The door opened again. The man who had carried her, the hands and voice she remembered, and he came in with another man. This one was shorter, older, neat, with quick hands and the even movements of a man used to cold rooms. He carried a leather case. A maid followed with more linen and set it down near the hearth. The taller man did not leave.
“Miss Bennet.” The name confirmed it. She had given it, then. The knowledge took root like a stone dropped in the mere, sinking beyond reach. She had given her real name. To a stranger. In a valley chosen for anonymity.
“I am Aldridge. Mr Darcy tells me you went through the ice yesterday afternoon and suffered a fracture of the lower leg, with the bone forced through the skin. I must remove the binding and examine the wound.”
Mr Darcy—that was the man who had carried her, Mr Darcy—he came to the bedside before Aldridge touched her. His face looked harder than before, as if the night had never ended for him.
“I am sorry,” he said quietly. “He must set it. You must keep still.”
The absurdity almost provoked laughter. Keep still? As if she had not spent every waking hour since the lake commanding her body to do just that.
Aldridge’s hands came to the blankets. She tried to focus. The room swam, reformed, swam again. His fingers were warm, a distant detail like weather in a passing country. The binding came away. The strips of cloth, waistcoat lining, she saw now, silk stiff with dried blood, peeled from the wound with a wet, final sound.
She looked. She had not before. Ignorance had filled the gap with horrors, and she needed to know whether they were true.
They were.
Below her knee, the skin was torn, a ragged opening through which the end of the bone protruded, white and streaked with pink. The flesh around the wound was swollen, darkened between purple and black. The sight produced vertigo unrelated to height, the body recognising itself in a state it was never meant to behold.
“The field dressing was competent.” Aldridge probed the wound’s edges with gentle fingers, causing pain so bright she gripped the mattress and her vision burst with sparks. “The bone has not displaced further. The wound is dirty but not yet septic. Another twelve hours and I would have had a different conversation with you.”
The words assembled slowly, like furniture carried into a room piece by piece. Not yet septic.A different conversation. Amputation. He spoke of amputation.
“It is not coming off today,” Aldridge said. His voice had the matter-of-fact quiet of a man delivering the worst and best news his patient would hear in one breath. “Today I will clean the wound, push the bone back through the opening and set it, and splint the leg. I must tell you plainly that this will be the worst pain you have yet endured.”
She wanted to answer sharply, to prove she was still herself behind the pain and fog, but produced only a bare, jerking motion of the chin.
Aldridge arranged his instruments. She could not see them clearly. The room drifted in and out of focus, object edges dissolving and reforming. A brown bottle. The smell preceded the liquid. He poured it over the wound. The sting was extraordinary, a fire laid directly on torn flesh. Her jaw locked. Her fingers dug into the sheet. She held fast.
Then Mr Darcy moved behind her and gathered her up against him before Aldridge put his hands on the bone. One arm went across her upper chest, not crushing, but inescapable. The other braced her shoulders.
“Forgive me,” he said into her hair. “I am sorry. I am so sorry. You must not move.”
She might have protested if the next instant had not annihilated every other power.
Aldridge laid hold of the bone.
What followed lay beyond language. The grinding came as the bone was forced back through the channel it had torn on the way out, and her body rebelled with every resource it possessed. She screamed. There was no stopping it, no containing it, no remnant of self-command left to save her from it. The sound tore out of her and went straight into Mr Darcy’s coat and shoulder where she had buried her face. Her hands clawed at him in blind agony. Cloth bunched. Something gave beneath her fingers. He held her through it.
“I know,” he said, though she could not have told whether he spoke once or many times. “I know. Forgive me. Hold fast. It will end.”
It did not end. It went on and on and on, the hands on her leg, the bone moving, the room breaking apart around pain so total it abolished thought. She heard the maid crying quietly somewhere to the left. She heard Aldridge tell Mr Darcy not to let her twist. Mr Darcy’s hold tightened. His chest took the force of every scream. His shoulder burned under her nails. Still, he did not let her go.
Then it altered. The bone was in. Aldridge was wrapping the splint, rigid and real, binding it fast with clean linen, and the pain receded from its height to something merely vast, a territory she could inhabit only because the one just passed had made this survivable.
She was soaked with sweat. Her hands would not release Mr Darcy’s coat at first. Her breathing shattered in ragged, wet pulls, the breath of a woman taken apart and uncertain she was whole again.
“The fracture is reduced and set,” Aldridge panted at last. His voice came from a distance. “The wound will need dressing twice daily. Watch for heat, redness, and discharge. If a fever persists beyond a day, send for me.”
“How long?” She could hardly form a proper question.
“Eight weeks before you can leave the bed, at earliest. Twelve more likely before you can be moved, and perhaps four or five months before you can walk. I am afraid it will never be as strong as it once was, even in the best if circumstances. And you must not bear weight on that leg until I say.”
Eight weeks at least. The number fell into the fog, enormous and incomprehensible. Eight weeks confined. In this bed. In this house. Unable to walk, leave, reach the bag, or Jane, or safety. The thing she fled did not cease because she had stopped.
Aldridge gave his remaining instructions while washing his hands. A brown bottle of laudanum was set on the table beside her. Then he repacked his case and paused, as though remembering one task still unfinished.
“Mr Darcy tells me his sister is no worse than last week. I will look in on her briefly before I go. I do not wish to tire you more, Miss Bennet, but if you need anything before I leave, say it now. I shall not stay beyond half an hour.”
