“I do not know the weather. I know men who invent do not often trouble to invent irregularly. If the timber had really come, the sum would have been uglier. There would have been delay, breakage, some extra nuisance charged because roads are roads and carters have imagination where money is concerned. This sum is too smooth. It is a lie written by someone who liked columns more than facts.”
Darcy did not answer at once. His eyes were at her now, not at the page.
“You say that,” he said at length, “as though you have met the species before.”
“I am my father’s daughter. I grew up watching men explain away guineas with confidence wholly disproportionate to their understanding of ink.”
“And your father let you watch?”
She glanced up. “Mr Darcy, my father did many things from negligence. Excluding me from useful observation was not among them.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Indeed.” He leaned nearer the page and took up the pencil. His sleeve brushed the coverlet near her elbow.
The contact was accidental, light, almost certainly unnoticed by him. Elizabeth perceived it as if the whole side of her body had been instructed to awaken.
“If the timber line is false,” he said, marking the entry, “then one of two things follows. Either the stone charge is honest, and the second line conceals a separate theft, or the second line was used to make the first appear more ordinary by repetition.”
“The second,” Elizabeth said. “Because repetition calms suspicion. One absurdity alone invites enquiry. Two similar absurdities look like habit.”
“That is unnervingly good.”
“You mean suspiciously good.”
“I mean good. Though I grant the distinction is finer than ideal.”
He did not, in saying so, take his eyes from the column under her finger.
“I had thought to spend the winter at these books, Miss Bennet. You appear to have shortened the work by half before noon. The man who set this column down was… shall I say not what a steward ought to be. My cousin was hardly a scrupulous man, but the man he hired to manage his estate had managed to outdo even him. You have unmade three months of the steward's work in three minutes.”
“Then he must have been industrious indeed. Or particularly idle.”
“Both. Often in the same column.”
From the hearth, Jane said, without looking up from the cloth she was refolding for no cause Elizabeth could discern, “Lizzy has always been better at catching a false note than the rest of us. She could tell when Hill had altered the butcher’s account long before Papa bothered to look.”
“The housekeeper, I presume? She altered the butcher’s account?” Darcy asked.
“Only once,” Elizabeth said. “And not from vice. She had paid twice by mistake and could not bear to explain it to my mother. I made her tell Papa instead. He laughed, paid the difference, and told her if she meant to commit household crimes in the future, she must choose ones less stupid.”
Darcy looked down at the page again. “I begin to understand a handful of things at once.”
“Only a handful? I had hoped my character might furnish at least a dozen.”
“Your character may. Your accountancy, for the present, furnishes four.”
He turned the page. They went on.
The intimacy of the next half hour consisted almost entirely of nouns and numbers. Stone. Timber. Lime. Two shillings sixpence. Three men for four days. Carriage impossible in weather. Wages entered and not paid. Repairs charged and not performed. Yet because every exchange required them to bend over the same paper, to follow the sameline with eye and finger, to interrupt and correct and answer, the thing took on an energy Elizabeth had not looked for.
He explained the meadow carriers, and she understood them with a speed that surprised him each time anew. She challenged an expenditure on walling, and he answered too fully, sketching with the pencil in the margin the line of a bank under thaw. She asked who Ashby was, who Hadley, who Norton, and with each answer, the valley grew more legible.
There was pleasure in it—real pleasure, of the mind first and then, more treacherously, of the shared attention that made the mind’s movement visible.
At one point, he said, “No, you are reading that line as a debit to wages when it is a debit to cartage,” and took the book slightly toward him.
“I am reading it as illegible,” Elizabeth said. “A debit to cartage would imply the existence of a consonant not actually present on the page.”
“There is a consonant.”
