He went back into the study and wrote to Aldridge in Bakewell.
The letter ran to three lines. He did not say why he wished Aldridge to return. He said only that Miss Bennet had been uneasy and that he would value the surgeon’s further opinion at the earliest convenient hour. He sealed it and gave it to Hadley’s boy and watched him ride out through the yard.
Then he stood in the yard for another minute and looked at nothing.
Because the truth was that he did not wish Aldridge to return either. He wished Aldridge to confirm what he had already half-concluded in the small hours, which was that the leg was not simply mending but mending in excess of what mending ought to be. If Aldridge confirmed it, Darcy would be obliged to do something with the information. If Aldridge denied it, Darcy would be obliged to consider whether he had begun to see things in his own house. Neither course led to any hour of that day in which he would sleep better than last night.
Mrs Hadley came at ten with the crutches.
She had been told, by Darcy, in a study interview engineered to resemble consultation about the lower carrier rather than what it was, that Miss Bennet was soon to be taught the use of aids. Standing while supported, he said, ought to improve the circulation in her good leg only, while the other remained splinted and immobilised, safe from bearing weight.
Mrs Hadley had raised one eyebrow, said nothing, and agreed. Whether she was persuaded by the plausibility of his account or by his own unwillingness to be questioned upon it, she did not disclose. She measured the crutches against her patient’s height, pronounced the height workable, delivered her instruction with the brevity of a woman who had trained rougher hands, and told Miss Bennet the first rule of crutches was humility.
He watched from the passage.
Miss Bennet received the rule with a gravity that would have moved him on any previous afternoon. Today it could not. His mind was still in the yard at nine, sealing a letter he had not wanted to send about a leg he could not explain.
Then Mrs Hadley unwrapped the bandage for her inspection.
He had positioned himself where he could see. He was not proud of having positioned himself where he could see. He had, however, done it, and he now saw what Mrs Hadley saw—what, on his walking into the parlour, he had to school his face out of an ungentlemanly unmasked response to.
The wound that on the afternoon of the ice had opened the thigh from mid-way to knee in a manner Aldridge had counted five separate tears within was, at three weeks, a single united line. Pink at the edges. Clean through the middle. The colouration a solid month ahead of where it ought to have been, and the tissue round it behaving as flesh did when flesh had reached an understanding with itself that none of the authorities in the passage or the parlour could explain.
“Well!” Mrs Hadley breathed.
Miss Bennet did not look at the leg. She looked across the room at Darcy, once, with an expression he was also unprepared for—an expression that asked him, plainly, not to speak.
He did not speak.
Mrs Hadley wrapped the leg again and said, “We shall need the bandage less tomorrow.” She was not a woman given to pronouncements in the hearing of patients, and Darcy understood that this one had escaped her. She gathered her basket and went.
He stood in the passage. His hand was against the wall.
That was the first day.
Thesecondandthirddays were easier and worse at once.
They were easier because Miss Bennet practised under Mrs Hadley’s eye at noon and at six. She had chosen those hours because they were the times when her sister would go out, and between those hours kept, more or less, to the bed. The particular paralysis of the first day—the surgeon not yet returned from Bakewell, the bandage not yet reinspected, the leg not yet pronounced upon by any voice Darcy was willing to call authoritative—held in abeyance for two days.
They were worse because in the hours between Mrs Hadley’s visits he began, against his better judgment, to understand.
It was at breakfast on the second day that he understood Georgiana.
She had come down to the table at an hour she had not held, before Miss Bennet, for most of the last three months. She had done so without being coaxed, without Nan’s elbow at her back, without the small white line round her mouth she had worn everymorning of October and November. She passed him the toast and teased him, in a voice Darcy had not heard his sister employ since the spring, about the colour of the blue shawl matching his eyes better than hers, so he ought to be the one wearing it. The laugh had breath behind it. The laugh had colour behind it. The laugh was the laugh of a sixteen-year-old girl, not a convalescent in her sixth month of decline.
He sat with his tea and watched.
He had known his sister was improving. He had known it as he had known that the weather was mild that winter, or that the south windows were cleaner than the north—an observation held at the surface, remarked upon by other people, considered by him as a fact of the season. He had not put the fact of it together with anything else. A gentleman did not go about assembling explanations for his sister’s recovery from complaints she had been mercifully spared from enduring a further winter under.
He was putting it together now.
He recalled the morning after Aldridge had refused to take the leg—Georgiana had walked to the hall on her own feet, which she had not done in a month. He recalled the afternoon Miss Bennet had first sat up against the pillows for an hour without tiring—Georgiana had practised twenty minutes at the pianoforte, which she had not done in six weeks. He recalled the evening Miss Bennet had first taken a proper dinner from her tray—Georgiana had eaten a full plate of mutton stew, which she had not done since October. He had been attributing these improvements, when he had attributed them at all, to the general warmth of a household now possessed of two young ladies rather than one.
He was no longer able to believe that.
He set down his cup. From the parlour door down the hall, he could hear Georgiana laughing again. Miss Bennet was laughing with her. Outside the south window the lower meadow lay pale in the rare winter sun and the dripping hedges were beginning, in places, to put out their first green points a full fortnight ahead of any previous account his steward’s book contained.
The valley itself, he could no longer pretend he had not seen, looked less ill than it had done a month ago.
