Miss Bennet had lowered her eyes to the book on her lap with absorption assumed too promptly.
“You do not like the blue shawl?” he asked.
“I did not know my wardrobe had become a matter of estate concern.”
He came a step nearer. “I have learned that you grow agreeable when you mean to do something unwise.”
She looked up. The look was quick, bright, and not innocent. “What vanity in you, Mr Darcy, to suppose my agreeableness must signify a plot.”
“I am not vain enough to suppose your agreeableness signifies me. I am prudent enough to suspect it signifies purpose.”
Then Mrs Marsden returned with Martha and the cloak over her arm, and whatever answer Miss Bennet meant to make dissolved into household business.
The blue cloak was indeed too warm for the drawing room.
That fact, appended to several others, completed Darcy’s certainty.
He went out into the passage because he was beginning to trust his face less than the wall.
The door of the music room stood partly open at the end of the passage. From inside came the sound of Georgiana practising, slow and particular, a phrase she had been unable to manage a week previously and was managing today with the quiet fluency of a young woman who had, by degrees none of them could quite account for, recovered her hands. He had stood outside that door perhaps two hundred times in his life. He had never, in any previous stance at that door, stood with the thought he now had—which was that he did not know what would happen to Georgiana if Miss Bennet were gone.
He did not know because it had not been tested. For three weeks and more, Elizabeth Bennet had been in the house and Georgiana had been improving. No other conjunction of circumstances had obtained in Georgiana’s life this winter. If the conjunction were removed, the improvement might continue. Or it might not. Or the white line round her mouth that had been absent now for a month might come back at dusk on the evening Miss Bennet was driven past Ashby’s gate in a carrier’s cart. He did not know. He could not know. He had only the distinct private arithmetic of a man who had watched, over ten mornings, two separate women convalesce at rates neither medicine nor prayer could explain, and who had at last come to suspect they were the same convalescence.
He did not wish her to go.
He stood at the music-room door with the phrase repeating in his sister’s hands and understood, for perhaps the first time since the ice, that this was the largest of the several dreads he was holding at once. She was running from something he had not been told of. She was a woman who walked too quickly into a thawing lane. She was, perhaps, more than either of these. And he did not wish her to go. The force with which he did not wish her to go produced in him a reaction so foreign to any previous temperament of his that for an ungovernable instant he thought he might be ill. He was not. He was only a man who had, in the last ten days, crossed some private line he had not known he was approaching, and who had now to contend with the discovery that the other side of that line was not the composed country he had always understood his affections to inhabit.
He set his hand briefly to the doorframe. He took the hand away. He went on down the passage.
He did not stop at the parlour.
Hadley’s boy came across the yard at half-past eleven with word that the lower hatch had stuck again and must be dealt with before dusk if the meadow were not to take more water than the fields could afford. Ashby followed within twenty minutes, muddy to the knee and implacable about the south wall.
Darcy rose to go, because going was required, and because he could not remain in a parlour where Miss Bennet had begun to conduct herself as a woman about to do something final. He stopped at the step long enough to glance back toward the bed.
She was already reaching for her book with the expression of a woman who had been waiting for him to leave.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hewentdowntothe meadow with Hadley.
He stayed exactly as long as judgment required and not one minute more, which was not many minutes, because Ashby’s account of the south wall concluded Hadley’s errand more efficiently than a dozen reasoned consultations. He told Hadley he would return within the hour with his own eyes on the hatch. He did not go back. He started up toward the house at a pace neither hurried nor concealed, and came in by the south door with the walk of a man who had come in innumerable times by that particular door.
Mrs Reeves was at the foot of the passage. Her face told him before her words did.
“The parlour’s empty, sir.”
“How long?”
“I cannot say, sir. I looked in a quarter-hour after you left. The bed was made and Miss Bennet was not in it. I did not wish to alarm Mrs Marsden before I had spoken to you.”
He went into the parlour. The bed had been made. The crutches stood in their place against the wall. The book she had claimed an interest in was open on the table at a page that did not match the place her finger had held when he had left the room.
He bent to look under the bed.
The bag was gone.
He had known before bending. Bending was for confirmation, not discovery. He straightened, went out by the south door without his hat and without any explanation for Mrs Reeves, who did not require one, and started down the lane.
