“What time is it?” Elizabeth asked.
“Past eleven. The rest of the house is dark.”
Elizabeth blinked again. “Then you should be asleep, too.”
“I heard your breathing change and thought you would wake soon. Mrs Hadley said the bandage ought to be changed again once you were properly roused.”
Elizabeth stared at her. “You waited up for that?”
“For that, and because I was not easy.”
Jane sat down on the bed’s edge with the basin near to hand. In the softened light, her face looked tired enough to make the hour plain. “I was sorry to be short with you before,” she said, not looking at Elizabeth while she folded back the blanket. “I am still angry, which is inconvenient, but I was sorry.”
The apology, offered so plainly, went through Elizabeth worse than reproof had done. She caught Jane’s hand before it could draw away and pressed her lips to her sister’s knuckles.
“I deserved worse.”
“You generally do, when you are bent on being impossible.”
Elizabeth almost smiled.
Jane’s fingers tightened once about hers, then slipped free to the work. “Now hold still, and let me mend what I can.”
Chapter Fifteen
Darcyhadreachedthepoint in the morning’s correspondence at which every letter had been written by a man determined to be answered at length on a subject not worth three lines.
Hadley wanted timber. Ashby wanted labourers. A tenant on the south side wanted indulgence over rent and supplied, in justification, four pages of weather, three of conscience, and not one of arithmetic. Darcy had laid that last petition aside with the intention of giving it a colder reply than Christian charity perhaps recommended when there was a knock at the study door so slight he thought at first the house itself had made it.
“Come in.”
Mrs Marsden stood on the threshold.
She did not enter at once. In the days since her arrival she had learned the habits of the house with the speed of a woman accustomed to entering other people’s arrangements carefully and occupying as little of them as possible. She had become, in a few days, indispensable to her sister’s comfort, agreeable to Mrs Reeves, respected by Mrs Hadley, and nearly invisible in every interval not spent at Elizabeth’s bedside. Darcy had begun to understand that this last effect was not natural diffidence but practice.
He rose.
“Mrs Marsden. Is Miss Bennet worse?”
“No.” The answer came too quickly for mere information. She had expected the question and hurried to relieve him of it. “No, sir. She slept tolerably. Mrs Hadley was satisfied this morning. I should not disturb you if the matter were not—”
She stopped. Not because she did not know what to say. Because she knew it too well and disliked having to say it.
“Pray sit,” Darcy said.
“That is notnecessary.”
“Neither is standing when one has come to ask a difficult favour.”
A faint colour touched her face at the wordfavour. He had judged rightly then. She came a step farther in but did not sit.
“I wished,” she said, “to know whether one of the men might be spared this morning to carry some things from the cottage. Only the heavier pieces. A box, a small chest of drawers, the table from the bedchamber if it can be managed. The landlord’s woman is to come tomorrow and whatever remains is to be put aside or thrown out. I had thought—”
Again she stopped.
He waited.
“I had thought I should contrive it,” she finished, which was a manner of admitting she had not contrived it at all.
