"No."
"The bone?"
"Show me how it moves."
She moved it—a small tentative flex, a small extension. The pain was substantial but it was not catastrophe. It was nothing like the explosive agony of the surgery morning. She could bend the knee and unbend it, as she had been doing in small private rebellions for a week, and the leg did what a mending leg did and not what a broken one did.
He watched the movement with an attention that pressed upon her body. Then he placed his hand at her ankle and rotated it a quarter turn, waiting for her breath to catch. It did not catch worse than she could hide.
"You can move it without grinding?"
"I can."
"You are certain?"
"I am certain, sir. The leg held through the whole of it. It did not fail me. The other did."
He closed his eyes briefly. Whatever passed across his face in that interval she could not read in full, but something in him yielded, and the hand at her shoulder eased. When he opened his eyes again the fear that had brought him through the door at a run had banked but not gone.
He looked at the foot he was holding. He lowered it to set it to the carpet, and his eyes went with it—down the line of the bandage, past the bandage, to the place where the nightgown had stopped on the sound leg, much nearer to him than the medical question had required him to look.
She saw his face change.
His forearm had been resting along her bare shin without his attention. He looked at it. He looked at her exposed knee. His eyes did not stay there; they moved on at once. But she saw that they had been there.
Colour rose at his throat, not much, only what could not be commanded. His hand left her shin. His hand left her shoulder. He had been kneeling beside her like a man witha task, and now he was kneeling beside her like a man who had only at this instant taken account of where he was.
She did not look down. To look down would be to acknowledge. To pull at the nightgown now would be to acknowledge twice. She kept her eyes on his and did not move.
"Miss Bennet," he said, "you have placed me, at this instant, in a position from which I do not yet know how to proceed."
"I know," she said quickly. "And I am about to ask you to be in it more thoroughly still."
“Miss Bennet—”
“Listen. My sister is coming.”
His head came up at once.
From above, across the boards of the upper floor, came the quick uneven tread of a woman who had been sitting still and was no longer—the unmistakable progress of someone crossing a bedroom toward a landing, stopping at a door, and deciding.
“She heard the fall,” Elizabeth said. “She is not far. Half a minute. Perhaps a little more, if Georgiana needed reassuring before she left the chair. Mr Darcy, please—I am asking you a favour whose cost I understand. If she sees me on this floor she will never permit me to attempt anything in this parlour again unsupervised. I will lose what I have gained. I will lose the fortnight’s mending I have begun, lately, to call my own.”
“Miss Bennet. She is your sister. She has a right—”
“I am not asking you to deceive her.” Both of them knew this was not quite true. “I am asking you to help me not to undo her. She has already carried almost four weeks of me on the point of dying. Every morning she has been given the one scrap of news she can hold—that I did not die in the night. I am asking you foronefavour. Help me to the bed before she comes in. I will answer for this, to her, afterwards, in any terms you require. But notnow. Not from the carpet. She will not survive another week of this kind of fear, and neither will I.”
“Miss Bennet, youareasking me to lie for you.”
“I am asking you to bequick.”
From the upper landing came the small telltale creak of the loose board on the second step down—which Jane had learned, over three weeks, to avoid when Elizabeth slept, and evidently had not troubled to avoid now. She was on the stair proper, and she was coming down in haste.
Darcy looked at Elizabeth once more. The face was not calm. It was also making a choice he had not, upon crossing the threshold, expected to be asked to make today. “Put your arms around my neck,” he said. “Quickly.”
“Thank you—”
“Thank melater.”
