“A pleasure,” Elizabeth murmured. Her lips were cracking again.
“Aye. Mrs Marsden asked whether I would come up. She says she’s your sister, and you’re lately come all the way from Hertfordshire.”
Elizabeth’s heart gave a hard, ugly turn.
If Jane had told this woman there was a sister newly come from Hertfordshire, that alone was bad enough. If the name had gone with it, worse. The town already knew too much. A strange lady dragged half-dead from the mere could not be kept from local talk. AddHertfordshireandBennetto the tale, and every careful mile of her journey would begin to come undone. She had not crossed England in secrecy only to be found because a village learned to connect county, Christian name, and a sickbed.
Mrs Hadley was still looking at her, not impatiently, but with the calm expectation of one who had spoken and meant to be answered.
“You are very good to come,” Elizabeth said.
“Goodness has little to do with it. I was told there was an injured lady at the house who wanted the waters.” Mrs Hadley glanced toward the chair, the fire, the folded cloths by the basin, taking stock of the room in a single sweep. “What am I to call you?”
The question fell exactly where Elizabeth had feared it would.
Not a falsehood. She had promised that much, and the promise mattered more now than ever, because lies bred other lies and must be remembered. But not the whole of it either, not if the whole might travel beyond this room.
“Elizabeth,” she said after the smallest count. “If you please.”
“Aye. Elizabeth, then. I am Hadley’s wife, the drowner. Mrs Bannon says the surgeon has left the leg on for another day. I came to see whether he has done right.”
“And if he has not?”
Mrs Hadley’s hands were red with cold, broad in the palm, knuckles enlarged by work, nails cut short. “Then there will be no mending it by discussing his judgment after he is eight miles away. Lift the blankets and let me look.”
Elizabeth obeyed. Mrs Hadley bent over the bandage with the concentration of a craftswoman. Her fingers, when they touched the skin above the wrappings, were cool. She did not begin unbinding at once. She first felt for heat, then swelling, then pressed two fingers lightly to the pulse at Elizabeth’s ankle as if the limb had its own language and she meant to hear it before anyone translated.
“Pain?”
“Yes.”
“That was not a useful answer. Where?”
Elizabeth, having spent two days being spoken to by surgeons and gentlemen as if the broad fact of suffering exhausted all practical enquiry, found the question almost cheerful in its precision. She described what she could. Mrs Hadley listened. When she had heard enough, she unwrapped the outer folds and looked long at the wound in silence.
“Mrs Bannon has done no harm,” she said at last. “That will vex me less than it vexes her. The water has taken some heat out and drawn some foulness down. But they have been laying the cloths too thick. It traps what ought to escape. And if the water is allowed to stand after it is drawn, it goes dead in the linen before the linen reaches the flesh. Fresh every time. Warm by the skin, not by the kettle. If a woman cannot bear her own wrist in it, she has no business putting it on another body.”
She turned her head toward the door. “Mrs Marsden. You may come in. I heard you on the stair three boards ago.”
The latch moved. Jane entered, colour high in her face, a tray in her hands, and the look of a woman caught in the act of listening and too tired to pretend otherwise.
“I was not listening.”
“No,” said Mrs Hadley. “You were standing in the passage with broth, waiting to hear whether I cried out that the leg was a lost cause. Set down the tray and come here.”
Jane set it down. Elizabeth had never seen Jane obey another woman’s summons with so little instinctive resistance. Mrs Hadley pointed at the bandage and began, in the tone of a woman teaching a younger one how to save time without losing care, to explain how the cloths must be folded, how often changed, how the water carried, how the skin around the wound must be kept dry so the flesh did not soften where it ought to knit.
Jane listened as if the instruction were prayer.
“You know nursing work well enough, Mrs Marsden,” Mrs Hadley said without looking up.
Jane’s hands lay still on the folded linen. “Yes.” Jane did not flinch, but something in her mouth altered.
Mrs Hadley nodded once, not in pity but recognition. “I was at the cottage the third week of Christmas when his chest took a turn. I thought then he would not see Twelfth Night. He surprised me by a fortnight. Men will sometimes stay longer out of sheer spite than all the skill in Christendom could have bought them.”
Jane gave a sound that might have been a laugh if laughter had been possible in the room. “That resembles him more than any other account I have yet heard.”
“Aye. I thought it might. Hand me the clean cloth. No, not that one. The thinner. There is no sense smothering a wound because one is afraid of seeing it.”
