“And you still will not tell me what it is.”
“I cannot.”
“Cannot,“ he said, and now the anger came through—not loud, only sharpened to a blade. “Orwill not?”
“Do not ask me that as if the distinction were simple.”
“It is simple where truth is concerned.”
She turned her face away. That, more than any other answer, told him how fully the blow had struck.
When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. Wounded, colder, more controlled. “I told you once I would not ask what you could not yet safely say. I did not understand that in return I was to be made party to consequences I could neither judge nor refuse—to my sister, to my house, to myself.”
She closed her eyes. “I know.”
“Do you?”
The question was not harsh. That was what made it unbearable—less for her, perhaps, than for him, for whom the years of discipline that had taught him to ask such a question plainly had no procedure to offer him for what might come next.
He drew breath.
“Rest,” he said at last. The word had gone formal, almost stripped of intimacy by effort. “Mrs Hadley will want the swelling watched. I shall see what has gone wrong below.”
He moved toward the door.
“Mr Darcy—”
He stopped. He did not turn fully. “Yes?”
There was no safe answer to an address with no sentence after it. He waited for it anyway.
“I am sorry,” she said.
He stood a short while longer. “So am I.”
Then he left.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Bymorningthefacthad spread through Northmere in the practical form such facts assume among people too occupied to see them as omens. Tom Pemberton’s cough had worsened sharply overnight. The lower meadow was wrong at the east edge where the water should have drained by dawn, yet still lay thin and cold over the young grass. One of the drowner’s lambs, found alive but weak, was brought to the kitchen in a sack and placed by the ashes while Mrs Reeves administered broth, dry cloths, and invective toward its recovery. Mrs Hadley, having slept no more than three hours after being summoned twice before daybreak, declared that either weather, poor management, or wilful interference had put the whole place out of temper and that she was not inclined, at her age, to unravel which without assistance.
Elizabeth heard most of this from the parlour bed, restored not to rest but to captivity.
The renewed injury was not catastrophic. Mrs Hadley had said so twice, her tone insisting one ought to feel reassured whether comfort followed or not. The torn knitting had not failed entirely, and the wound would heal again if properly tended. But the leg was more swollen, the pain deeper and less straightforward than before, and every minimal movement echoed the lane. Her body remembered exactly where she had demanded too much and responded with resentful accuracy.
Humiliation, at least, remained vigorous.
Jane came in at seven with tea and the bottle Mrs Hadley had ordered at intervals throughout the day. Her eyes were shadowed. The calm with which she measured the spoonful and held the cup was so contrived that Elizabeth nearly questioned whether she had slept at all.
“Mrs Hadley says you are not to put the foot down except for the chair and only then if someone is with you,” Jane said.
“I perceive she has lost confidence in my judgment.”
“That confidence was never extravagant.”
The reply would once have been light. Now it lay between them weighted with truth. Elizabeth took the medicine.
“And the lamb?”
