That was not the same as its being hers.
She put both hands to the bedpost and pushed up.
For a single luminous instant, the world gave no trouble at all. The good leg took her weight, the wounded one bore a portion it had not borne in weeks, heat bloomed under the bandage—warning, not yet pain—and the parlour, which had been a ceiling and a fire and a row of tiresome objects arranged within her sight, became all at once a room that could be crossed.
She wasstanding.
The word was so small and so outrageous that she had to press her lips together to keep from laughing aloud at nothing. A grown woman, upright on two feet in her own chamber. The commonest act of the human species. And she stood there clutching a bedpost as if she had just recovered the use of a continent.
The window was eight feet off. The chair by the writing-table was four. From her new vantage both distances looked generously conspired against her—the floor sloped where no slope had been visible from the bed, the carpet’s edge was a small Alpine pass, the fire, rearranged into a squatter creature by the change of perspective, had repositioned itself on purpose to obstruct her. She set her jaw and braced her hand on the bedpost. The whole of her body sang, at one pitch, with the astonishing fact of its verticality.
If this was all she got, it was already more than the household had offered her.
If this was not all she got—
She thought of Jane coming to this bedside every morning for twenty-six mornings with that same controlled face. She thought of Mrs Hadley’s disapproval. She thought of Darcy, who had kept every bargain with a gentleman’s dedication to duty, and would disapprove of the present venture from the first step. None of them had asked her whether she was willing to spend a month inside another woman’s idea of her own condition.
She let go of the bedpost.
The first step was slow and mostly successful. The second was less successful and more necessary. By the third she had reached the chair, her hand closing over its back with a grateful ferocity the chair had not earned in any other way in the weeks it had occupied this parlour. Her breath came short. The wound was giving her warnings she could not now pretend away.
The window was still four feet off. She thought, recklessly, that four feet was scarcely a distance at all. She thought, more carefully, that the first four feet had been the easier and the second four would not be. She thought, underneath both, that she had not come this far to turn back at a chair. She had come to awindow.
She took the first of the four. The second foot had barely committed when her weight went wrong.
It was the sound leg that gave. She would trace the fault backwards afterwards, at leisure enough to see it clearly—that the leg she had trusted through weeks of holding still was less prepared for turning than the one she had been negotiating with every day, and that a knee which had not been asked to do anything for almost a month had forgotten how to refuse an instruction from a mistress in a hurry. She turned too fast. The sound knee gave without warning. The chair, which had never been party to a fair alliance with her weight to begin with, went with her.
She heard herself cry out—a small sharp sound that did not sound like her and for which she would have been humiliated in advance had she known it was coming—thechair went out from under her—and after that the ordinary laws of falling arranged themselves with tremendous efficiency. The chair went over against the fender with a wooden crack. The brass inkstand on the writing-table followed it to the floor. She was on the carpet before the idea of falling had quite completed itself in her mind, her wrist bent beneath her, her wounded leg tucked at an angle she did not yet have the courage to examine, the pain arriving in a white flash that closed out the parlour entirely for whatever interval pure pain required.
When she could see again she was staring at the underside of the chair.
The parlour itself had gone very loud and then very quiet.
A door in the passage flung open. Footsteps crossed the passage at a pace no gentleman would permit himself inside a house. The parlour door came open so hard that it bounced lightly against the wall.
“Good God—”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Hewasonthefloor with her before the exclamation had completed. She had never seen his face from this angle, and in almost four weeks she had never seen his face assembled in this particular order. His hands went to her at once—her shoulder, her ribs, the uninjured leg—with the hurry of a man who had once carried her out of a freezing lake and had learned then, with a clarity he had not forgotten, how fast a body could be lost if one did not act at once.
“Are you—”
“I amnotworse!” She caught at his sleeve to interrupt the checking. “Mr Darcy—listento me. I am not worse than I was.Listen.”
His hand stilled on her shoulder. His face did not look persuaded.
"The wound did not open," she said, rapidly. It mattered that this was the first thing. "The bandage is intact. I would know if it had gone. It was not the bone. The bone held through the whole crossing—standing, the three steps to the chair, the two after. It was the other leg. The sound leg. Weeks of lying still has done what weeks of lying still does, and when I turned too fast the knee of the leg I have not been thinking about gave me no warning, because I had not been asking anything of it. The chair was no foundation for what followed. I did not land on the wound. I landed on my side. The wrist is turned. Nothing more."
He looked at her a long while without speaking. One hand at her shoulder still. The other, now, had gone to the wounded leg and was tracing the position of the bandage, the shape of the thigh, the line of the bone beneath. She held very still. She had just asked to be believed and could afford no motion that would argue against it.
The nightgown had moved when she fell, and again when she had braced her sound leg against the chair, and the cool of the air on her knee told her it had not come back into proper place. His arm crossed the bare skin of her sound shin to reach the bandage. The contact was incidental. Both of them were attending to the bone.
"The bandage?"
"It is not wet. Is it?"
He pressed, lightly, in the two places blood would first reach muslin if anything under had torn. Then again, more carefully. He brought his fingers back and looked at them. Clean.
