She laid the folded shift over the arm of the chair, the drying-cloth over the fire-screen to warm, and a small bottle of oil on the mantel. She did not look at Elizabeth while she did any of this. She had been doing this kind of practical work for her sister all winter and had never once needed to look.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.
“Do not thank me. I am carrying linen. Anyone in this house could carry linen.”
It was the first thing Jane had said to her since the exchange of the morning, in which Elizabeth had said something mild about the mere looking darker and Jane had saidthen do not look at it, and they had not spoken again.
The tin bath filled by stages as Mrs Reeves poured the second bucket and Martha ran for the third. The water gave off a faint mineral smell, clean but strange, and the steam carried it into every corner of the parlour so that the room began to hold the outdoors inside itself in a way Elizabeth had not met before.
Mrs Hadley tested the temperature with the back of her wrist.
“Another bucket cold from the pump, Martha. She is not a mutton joint.”
When the water had cooled to bearable, Mrs Hadley drew the screen across and came to the bed.
“Up, then.”
Elizabeth pushed the coverlet back.
The shift came off over her head with Jane holding one sleeve and Mrs Reeves holding the other and Elizabeth helping as she could, which was not much. She was thinner than she had been in Hertfordshire. She had known this in a general way from the slackness of her stays whenever Mrs Reeves had let her sit for dressing, but seeing her own arms now in winter light she understood for the first time how much of herself the last six weeks had taken. The bath-shift Jane drew round her was cotton so fine as to be nearly transparent, intended only to keep a woman from sitting entirely bare in front of servants, and Mrs Hadley began at once on the bandage.
She worked with her usual brisk competence, winding the old linen into a loose coil as it came free. The outer layers lifted easily. The inner ones had adhered a little at the worst part of the wound and Mrs Hadley soaked them free with warm water from a small copper jug rather than pull. She was quiet while she did it. So was everyone else.
The bandage came away entire at last.
Elizabeth looked down.
She had not looked in some days. She had found reasons not to look—the examinations by Aldridge and Mrs Hadley had demanded her attention elsewhere, and the dressings changed morning and night had always been someone else’s hands over a thing she could not quite bring herself to see in full. Now the leg lay bare along the coverlet before her in full winter light with the screen shutting out nothing that mattered.
The long scar ran from below the knee nearly to the ankle’s inner bone. Pink-new down most of its length, livid where the lane had retorn it at one end, still weeping very slightly at the worst margin. The bruising from the fall lay across the thigh above the knee in a wide plain of blue-black at the centre and sulphur yellow at the edges. The knee itself was puffed. The ankle was puffed. The leg as a whole was not the leg she remembered.
She looked at it perhaps half a minute. Neither Mrs Hadley nor Jane hurried her.
They lifted her. Jane at the good side, Mrs Reeves under the other arm, Mrs Hadley at the knee as a brace, and Elizabeth stepped on the sound foot and swung the wounded one over the rim of the tin bath with more help than she would have admitted needing a week ago and less than she had required a week before that.
She sat slowly, supported by the three women, and let her legs straighten along the bath’s length until the mere covered her to the hips. Mrs Hadley laid a folded towel behind her shoulders where the rim of the bath would otherwise cut. Mrs Reeves put a second folded cloth under the knee for support. Jane, whose hands had been doing their share of the lowering, withdrew them as soon as Elizabeth was safely down, took up a warmed towel from the fire-screen, and returned to stand at the bath’s edge with it folded across her arms ready.
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
The water was warm.
Not warmer than any other bath she had taken in her life. Warmer than she had been in her body for a month. The heat reached first the surface of her skin and then, more slowly, a layer beneath, and then, more slowly still, a place lower than skin or muscle that she had not been aware of as a place until the warmth arrived in it.
That was the first strangeness.
She opened her eyes.
Mrs Hadley had begun sponging the wound with a soft cloth, drawing the mere water up over the scar in long slow passes that carried the steam against Elizabeth’s face each time the cloth lifted.
The second strangeness came from lower. A tingle in the shin-bone itself, not the muscle above or the skin, a running sensation as though the bone were drinking. It was not painful. It was not pleasant. It was the feeling of a thing answering that had not answered before.
“Mrs Hadley,” Elizabeth said.
“I feel it.”
That was all Mrs Hadley said. Her hand went on with the cloth. But she was looking, now, at the knee rather than the scar, and Elizabeth looked too.
The puffiness round the kneecap was going down.
