Jane looked at him then. Not long. Not staring. Long enough to make Elizabeth wish, with sharp helplessness, that he had said anything else.
“How fortunate for every estate she visits,” Jane said.
Darcy drew back half a step. Elizabeth held the broth in both hands, though it was too hot for comfort. Jane turned to the hearth and busied herself adjusting a cloth that required no adjusting.
“Well. If I begin charging consultation fees,” Elizabeth said, “you may both hold yourselves answerable for the corruption.”
Jane smiled at last, but faintly. Darcy inclined his head in grave acceptance.
“Then I shall pay in ledgers,” he said. “It is the only currency you have yet shown any warmth toward.”
“An infamous slander. I have shown warmth toward broth on at least three occasions.”
“Under protest.”
“A protest does not invalidate the warmth.”
“No more than a correction invalidates a page.”
There it was again—the private movement under the words, too quick and exact to be anything but its own species of understanding.
Jane must have seen it. How could she not? Elizabeth wished, absurdly and too late, that she could gather back every sentence and redistribute them into safer shapes.
But language, once spoken, belonged to the room.
Darcy gathered the smaller account book under his arm and the left the larger one behind beside Elizabeth’s chair. “I will send the second volume tomorrow,” he said. “If you have not exhausted your appetite for mismanagement.”
“On the contrary, you have sharpened it. I find it preferable to the dulling effects of laudanum, and better than the view which I can hardly see through that window.”
He looked at her with that same almost-smile, the one that made seriousness seem not absent in him but briefly companioned. “The view, Miss Bennet, has been praised beyond its deserts for generations. I should rather earn a better commendation.”
And then he was gone.
Jane did not speak until the sound of his step had faded along the passage.
“He likes you,” she said.
There was no accusation in the words. That would almost have been easier to bear. There was only truth spoken by a woman too fatigued for pretending not to see.
Elizabeth set down the empty cup. “He is kind.”
Jane gave a brief, unsteady laugh devoid of mirth. “Lizzy, do not answer me as if I were Mama. I know the difference. Kindness is what he has shown all of us. This is something else.”
Elizabeth looked at the ledger on the table. At the page bearing both their marks. At the pencil Darcy had forgotten and left behind by the blotter.
“If it is,” she said carefully, “it can lead nowhere.”
“So you say. Be careful, Lizzy. Men of Mr Darcy’s situation in life can hardly afford—”
“I know, Jane. I know better than you can possibly comprehend.”
Jane watched her drink her broth an instant longer. When she turned back to the fire, Elizabeth saw her clasp her hands very tightly, as if some effort of self-command required physical anchoring. The sight pricked her with a guilt not yet named, for naming it would have forced her to follow it farther than she was prepared to go.
Later, when Jane had accidentally dropped into a fitful rest in the chair by the hearth, Elizabeth reached for the ledger once more.
The page they had last examined lay open where he had left it. One pencil, two hands upon the paper. It was absurd that a leaf of figures should look intimate.
She touched the margin where his note sat beside hers and drew back almost at once, as though the paper had kept some trace of his hand and might expose her for testing it.
