“Of course it does,” Mrs Reeves said. “You arrived from the south with an invalid sister, a dead cousin’s title papers, and no idea where the good linen was kept. Then you dragged a second invalid out of the mere and got blood all over your fine white shirt. The valley would have discussed you if you had done much less.”
She went back inside before he could answer, leaving Ashby to hide what might, in another man, have been a smile.
Darcy spent the next two hours with Norton over the store lists and then with Hadley at the lower wall where the stones had slipped near the drain. Work proved, as it usually did, the most reliable discipline available. One decided what must be mended and mended it. One decided what must be paid and paid it. One kept hands and attention occupied and spared the mind its more unproductive habits.
Yet even discipline had limits.
Whenhecameinat last in the late afternoon, cold to the wrists and with the ache across the shoulders that only ladder work could produce in a body more accustomed to riding and ledgers than roof-slope crouching, his first awareness on entering the hall was not of his own fatigue but of warmth and voices from the parlour.
Not many voices. Two.
Mrs Marsden’s, low and even. Miss Bennet’s, lighter, with that current of suppressed life in it which made even fatigue sound like intention.
He stood in the hall unreasonably aware of his cuffs, damp now and drying, of the wind in his hair, of the fact he had come in looking not entirely the composed master of the house but a working man only temporarily restored to gentility by better cloth.
Then, because retreat would have been absurd, he went in.
The parlour was exactly as the south light meant it to be at that hour—warmer in appearance than in fact, the long pale beam across the carpet gone amber at the edges as the sun lowered behind the ridge. Miss Bennet lay propped against the pillows, a shawl about her shoulders and a second cushion at her back. Mrs Marsden sat in the chair beside her with mending in hand. On the table beside the bed lay the meadow ledger open where he had left it the evening before, and several smaller slips of paper weighted under the forgotten pencil.
She looked up at him. Her gaze passed in a quick involuntary movement from his face to the loosened tie of his cravat, from that to the damp darkening the cuffs of his shirt where the coat had fallen back, then to the reddened skin across his hands before returning to his face with a composure so swiftly reassembled that the very speed betrayed her. It was not the noticing alone that unsettled him. It was the sense she had seen too much and disliked herself for it. Darcy knew, with absurd distinctness, not the cold on his hands but that she had imagined them warm.
“Mr Darcy,” Miss Bennet said. “Has the roof submitted?”
“Under protest. Ashby says it may continue to hold if no one praises it within hearing.”
“Then I shall be moderate in my admiration. Sit by the fire before you freeze in that hunched over posture and never recover.”
Mrs Marsden’s needle paused. Darcy saw it. He saw also that Miss Bennet had spoken not as a guest to a host but as one accustomed, already, to issuing useful orders where she saw discomfort.
“I am not frozen,” he said.
“No? Your hands contradict you from across the room.”
He looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. The knuckles were indeed reddened nearly raw from cold and wet slate. The sight ought not to have mattered. Yet because she had seen it first, it did.
Mrs Marsden set down the mending. “There is hot tea. Mrs Reeves left the pot on the hob. I will fetch it.”
“No need,” Darcy said too quickly.
“There is every need,” Mrs Marsden answered and rose with such composed efficiency that refusal would have been discourtesy. She left them, with the door standing open behind her.
Silence entered the room—not empty, not safe.
Darcy glanced back over his shoulder. “Why does she leave every time I enter the room? Have I given offence?”
“Far from it. Jane's way of showing regard is by making herself useful. And you, Mr Darcy, look like a man who could use a hot cup in his hands.”
He nodded. “I see.”
Miss Bennet let her book fall shut over one finger to hold the page. “You have had a day of useful severity, I think.”
“Ashby does not distinguish much between severity and instruction.”
“That is generally how one knows the instruction is worth having.”
He came at last to the fire and held his hands out to the blaze. Heat found the skin with a sting sharp enough to make him draw breath. From this closer position he could smell not merely woodsmoke and tea but the faint mineral freshness that now hung always about her, whether from the wound dressings or the water or the mere itself he could not say.
“Has the ledger given you enough employment to prevent mutiny?” he asked.
