Jane’s hand tightened round hers. Elizabeth fixed her eyes on the tester of the bed and failed to keep them there. She had to know. If this was the last morning she possessed her own leg entire, she would not meet ignorance in place of horror.
Aldridge drew back the blankets and began to unwrap the bandage.
Each turn of linen uncovered not merely flesh but dread itself. Beneath came the wet cloths steeped through the night in water drawn from the southern springs where she had fallen and laid on by hands that hoped because they had nothing else to offer. They peeled away with that intimate, dreadful sound she had already learned to fear.
She did not cry out. She shook and bit the inside of her lip and tasted blood.
The wound lay open. The bone, set two days earlier amid screaming and force, held where he had put it. Around it, the flesh was swollen, angry, discoloured. But the blackened margin was not where she had expected.
It had drawn back.
Not by miracle enough to erase what had been done, nor enough to be trusted at once, but enough that even in terror she knew it. The dark edge Aldridge had marked as advancing had retreated toward the wound instead of climbing higher.
Aldridge went still.
Then he bent closer.
His fingers examined the damaged flesh with grave, deliberate care, sending white flares through her leg that she bore in broken breaths against Jane’s hand. Darcy had moved no farther than the bedside. Though she did not look at him again, she knew exactly where he stood.
Aldridge straightened, looked again at the wound, then at the removed cloths—the linen, the mineral scent, evidence of the fomentations he had not prescribed.
“What has been applied to this wound?”
“Water from the mere.” Jane’s voice was flat and carefully controlled. “Mrs Bannon advised it after you left—hot fomentations—cloths soaked in the spring water, laid on the site. We have applied them through the night. We even coaxed her to swallow some.”
Aldridge’s face remained unchanged, but something behind his eyes—the professional part that had practised for decades—was working.
“I did not recommend this treatment.”
“No.”
“The water from the mere?”
“The mineral springs. The water the locals credit with curative properties.”
“I am familiar with local claims, Mrs Marsden.” He said this without inflection—neither endorsing nor dismissing. He examined the wound again, tracing the blackening’s margin with his finger, measuring the distance between dead and living tissue. His lips moved silently—counting, measuring against a standard Elizabeth could not see.
“The margin has not advanced,” he said. “It has retreated. By approximately a quarter-inch.”
The words filled the room—a quarter-inch—the distance between fingertip and first knuckle. The measure between keeping her leg and losing it.
“Mr Aldridge.” Jane spoke first, the voice Elizabeth knew best—the voice that read her stories, reasoned with their mother, spoke calmly through every crisis. The voice trembled. “My husband bathed in that water for five months. Drank it every day. Followed every local recommendation. Yet he was buried in the churchyard less than a week ago.”
The ground beneath everything Elizabeth believed moved. Jane’s husband was…dead?
Mr Marsden was dead!
The household she’d sought for eleven days—the cottage, the safety, the married sister with a roof, a husband, a life to absorb her burden—did not exist. Jane was alone. Alone when the letter arrived. Alone when she rushed to the house. Tending Elizabeth’s wound with the competence of one who had just tended a dying man, and—
“Jane?”
“Not now, Lizzy.”
“Jane—Mr Marsden—when—”
“Not now.” Jane did not meet her eyes. She looked at Aldridge, the wound, anything but Elizabeth’s face. Her jaw was set. Her eyes glistened with tears she refused to shed. Clearly, she had not meant to say it. The words were pulled from her by the argument, by Aldridge’s hand on the case, by the terror of watching another loved one risk a remedy already failed. The gentle delivery planned—tomorrow, Elizabeth, all tomorrow—lay in ruins, and Jane stepped over the wreckage because the leg was more urgent than grief, and grief had to wait.
“The water did not save him. I do not believe it is saving Elizabeth’s leg. The fever loosens because fevers loosen, wounds improve because wounds sometimes improve, and if we wait another day, hoping on a quarter-inch that could be swelling’s trick, we risk—” Her voice caught, and she restrained it. “We risk everything! I have already lost myhusband. I will not lose my sister to chance or vanity, sir. Take the leg now, while it can be taken cleanly. I would rather my sister live without a leg than die with one.”
