She did as he instructed. He slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and rose—and now the lift had no composure in it at all, only speed, because the boards at the turning of the stair had given twice and Jane was halfway down. He crossed to the bed in three strides and set her on it with less gentleness than she had been handled with since Mrs Hadley had first laid hands on her.
He did not, in the half-second after he had laid her down, take his hand from beneath her shoulder at the speed his other hand had moved. The other hand had already gone to the coverlet. This hand, the one beneath her, stayed where it was for the breath he could spare it. The press of his thumb at the back of her shoulder came through her, and the rest of his hand under her, and the perfect stillness with which he held both. Then the hand left her and the coverlet came up over her legs by the brisk efficiency of a housekeeper clearing a table.
He crossed to the fender, righted the chair, returned it in one motion to its place by the writing-table. With his other hand he scooped up the brass inkstand and set it on the desk. His foot, in the same passage, nudged the survey map he had dropped on entering so that it came to rest folded near the fender as though it had been laid there on purpose. He was standing by the fender with the map in hand, a gentleman who had just that instant come in at an ordinary pace, when the parlour door opened.
“Lizzy—what happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Darcy said, before Elizabeth could draw the breath to lie competently on her own behalf. “I came in for the survey sheets and struck the fender going past, and the inkstand and the chair went with it. I am very sorry, Mrs Marsden, for the din. Your sister was dozing and is startled but not harmed. I shall convey my mortification to Mrs Reeves when I am next in the kitchen. There was no occasion for you to harm yourself rushing downstairs.”
Jane looked from him to Elizabeth. From Elizabeth to the fender. From the fender to the righted chair and the folded map and the inkstand in its place.
“I heard a cry.”
“My own,” Elizabeth said, and was never in her life more grateful for the absolute technical truth of the English language—a cryhad beenhers. “Mr Darcy was more alarming in his arrival than he intended. I am not hurt. I am only—” She let her head fall back against the pillow with an impersonation of weariness a part of her privately disliked. “I had been dreaming.”
Jane’s eyes did not leave her face for a long interval. Then she crossed to the bed and laid the back of her hand to Elizabeth’s forehead.
“You are warm.”
“I was dreaming badly.”
“You are not hurt?”
“I am not.”
Jane looked at her a second longer. Whatever she weighed in that interval she weighed against several years of knowledge of her sister’s faces, and whatever she concluded she kept for herself.
She had opened her mouth to speak again when the knock came at the back door.
It was not a knock requiring answer by any ordinary household order. It was three short raps followed by a fourth—the Hadleys’ signal for haste—and Martha, who had been in the scullery, came into the passage so quickly that her slippers made no second sound on the boards before she was at the parlour door.
“Mrs Marsden—it’s the Pemberton boy. From the cottages. Mrs Hadley sends word Tom’s fever has turned and she must have the poultice you were wrapping before she was called out, and the boy’s on the step and he was told not to come in out of the cold and he’s on the step nonetheless.”
Jane went very still.
Elizabeth saw in her sister's face the quick transit of every calculation a widow trained in sickrooms made without effort. Tom Pemberton was six, thin in October and thinner in January. The poultice lay half-wrapped on the kitchen table; Mrs Hadley had been summoned out before Jane could finish the linen. A fever turned was not a fever risen—it must be answered within the half-hour or not at all. The boy at the step was cold and would be colder standing. The parlour she was being asked to leave contained a sister who had given her a suspicious account of a crash and a gentleman who had given her another. The two together would keep for the half-hour the poultice would not.
“Tell him to come into the kitchen,” she said to Martha. “The wrap wants the last turn and the cord. Two minutes. He is not to stand out there another breath.”
Martha went.
Jane crossed to the parlour door and opened it wider—not by a little, but plainly, so that the whole passage lay exposed from the foot of the stair to the parlour hearth. She turned in the doorway. Her eyes went to Darcy, once. They did not speak the whole of what she thought, but they spoke some of it.
“Mr Darcy. I shall be at the kitchen table for two minutes finishing a poultice and then at the back door handing it to a boy whose mother is not equal to walking up here herself. Mrs Reeves is in her rooms and has instructed the household she is not to be disturbed, which I shall disturb on my way past if I consider it necessary. I trust I shall not. I trust I shall find this parlour, when I return, no more disordered than I leave it.”
“Mrs Marsden—”
“I have heard you.” The two words, low. “You may speak with my sister while I am gone, if she wishes it. The door will remain as you see it.”
She looked once more at Elizabeth—a long unhurried look that was not the look of a sister deceived—and went. Elizabeth heard her step cross the passage, quick and competent, and the kitchen door open and close upon the business that could not wait.
For a long interval neither of them spoke.
Elizabeth lay with her eyes closed because opening them would commit her to the next thing and she was not ready for the next thing. She heard him cross, quietly, to the fender. She heard him lay the map down. She heard him take a breath, let it out, take another. When at last she opened her eyes he was standing at the foot of the bed, one hand on the post, the composure of the last five minutes at last failing him around the edges.
“She knows,” Elizabeth said, very quietly.
“She knows something.”
