“Comfort? I’m not here for comfort. I’m here because Tom Pemberton nearly frightened his mother out of her senses in the night and because the water’s drawing mean this morning. Whether one has to do with t’other I leave to wiser heads than mine, but I’ve lived long enough to notice when troubles begin keeping time together.” She began undoing the bandage with brisk fingers. Elizabeth looked—the bruising had spread and deepened overnight, yellow-green at the margins, the colour of damage no longer fresh but recalled, the first-week shade she had thought behind her. Below the knee the skin had retightened. The break ached in the grinding, distinct way that marked bone, something interrupted mid-repair. “The boy asks after you.”
Elizabeth turned her head. “After me?”
“Aye. Says where’s the south lady and did she mend proper or no. Likely because he saw you by the hearth once and children remember what adults do not expect them to keep.”
The mention of the boy, not sentimental but as a small consciousness somewhere in the valley, undid something in Elizabeth’s chest.
“Can I go to him?”
Mrs Hadley looked up as if the question were fever.
“On that leg? No. On the other, with your common sense restored, perhaps. Hold still.” She tightened the clean layer. “You’re not to save the whole county by noon.”
“I am beginning to suspect the county objects to being left unsaved.”
Mrs Hadley snorted. “Counties always do. But no good ever came of a woman half-healed trying to play Providence because she dislikes dependence.” She tied off the dressing and sat back. “Tell me plain. Did you mean to leave only the house or the valley entire?”
Elizabeth met her gaze.
Mrs Hadley’s weathered, intelligent face held no idle curiosity. She wanted fact because fact altered treatment.
“The valley,” Elizabeth said.
“Hm.”
Nothing more. Only that sound. Then, without looking up—”The wound went backward because you did. Walk toward the road again and we will not get it back. And if you’d reached the road?”
“I do not know.”
“Aye. That’s the way with desperate plans. Folk call them decisions because it sounds finer. They’re often only motion with fear pulling the traces.” Mrs Hadley packed away the linen. “Well. You did not reach it. So we are left with the nuisance instead of the imagined one. I’ll send broth presently. Don’t make that face at me. You need it.”
When she had gone, Elizabeth lay under the newly bound leg and wished badly to cry, which irritated her because tears would relieve nothing and leave her eyes swollen for anyone entering later.
Theafternoondarkenedearlybeneath a bank of cloud from the west. Georgiana sent a note apologizing for not coming down and enclosing a page of copied music so Elizabeth might at least mock it from a distance. Elizabeth stared at the stave several minutes before realising she had read not a note. Her mind refused trifles where guilt thrived.
Near three o’clock Jane came with the broth and set it on the table by the bed.
“Miss Darcy is sorry not to come,” she said.
“I know. She has written.”
Jane glanced at the music page. “She is growing stronger.”
The sentence should have been simple. It was not. Elizabeth heard beneath it everything unspoken—Darcy’s joy in Georgiana’s recovery, Jane’s own susceptibility to the kindness attending that joy, the intolerable spectacle of Elizabeth standing by while both siblings turned toward her.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said carefully. “That is good.”
Jane arranged the spoon, though it needed no arranging.
“Mr Darcy has been at the carrier since noon. Hadley says the water nearly broke the edge twice. Ashby believes Edmund had one of the lower gates pegged wrong last autumn and the thaw has moved the timber further out of true.”
“So it is mismanagement after all.”
Jane’s hands stopped.
“Lizzy.”
Only the name. Yet in it lay weariness and warning both.
