“For an hour. After that it inspired only questions.”
“That is its proper function.”
“Then it has excelled. This line—” She tapped one of the slips. “If Hadley was charged for two extra men on the lower carrier, why does the wage book show only one village payment made that week? Either your cousin employed a ghost or someone pocketed the second man’s labour.”
He turned. “The second.”
“You answer with readiness that suggests despair has become habit.”
“Experience, Miss Bennet. Not despair. Though I grant the distinction is sometimes slender.”
She looked at him with a brightness sharpened by challenge rather than mirth. “I do not believe you.”
“No?”
“No. A despairing man does not go up on his own roof in January. He sits by the fire and composes letters about the melancholy state of rural infrastructure. A man on the roof means to mend something.” She tilted her head. “You have straw in your sleeve, by the way.”
He glanced down. There it was indeed, a pale bit of old bedding-straw from the cart in the yard caught at the dark wool near his wrist. Before he could brush it away she had already half-lifted her hand by instinct, then stopped, as if the smallest familiar office would have crossed some line she had only just discovered at her feet. The interruption was tiny. The knowledge in it was not.
Darcy removed the straw himself.
“You observe too much.”
“You bring evidence indoors.”
“You sound like a magistrate.”
“That is because you are trying to defend yourself with facts unworthy of the effort.”
He ought then to have retreated into formality. Instead he said, “And if I admitted the charge?”
Her eyes met his directly. “Then I should conclude the roof was in worse condition than you first reported.” The sentence was light. The colour in her face was not.
He knew with unwelcome clarity how much he liked being met in this fashion—neither flattered nor deferred to, but answered at full strength and made to feel the answer in his body besides. And when he let his eyes linger on her face—
Mrs Marsden returned with the tray before silence could tip the balance. She set down the teapot, cups, and a small plate of biscuits which Mrs Reeves would later deny having sent for any purpose beyond preventing collapse.
“Mr Darcy, you are to drink this while it is hot,” Mrs Marsden said. “Mrs Reeves spoke as if refusal would be viewed as personal insult.”
“I would not willingly insult Mrs Reeves.”
“No one in this house would. It would be like offending weather.”
Miss Bennet took the cup Mrs Marsden handed her, but her eyes remained, longer than necessary, on the movement of his hands around the hotter porcelain.
They drank tea. The conversation, with Mrs Marsden present, returned outwardly to safer channels—Ashby’s judgment of the roof, Hadley’s meadows, Mrs Hadley’s prediction that the next clear day would bring half the valley’s ailments to her door atonce. Yet even in safety he remained more conscious than before of Miss Bennet in her chair—the careful curl of her fingers around the warm cup, the stillness she had learned to keep for the sake of the leg, the strand at her temple loosened by the hour. Worst of all was the growing certainty that if Mrs Marsden were not there he would have gone on looking.
He did not like such noticing. It was not useful. It lacked the clean shape of estate accounts or drainage. It moved under the mind rather than through it and left him cross with himself for obeying it at all.
To punish himself, he turned his attention to the fire. She reopened the ledger.
“If the west wall must be repointed before the thaw,” she said, “then the expense line here is impossible unless the stone was bought cheaper in hope of compensating elsewhere.”
He came to the table at once. Mrs Marsden watched him.
There was the whole mischief of it. He came because the work called him. He stood near because the page required it. The innocence of these actions made them all the harder to oppose.
“Not cheaper,” he said, bending over the entry. “Deferred. The quarry account shows only half the stone delivered. Ashby believes the rest was promised and never sent because payment had not gone through.”
