“And that is a very poor employment when the patient has had the good sense to sleep.”
Elizabeth smiled reluctantly. “You are managing me, Mrs. Nicholls.”
“Yes, miss.”
“At least you confess it.”
“I find confession saves time.”
The housekeeper moved to the curtains and drew them only a little wider, admitting a gray morning light that made the room feel less enclosed. “There is a fire in the library. No one is below at present, and the house is quiet. Take your tea there, or finda book, or merely sit in a chair that has not declared war upon your spine.”
Elizabeth hesitated.
The library.
Her library, though no one must call it so. There was an odd temptation in the thought. She had not spent much time there since the Bingleys’ arrival, for it was one thing to visit Netherfield as a neighboring young lady consulting Mrs. Nicholls and quite another to wander through its rooms as though she knew every repaired hinge and altered curtain. But early morning offered concealment. If the household was not yet fully awake, she might have a few minutes in a room that belonged to her on paper, if nowhere else.
“I shall go for a very little while,” she said at last. “But if Jane wakes—”
“You shall be sent for at once.”
“If she so much as stirs uneasily—”
“At once.”
“If Mr. Bingley sends another inquiry—”
“I shall tell him Miss Bennet continues asleep and that Miss Elizabeth has not abandoned her to wolves.”
Elizabeth laughed under her breath, then bent over Jane and touched her sister’s hand lightly. Jane did not wake.
Taking her tea, Elizabeth slipped from the room and walked quietly down the passage. Netherfield in the early morning felt almost like a different house. The grander rooms had not yet been claimed by conversation, music, or Miss Bingley’s opinions. A maid crossed the far end of the corridor carrying a coal scuttle, and somewhere below, a door closed softly. Otherwise, all was still.
At the library door, Elizabeth paused.
It was absurd to feel like an intruder in her own house. More absurd still to feel like a trespasser because the guests shehad admitted under a lease might find her there. Yet secrecy had trained strange habits into her. She looked once down the passage, saw no one, and entered.
A small fire burned in the grate, exactly as Mrs. Nicholls had promised. The curtains had been drawn back enough to reveal a pale, wet lawn beyond the windows, where the grass still held the silver of last night’s rain. The shelves stood in quiet rows, familiar and inviting, and Elizabeth released a breath she had not realized she was holding.
Here, at least, nothing required immediate attention.
No mother to soothe, no sisters to restrain, no tenants to protect, no fortune to hide, no handsome gentleman to misunderstand or be misunderstood by.
Only books, warmth, and half an hour of stolen peace.
Elizabeth set her tea upon the table, drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders, and went to the nearest shelf.
∞∞∞
Darcy had risen earlier than he intended.
This was not unusual. Years of military service had made late mornings nearly impossible, and the habits formed by Pemberley’s accounts were not much kinder. Still, he had expected that after the previous day’s agitation—the discovery of Miss Bennet’s illness, Miss Elizabeth’s arrival, the dinner that had begun with awkwardness and ended with him thinking far too much of a lady seated across the table—he might sleep more heavily.
Instead, he woke before the house had properly stirred, with the gray light of morning pressing around the curtains and Elizabeth Bennet already in his thoughts.
It was becoming a problem.
At first, after Gracechurch Street, she had been little more than an image that returned when he least expected it: dark eyes in lantern light, mud upon one cheek, a Roman coin in her hand. Then he had thought her out of reach, not by rank precisely, but by circumstance, by uncertainty, by the sheer impossibility of ever encountering her again. That had made the memory safe in its way. Foolish, perhaps, but harmless. A man could admire a pair of fine eyes in recollection and still go about the business of restoring an estate.
