He should, probably, have left it there. But the concealments surrounding the two sisters had been visible from the beginning, and his curiosity about Elizabeth—her arrival, her secrecy, the violence of whatever had driven her north in winter—had been sharpening daily whether he approved of it or not.
“Your father is dead, I think?”
“Yes.”
“And your mother?”
“Living.”
Nothing more.
He lifted the smaller box to the chair, giving her time if she chose to use it. At last she added, “My mother and younger sisters are at present residing with an aunt.”
“In Hertfordshire?”
Her eyes met his then, very clear and very guarded. “With an aunt,” she repeated.
The rebuke, though perfectly civil, was unmistakable. Darcy inclined his head as if the fault had been larger than it was.
“I ask too much.”
“No.” Her tone softened a little, perhaps because she knew he had helped her through two rooms’ worth of humiliation and deserved some reward less chilly than silence. “You ask what any reasonable person would ask. I am only not equal to answering reasonably on every point.”
He accepted that. It had the sound of truth.
He took up the box. “Then we shall confine ourselves to the unreasonable. It is a more diverting category.”
This time she almost smiled without sorrow undoing it at once.
Back in the front room she knelt by the remaining stack of books. There were fewer than Elizabeth would have called decent and more than Darcy might have expected in such a house. A prayer book, a volume of sermons, two novels shabby from repeated reading, a medical tract bristling with markers, and a Virgil whose binding had failed in one corner.
“You keep that one?” he asked, indicating the Virgil.
“It was my father’s.”
“Then certainly.”
“Yes.” She brushed the cover with her thumb. “He taught us all badly and enthusiastically. We learned more noise than grammar, but I suppose that is still an inheritance.”
The sentence altered her face. Not happier. Younger. For an instant he saw the daughter before the wife or widow.
“You and Miss Bennet were educated together?” he asked.
“As all sisters are, where there is no governess worth the name.”
“And always close?”
She chose the next book with too much attention. “Not always easy. Closeness is not ease.”
“No.”
“No,” she repeated, perhaps surprised that he did not make a jest of it. “But yes. We were close.”
He hesitated, then ventured farther under cover of moving the books into a basket. “Was that why she was travelling? To join you?”
Mrs Marsden set down the prayer book very gently.
“She meant to see me.”
