“Then I must learn to value obscurity while it lasts.”
He moved a little nearer the bed. “Are you distressed? I will tell Mrs Reeves you are not to have unannounced visitors.”
It was exactly the question he would ask—notWhat did you make of it?, notDo you believe her?, but this practical enquiry into present harm—that Elizabeth could not answer lightly at once.
“I do not know.”
“That is not an answer I dislike.”
“Because it is honest?” The words escaped more directly than meant, and the flush of understanding that crossed his face at hearing them.
“Yes,” he said.
There it was between them again—the bargain in the midnight parlour, still governing everything, the whole house somehow more crowded yet.
Elizabeth looked to the window where pale noon light had thinned beneath clouds. “She said I was noticed by the place. Whatever could she mean by that?”
“She said many things with equal force.”
“That is not the same as saying she is wrong.”
He did not reply.
She turned back. “And what could she mean by calling you a shoulder? Why not an ear or a big toe?”
The jest seemed lost on him, for a strange look crossed his face—not vanity, not reluctance, but something more painful than either.
“If the house rests on anyone at present,” he said quietly, “it rests on more shoulders than mine. Your sister’s among them. Mrs Reeves’s. Hadley’s. Mrs Hadley’s. Ashby’s. Perhaps yours, though I do not like to think it because I would rather your business here were easier than that.”
Elizabeth heard in the answer what he left unsaid—that he knew the weight was his in name, whatever others bore in labour, and that he did not trust the name by itself.
He looked at the coverlet, at the shape of the leg beneath it, at the place where pain and saving still contested unseen.
Jane’s step sounded in the passage before the door opened. She entered with Georgiana’s shawl over one arm and stopped, reading the room in a glance—the signs of Old Bess’s passage, Darcy at the foot of the bed, Elizabeth more thoughtful than frightened. Her eyes went to Darcy’s face, then away.
“I passed Old Bess in the hall,” she said. “She told me, without stopping, that I am trying to be two kinds of woman at once and shall ruin my sleep if I continue.”
Darcy said gravely, “Then I perceive you have been honoured.”
Jane gave a tired, genuine laugh. “If honour continues in that style, I shall beg to be passed over next time. I only thought you ought to know what sort of visit you have entertained. She likes to prophesy and fancies it lends her importance. I recall several odd sayings passed about when Mr Marsden was in his last week, and noe one of them made sense. You should pay her no mind, Mr Darcy.”
He nodded. “I shall endeavour to take your advice, Mrs Marsden. What have you there?”
“Miss Darcy asked me to trade this for the blue shawl she left here yesterday. She says the south chamber is too warm for the green one and too cold for none at all.”
“Which means she is stronger,” Darcy said at once.
“Yes.”
The whole of him altered at the word. Elizabeth saw it, and because she saw it, she noted as well the fleeting change in Jane’s face before she lowered her eyes to the shawl and smoothed a fringe needing no smoothing.
Old Bess, Elizabeth thought, had not begun diagnosing nearly soon enough.
Chapter Twenty-One
Aldridgehadcomebackfrom Bakewell on the morning of the eighteenth day, had spent twenty minutes at Elizabeth’s bedside with his instruments and his professional silence, and had glanced up looking—for the first time she had observed it in him—as though he did not quite trust his own report.
“I have never seen the like,” he said at last. He said it to Darcy in the study, but the door stood partly open, as doors between passage and study at Merebank invariably did, and he made no effort to prevent what he knew perfectly well the lady next door would hear. “The wound is closing at a pace I cannot, within the limits of my own profession, account for. You have given it clean water, warm cloths, rest, and a household temper that does not exhaust her. None of those, singly or together, should have produced what I now find under the bandage.” He cleared his throat. “I beg you, Mr Darcy, and through you I beg the lady herself, not to mistake what is happening upon the surface for what is happening below. An exterior wound will sometimes appear to mend before the bone beneath it has done its work. Haste here could still ruin the leg you have been trusted to save. Whatever is mending Miss Bennet faster than my own training has prepared me to account for, it is not in my power to promise it has mended everything equally.”
