Darcy did not know what to do with such sentences except try to deserve them a little better than he usually did.
By noon the cottage had been reduced to what the landlord’s woman might strip without injury to memory—the broken crockery, the poor mattress, the useless bottles, the scraps of fuel, the remains of a life no one would covet. The handcart stood full. The two better chairs, the chest, the box of linen and books, the workbox, the surviving cups, the glass that had been hers before marriage, the packet of letters she would not set down.
Mrs Marsden took one last turn through the rooms, not lingering, only verifying. Darcy remained by the door with the cart handle in hand.
When she came back she had the key and nothing else.
“That is all,” she said.
Noteverything. Only all.
He closed the door behind her and waited while she turned the key.
“I can send the landlord payment for another week if you require more time,” he said.
She shook her head. “No. If I leave anything more in there, it will only be because I have mistaken delay for mercy.”
He looked at the small house, then at the woman beside him. She stood straight, the packet of letters in one hand, the other gloved again and closed round the key. Not relieved. Not undone. Something more difficult than either. A person who had finished an office no one else could have done for her and discovered that finishing it solved less than one had hoped.
As they turned back toward Merebank, he took the heavier side of the cart before she could think to touch it.
She let him.
That, more than her thanks, told him how tired she was.
He said nothing further about Hertfordshire, aunts, younger sisters, or the winter road that had carried Elizabeth Bennet into his valley. Mrs Marsden had answered what she meant to answer and defended what she meant to defend. Yet the very caution of her silences had its own force. Whatever had driven Elizabeth north had not been ordinary family duty. Whatever history lay behind those guarded letters and that missing information, Mrs Marsden thought it dangerous enough to carry close and disclose to no one.
Darcy should, perhaps, have found that only inconvenient.
Instead he found himself thinking of Elizabeth in the parlour at Merebank, clever enough to laugh in pain and stubborn enough to call half the household to account while unable yet to cross a room alone, and of the sister who guarded her with silence as fierce as love.
By the time the house came into view above the lane, he knew two things more clearly than before.
The first was that Mrs Marsden had not wept this morning for her husband so much as for the life marriage had promised and never delivered.
The second was that Elizabeth Bennet had not come north for any simple reason a gentleman might accept at first asking.
Chapter Sixteen
TherequestwentthroughJane because Elizabeth did not yet know whether it was proper to ask gentlemen for ledgers directly.
It ought not to have required embarrassment. She had asked Mr Darcy for water, for silence, for honesty on negotiated terms, and had accepted from him the intimate indignity of being lifted, watched, dosed, and read to in the night. A ledger ought to have been the least compromising thing to pass between them. And it was, she hoped, a request he might honour—less for any perceived help she might be able to offer him and more for the prospect of diversion for herself.
Yet when Jane returned from the study after dinner and said, with too smooth a voice, “Mr Darcy wishes to know whether you mean an estate ledger in earnest or merely seek a theatrical prop to alarm the housekeeper,” Elizabeth found herself burning where no fever lingered.
“In earnest,” she said. “He seemed to be genuinely perplexed by the last one, and I am now permanently fascinated. Though if the housekeeper alarms easily at account books, I confess I should like the experiment tried.”
Jane did not smile as she ordinarily would have. She folded the napkin she had brought back untouched from the tray and laid it very straight upon the table.
“He supposed so. He said he would bring one down when he had found a volume not too muddled by Mr Reeves’s handwriting.”
“Mr Reeves keeps the books?”
“He has kept some of them. Mr Darcy says the rest were handled by the late owner with methods unlikely to inspire confidence.”
That was all. No more than the information required. Yet there was tension in the sentence, and because Elizabeth had begun at last to detect strains she had formerly missed, she knew it for what it was—not anger, not yet, but effort. Jane was being cautious.
Elizabeth ought then to have declined the ledger and spared them both the next hour. But the distraction promised a temporary relief from pain, and that was not a thing to be set down lightly.
