Jane inclined her head. “I thought you would wish to know.”
After he had gone, Elizabeth lay very still, and Jane began stacking the cups.
“You need not manage him on my account,” Elizabeth said quietly.
Jane’s hands did not stop. “I was managing your leg.”
“Jane.”
Now she looked up. There was no anger in her face. That would have been simpler. There was only tiredness, pride, love, and the new hurt she had not yet learned to conceal.
“Lizzy, if I manage anything in this house, it is because I have had practice managing what can be managed when there is one thing too many in the room. Do not be cross with me for being the same woman I was last week. I cannot yet afford to be another.”
The answer silenced her.
That evening, after the house stilled and the mere lay dark beneath a moon not yet full enough to shine, Elizabeth lay awake longer than she meant. The physical pain was tolerable. The other kind had grown less so.
She thought of Georgiana’s laughter and Darcy’s face answering it. She thought of Jane at the tea tray, controlled as a wound stitching itself wrong. She thought of the map between Darcy’s hands and hers, the span of paper keeping skin from skin.
Every day at Northmere now produced some object that retained the shape of what had not happened—a ledger page, a folded note, a map corner, a half-inch of table between hands. Worse, she had begun to live for such scraps, receiving them like a miser and despising herself for the pleasure.
This, she suspected, was how women became sensible too late—not by one grand surrender, but by feeding upon privations until privation became a species of appetite.
Anotherweekpassed,andthe afternoon turned quiet in the way Elizabeth had learned afternoons always on washing days. Jane had taken Nan's place beside Georgiana with a book neither lady particularly cared for. Mrs Hadley had come, pronounced the wound unchanged, and gone again to the cottages. Nan, Mrs Reeves, and Mrs Bannon would be occupied for hours, and she had not heard Darcy's footstep outside for two hours at least. Surely, he was out at the hatches with Hadley.
The parlour held no one but Elizabeth, the fire, the ticking clock, and—under the bed, at the exact distance she could neither reach nor forget—the bag whose continued patience was by now its most terrible quality.
For some minutes, she lay staring at the ceiling because she had run out of other occupations and because the crack above the bed had become one of the few things in the parlour not yet confiscated by her own thought. She had named each of its branchings. She had imagined it as a river. She had imagined it as a country. She had, on two separate afternoons, caught herself assigning it a personality. A woman lay under such a ceiling for twenty-six days without going mad only if her mind had found some smaller escape, and these harmless embroideries were now grown suspect—they were the diversions of a woman being slowly convinced that a ceiling was the only landscape left her.
She turned her face toward the window.
The winter light came through the glass with the tired quality the hour always had, pale and low and declining to be admired. She had looked at it perhaps a hundred times in three weeks. She had looked at it more often than she had ever, in any previous life, looked at any view. And because she had looked at it a hundred times without doing anything about it, she was growing aware of a second, harder fact that had been ripening beneath the first.
She did not know whether her own leg was still hers.
Nearly four weeks of other people’s hands. Almost four weeks of a body held open for inspection, cleaned like a plate, dressed like a doll. Mrs Hadley’s palm at her ankle. Aldridge’s fingers at her knee. Jane, Mrs Bannon, Nan—every woman in the valley had, by now, taken a turn at the limb that had once carried her three miles across a field before breakfast. Somewhere in the procession of careful strangers the leg had stopped being a thing that did what she asked and become a thing others made decisions about.
And yet she knew something else, too—something no one had asked her and she had not volunteered. Every time Jane laid the mineral cloth against the bandage, the wound answered with a warmth that was not the water’s warmth. A second heat. A quiet exact activity beneath the skin, as though the flesh were being worked on by some intelligence below the instruments of any surgeon in Derbyshire. She had said nothing of it out of caution. She was not certain the experience was reliable, and less certain how to describe it without sounding credulous. But the thing had been consistent for a fortnight, and Aldridge’s own astonishment, last week through the open study door, had confirmed in a professional voice what her body had been telling her in a private one.
Something was mending her faster than medical wisdom allowed for. The household had continued to treat her as if the margin were Aldridge’s to govern rather than hers to test.
The next part of the thought she refused to say plainly even to herself, because once said it could not be unsaid. But it was there. She needed to know.
She sat up.
The movement was answered by a hot ache from mid-thigh to heel, but the ache stopped short of the white wall it had once been. She had not feelt that horror for days. This, she could think through. She could think past it. She waited until the pain dimmed to the small familiar torment she had learned to carry, and drew the coverlet back.
The bandaged leg lay bulkier than its twin—stiffer, swaddled, wrong to look at. For an instant it was not hers at all. She had a wild, undignified thought that she might have to be introduced to it afresh, like a cousin last seen as a child.
Very well,she told it.Let us see how much of you is still mine.
She swung the good leg over first—easy, nothing. Her good leg remembered how to be a leg. Then, with a care so slow it surprised her out of her own breath, she slid the other after it. The wound answered with a shuddering protest but nothing extraordinary. She had asked it a question and it had not refused.
She set her foot to the floor.
Cold through the stocking. The small, completely ordinary sensation of a floor beneath a foot. She had forgotten, in the purely bodily sense, the plain physical knowledge of a floor beneath a foot. Her throat tightened absurdly. She was ridiculous. She was going to weep at the temperature of the parlour floorboards.
The wounded foot she rested only on the ball. Pressure without weight. The leg confirmed, with brief reluctant candour, that it was there. Intact. Waiting for instructioins.
