“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
He carried her up the lane.
The house grew larger with every step, its south wall pale against the damp sky. Below, from the meadow side, men shouted over water and wood. A flock of rooks rose from the far trees all at once, as though some disturbance had passed unseen. She made no more effort to argue with him. She lay against his chest with the silence of a woman who had been stripped of every reasonable argument by her own body and had decided to conserve what small dignity she could by not adding unreasonable ones.
Mrs Reeves met them at the step with one look at the two of them and no waste of speech.
“Parlour,” she said over her shoulder to Martha. “Hot water. Clean cloths. Find Mrs Hadley if she’s not already halfway here by Providence or malice.”
Mrs Marsden came out of the passage then and stopped as though struck.
Her face went first white, then filled with a pain so swiftly mastered that only a sister could have measured the effort—though Darcy, who had been measuring her for a month, measured it too, and would not afterwards have forgotten what he saw.
“What happened?”
He answered before Miss Bennet could.
“She attempted too much ground. The wound has opened.” Not a lie. Not the whole truth.
Mrs Marsden paled, her eyes sweeping his and then her sister’s bleeding bandage. “Bring her in.”
He did.
Mrs Hadley arrived before the dressings were fully cut away, mud still on her skirts from the field and a basket always containing exactly what disaster required. The reproof she reserved for later. First came work—clear water, pressure, examination. When the last bandage came away she was still. The discoloration was not the clean red-purple of fresh tearing. It ran deeper, bruised green-black at the wound’s margins, the colour of the first terrible days after the ice, as if something had turned a fortnight’s mending back in the space of a lane.
“This is not ripped knitting,” she said at last, binding the clean layers with hands brisk and warm. “This wants to go backwards. Three days at the least, and maybe five if the inflammation rises.”
Miss Bennet, white now in earnest and with cold at her temple, said, “I am perfectly aware I have behaved like a fool.”
“Good. It saves me one speech. Not the next six.”
Mrs Marsden stood at the head of the bed holding the basin. Darcy stood farther back near the hearth, muddy at the hem and silent enough to change the pressure of the room.
When at last Mrs Hadley and Mrs Reeves conferred in the passage over poultice timing and what ought to be sent up to the Pembertons if the water continued wrong, Mrs Marsden set down the basin, turned, and looked at him.
“Thank you,” she said.
He inclined his head. “I am sorry it was necessary.”
Whatever Miss Bennet did in the bed behind him at that exchange he did not turn to see.
Mrs Marsden looked once at the mud on his coat, at the place where Miss Bennet’s hand had crushed the cloth at his shoulder, at his face, then away. “So am I.”
She went out to follow Mrs Hadley. The room, when the door closed, was emptier and less certain.
He did not come closer at once. He stood by the fire looking not at Miss Bennet but at the rain-dark window.
“Why?”
He watched the colour of her face alter as whatever pain she had held at bay, in order to quarrel with him in the lane, took proper possession of her now the quarrel was ended.
“Because every day I remain here, I put more upon you than you have any right to bear. Upon Jane. Upon Miss Darcy. Upon this house. Upon a valley already foolish enough to invent consequences where perhaps there are only coincidences. Because I am not a harmless guest who stayed too long. Because if the thing I carry breaks over your head, it will not care that you meant only kindness.”
The last sentence hung in the room like a cut rope. “There is something, then.”
“Yes.”
