“Where is Mr Darcy?”
“In the study, I believe. He brought supper an hour ago. He said I should tell you it was Mrs Reeves’s, not his own. I did not inquire into why he thought to make that distinction, or about his previous attempts’ history.”
There was the slightest edge—not mockery, but dry observation, the tone of a woman filing away a story she’d heard in the kitchen. Elizabeth almost smiled. Her face remembered the shape even as the rest of her forgot the occasion.
“Jane. I must tell you why I am here.”
“Yes. You must.”
“I—” She closed her eyes, swallowed against her throat’s bitter scratchiness. “I had nowhere else to go.”
Jane closed the book and set it aside. Her face, in the firelight, was still—the composure Elizabeth knew was not absence of feeling but the structure her sister built to contain it.
“Then we will talk tomorrow.”
“You will not ask why?”
“Could you tell me tonight? Be truthful, Lizzy. You can hardly keep your eyes open.”
She swallowed. “No.”
“Then I will not ask tonight.”
The simplicity—the trust, restraint, the willing patience despite its cost—was so entirely Jane that Elizabeth’s throat constricted around a wordless sound. She had wept today already. That was enough.
“How is Mr Marsden? Is he well enough to spare you?”
“Tomorrow, Elizabeth. Everything tomorrow. Tonight you will sleep.”
“I am not tired.”
“You are exhausted. You have a compound fracture, lost blood, you are a full stone lighter than when I last saw you, and your gown looked like the road did sufficient damage to it before the blood finished it off. You will take another dose. In the morning I will be here, the bag will be here, and whatever you must tell me—and I you—will await.”
Whatever I must tell you.Jane kept the timing as Elizabeth kept information—controlling what left the room, choosing the hour, shielding the listener from truths too heavy to bear.
She ought to have insisted. But laudanum still coursed through her, warm and heavy. Jane’s hand rested on her forehead again. The fire crackled. The bag was safe. Above them, the house had gone quiet—Nan had finished, or Georgiana had fallen asleep, or the hour had arrived when the upper floor closes itself from the rest. Tomorrow she would know.
Tomorrow she would have her mind again. Tomorrow she would tell Jane everything, and Jane would tell her whatever had changed the careful face in the instant before her composure closed over it.
Chapter Seven
ThelettertoBuxtonlay before him, no longer blank—three paragraphs composed in the hour after Mrs Marsden’s departure, the question at last taking shape. He wrote and read it. Now he sat with it open in the chill, the sentences no longer his focus, for his thoughts dwelt on the mere—had done so for the better part of an hour—and would remain so until he acted.
He thought of the woman in the ground-floor chamber whose leg had been broken by the very water he had carried uphill each morning for six weeks for his sister. The irony was sharp. The water had failed to heal his sister, so far as he could tell, and now had injured a stranger with no quarrel against it—and both failure and injury stemmed from the same mere.
The mere was the one thing Darcy had trusted, yet understood not. He did not know what the water was. He did not know what it did. He had hauled buckets uphill for six weeks, driven only by the memory of a dying old man recalling a story his father told fifty years before, and the water had neither clearly aided his sister nor spared this woman once touched by it.
He folded the letter, returned it to the drawer, and rose.
The house was quiet in a manner unknown since Miss Bennet’s arrival—no sounds from the parlour, no footsteps on the stairs, no Mrs Bannon appearing in doorways with her aggrieved patience. Mrs Marsden’s presence had drawn the crisis away like a cloth pulling moisture from the air, drawing it from the hallways to the room at the passage’s end, where it could be tended by one who knew her duty.
He was neither required nor able to remain in the study with the folded letter and the silence yawning at the windows. He took his second coat—the intact one, not the one that had been cut in strips for a stranger’s leg—and went outside.
January dusk filled the valley like water in a basin, the last light draining from the hills toward the mere. The air was bitter, and his breath clouded before him. The path fromthe house descended the slope he had climbed that morning with Miss Bennet in his arms, her blood staining his shirt, her fingers on his neck. In daylight, the path was an obstacle. In the dark, it was the same ground he had crossed for six weeks—frozen and still, leading down to the water that had set all this in motion.
The mere was a black mirror in the dusk. Snow on its surface took the blue of the fading sky, and the trees along the far bank stood as dark columns against white. No wind stirred. The surface was so still that the first stars emerging above the eastern ridge were doubled in the water—each point of light matched by its twin below, the sky and its reflection meeting in an indistinguishable seam.
He walked the northern bank, not the eastern shore where he had seen blood—he was not ready to tread that stretch in darkness—but the near bank where the ground was firm and the mere stretched before him in full breadth. The weir lay to his left, a dark mass, the hatches frozen, the overflow silent. The valley was dark in every direction except behind him, where the house stood.
