“She will not say so.”
“No.” His voice had gone lower. “She will not.” He fell silent for a moment. “Miss Bennet.” The voice was low. It was also no longer composed. “I would like, if I may, to speak to you now.”
“Yes.”
“You have taken, in the space of a single afternoon,” he said, very low because the door was open and Georgiana was directly above, “more risks with your own body than any patient I have observed recover from anything. You werealone. You werewalking. Without warning. Without a companion. Without a stick or a crutch or a handfor support. Twenty feet from a bed you have not been cleared to leave, even if you were carried. Yet you werewalking. While every soul in this house believed you resting!”
“I—”
“Do you understand that you could have struck your head on that fender? Do you understand that you could have reopened the wound that has cost five people an hour of labour every morning for more than three weeks to keep clean? Do you understand that I wouldat this instantbe riding for Aldridge at a gallop on a road still half ice had anything turned a quarter inch differently in your fall?”
“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”
“Do not say yes to me as if to pacify—”
“I am not pacifying you. I am agreeing. I did not think, and I should have thought, and I am paying for it now.”
He looked at her. She could not, even with the humiliation fresh and the pain still radiating up from the leg, look away. She had earned whatever he meant to say, and she had no intention of spending her gathered breath on avoiding any of it.
He took a breath. The banked fury did not leave his face. It agreed, a second time today, to wait a little.
“You will not test alone again. That is the condition of my silence.”
“I cannot promise—”
“Youwill. That is the condition of my silence.”
“And what am I to do? Lie in this bed until Mrs Hadley pronounces me walkable like a lamb? I am almost four weeks buried, sir.”
“I will speak with Mrs Hadley. Not of this. Of crutches. She has been withholding them because she mistrusts your patience, which is a diagnosis I share. You ought not even be attempting movement for another month, but if youwillbe so headstrong, I will tell her I have observed you grow restless and suggest supervised leaning, daily, on your good leg to promote its strengthening. She will agree if she thinks the idea originates with me.”
“You will lie for me asecondtime.”
“I will omit for you. That is the favour I have already half performed.”
“That is not a difference you would have conceded a month ago.”
“No,” he said, very quietly. “It is not.”
She looked down at the coverlet because she was not able to do anything else with her face.
He said, after a time, “Miss Bennet. May I speak plainly?”
“It has notpreviously required my permission.”
“I say this because I have been thinking it since I came in, and because if I do not say it now I shall arrange it into something easier, which will be a worse service. You are unjust to yourself.”
She kept looking at the coverlet.
“You treat your body as an opponent. You have done so since the morning I met you. I understand some of the reason for it and none of the wisdom. Pain is not a defect in you. Three weeks’ confinement is not a failure of character. Your sister has not been wronged by your possessing a leg that needs five or six more weeks. And whatever you are running from—whatever I have not been told—is not best served by punishing the only body you have for not being fast enough.”
She did not trust her voice to answer. She did not trust her face not to show what she had not prepared it to show.
“Is that all?” she asked after a time, and was startled by how quiet her own voice came out, and by the fact that she could not say whether she hoped he would answer yes or no.
“Is it too much?”
“No.” The word came small. “It is only more than I was prepared for.”
