the rest go hungry in the dark, the valley’ll feel it before he does.”
