“There is a blot.”
“Miss Bennet, if every blot were taken for deception, the nation would collapse under the weight of its own correspondence.”
“Perhaps it ought.”
“That is revolution by stationery.”
“The safest kind.”
He laughed then, outright enough that Jane looked up quickly from the hearth and then down again with such speed Elizabeth might have doubted the look had she not been prepared for it.
Silence entered after that. Not uncomfortable silence. Worse. A silence too full of what had just transpired. Jane got up, making a sort of scuffle about settling her sewing basket, and went out—sending Elizabeth a warning glance as she left the door conspicuously open to the hall.
Darcy cleared his throat and turned the page.
“Here,” he said, more carefully, “are the arrears Hadley believes owing to the men who cleared the lower run last March. Mr Reeves entered them as paid. Hadley says two were paid in part and one not at all.”
Elizabeth studied the names. Two she did not know. The third, she had heard already from Mrs Hadley.
“Pemberton. Tom’s father?”
“Yes.”
“Then he was working while his son’s lungs were already poor.”
Darcy looked at her. “You have heard about the boy?”
“Mrs Hadley informed me this valley contains more than one human body in distress. I am now trying to be equal to the information.”
Something in his face changed—softened, perhaps, though softness was too weak a word for what happened in him when admiration met caution, and both were forced to occupy the same expression.
“You are very quickly equal to more than I expected,” he said.
Elizabeth ought to have answered lightly. She did not.
“So are you.”
Jane returned then with the broth tray, saving or interrupting them—Elizabeth could not tell which. “Mrs Reeves says my sister is not to spend the entire evening proving herself useful at the expense of her strength.”
“Mrs Reeves is a tyrant,” Elizabeth said.
“Mrs Reeves has fed you through two days of self-pity and one of recovery,” Jane returned. “You may call her a tyrant only after you have drunk the broth.”
Darcy stood at once and took the ledger from Elizabeth’s lap before the motion of reaching for the cup could disturb her leg. His fingers brushed her wrist as he did it.
This touch, too, was incidental. That did not save it.
He set the book down on the table, but not before Jane had seen the page, the marks in two hands, the margin carrying Darcy’s strong pencil notations and Elizabeth’s smaller, sharper corrections in ink. Jane’s gaze lingered there a fraction longer than on the cup she offered.
“You have been annotating one another,” she said.
Elizabeth took the broth. “Only the accounts.”
“Of course.”
The answer was civil. Elizabeth heard the strain all the same.
Darcy must have heard something, for he said, with a quickness almost unlike him, “Miss Bennet has an eye for false entries that would have saved me six months’ labour when I first came into Pemberley.”
