He stepped back. Not far. She had the sense that he had only now understood he was standing nearer the bed than a gentleman permitted himself, and that standing any nearer now would demand an explanation he would not make or a retreat he would not dignify.
“I will find Mrs Hadley before dinner,” he said. “The crutches will be in the parlour by tomorrow. You will use them when she permits it and not before.”
“Yes.”
“And you will not test alone.”
“I give you my word.”
“Your word, Miss Bennet, has lately become a matter of some interest to me.”
A coldness sank in her stomach, even as her cheeks heated. “You must be easy to interest.”
“On the contrary. I am notorious for the difficulty. You, however, have proved… an enigma, Miss Bennet. And I do not trust enigmas.”
A small half-undone breath escaped her—half-embarrassed, unexpectedly grateful for the narrow opening he had provided back into the ordinary weather between them. “I understand you, sir.”
He inclined his head. He went, and the door closed.
She lay back against the pillow. Her hand shook. The coverlet would not lie straight. The wounded leg, informed at last that the afternoon was over, reopened its account with her in full, and she let the pain come because she had earned it.
Behind her closed eyelids the afternoon reassembled in the order the body chose—his hand at her back, his chest against her forehead, the way he had lifted her without hurry because any hurry would have shamed her further. She could not leave Northmere because of a leg. She could not leave Northmere without carrying this afternoon out of it with her—which was only another way of saying that whatever direction her escape might one day take, she would be carrying pieces of these people inside her when it did.
She had been saved, and was grateful. She had kept a secret, and he had joined her in it. She had been told plainly, by the one man in the house whose judgment she trusted more than her own, that she was unjust to herself. She wished, absurdly and against every prudence, that he should say itagain.
Dusk came in at the windows. Jane came down, laid the back of her hand to Elizabeth’s forehead, frowned at the warmth, and asked no question Elizabeth could not honestly answer. The leg burned. The rest of her burned too, on a different account, untouched by pain and refusing the pretence of being a symptom. She lay with the coverlet bunched in her fist and thought of the man ten paces down the passage who had given her his silence and asked nothing but her word.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Themorningafterhehad carried Miss Bennet back to the bed she should not have left, Darcy woke at an hour he could not afterwards have described as either late or early, and discovered that he had not in fact slept at all.
What came back to him first, at the edge of whatever dawn it was, was the sound of his own voice in the parlour the evening before, asking her to move the leg—show me how it moves—and then his fingers pressed lightly, then more firmly, against the two places blood would first reach muslin if anything underneath had torn, and the clean fingers drawn away. Clean. He had pressed a leg that four weeks ago he had carried into the house half-frozen and broken open to the bone, and the muslin over the wound had been dry.
That image, by itself, he might have made behave.
The other image he could not, by any discipline, make behave.
It came back to him without his asking. The nightgown that had moved when she fell and had not returned to its proper place. The line of her sound leg from above the knee down. The bareness of her skin in the firelight. His own forearm crossing the inside of her shin, where it had been resting unattended while he tested for blood at the bandage. The instant, when he had looked at last at his own hand, in which he had not at once moved it. Three seconds. Four. He had looked at her exposed knee for the time it took a sensible man to count to four, and had not been counting. His discipline had not stopped him. The sight of the colour rising in himself had.
He sat up in the dark. He could not stay in the bed with the image.
There was a response his body had in answer to it that he had no use for and no business owning at the present hour, in the present house, where the woman in the image was a guest under his roof with a broken leg and a sister upstairs, too far removed for true decency. He had been examining her because the bone might have torn again. He had no claim, in law or conscience, to have seen what he had seen, and no right at all to be carrying it like this in his mind.
He stood. He walked to the window. He drew the cold of the glass against his forearm and held it there. The image came back. And his body's answer came back with it.
He had gone down at three because he could not stay upstairs with it. He had stood at the parlour door a long minute. To enter, at three in the morning, was a thing he would not do. He stood because the quiet on the other side of the door was the one quiet in the house that had any meaning for him, and he could not, for reasons he was not ready to examine, be away from it. The small sounds of Miss Bennet turning in her bed had been audible to him only because he was standing nearer the door than any gentleman ought. At four, he had gone back upstairs.
The rest of the night he had spent rehearsing, against his will, what he knew about broken bones. The fibula. The tibia. The femur. The malleolus. He had recited them as a man recites a prayer he has lost faith in, hoping that the recitation will do the work of the belief. Sometimes it worked. More often, somewhere between the malleolus and the next breath, the image of the bare knee came back unbidden, and so did the body's response, and he began the recitation again.
He knew that a fracture such as Aldridge had first described—the tibia driven against something unyielding under the ice, the wound taken in the thigh from the same blow—required the better part of two months to heal in a strong man under the best conditions a surgeon could contrive. He knew what the colour of such a wound looked like in its first week, because he had seen it. He knew what the colour looked like in its second, because he had been present when Mrs Hadley had changed the dressings. He knew what the colour looked like in its third, because he had pressed the bandage for blood twelve hours ago and the fingers had come back clean.
None of the things he knew about such injuries agreed with any of the other things he knew. A leg did not close in three weeks. A woman did not stand on such a leg at four weeks and walk. A bandage pressed firmly over the site of the fracture did not answer with clean muslin. These things were, in the ordinary courses of English medicine, not difficult to describe because they did not occur.
He did not know what to do with a woman he was housing who was healing at a pace his training in the ordinary arithmetic of bodies had no answer for.
He got up. He dressed and went out.
Mrs Reeves was in the kitchen, flour to the elbows. He asked her if Miss Bennet had passed a quiet night. Mrs Reeves said she had slept better than expected. He did not ask what she meant byexpected.
