Set in Stone, Chapter 1.

She woke reaching for the surface of something that was not water.

The room was unfamiliar in the way rooms become when one has been in them only a few days. She recognized it but it was only a slight acquaintance. The wallpaper’s pattern of twining, serpentine ivy had not yet resolved into the kind of worn familiarity that would let her stop seeing it. The window was in the wrong place. She had been dreaming, though the substance of it scattered the moment she tried to examine it directly. Something reflected. A pool, perhaps, or a mirror. Something seen first in the water and then…

She could not hold it. The more she reached for the sequence, the more completely it dissolved, leaving only the metallic taste of interrupted sleep and the sense that she had been about to understand something she would have preferred not to know.

Elizabeth sat up. The house was very quiet in the way houses are before the servants have finished opening them to the day. She reached for her wrapper and found it where she had left it the night before, which felt like a minor victory. It had been a week of minor dislocations: learning where things were kept, which doors led where, the names of people whose faces she was supposed to recognize and could not quite place. Her father had explained that she had been unwell. He had used the word episode in a way that suggested it was meant to clarify something, though it had not clarified anything at all.

She went to the window. The grounds below were extensive, well-kept in the manner of a house whose owner was both absent enough to require staff and present enough to notice when they slacked. Beyond the lawn and the line of trees she could see the edge of the village, and beyond that, just visible against the early sky, the broken silhouette of something that had once been a tower.

She turned from the window and caught her own reflection in the glass of a picture frame on the opposite wall. The room had rather a lot of mirrors. She had noticed this yesterday, and the day before that, though no one had remarked on it and she had not asked. They were not covered, as mirrors sometimes were in houses of mourning. They were simply present, carefully positioned, accumulating in corners and on walls in numbers that suggested intention without declaring it.

Elizabeth dressed and went downstairs.

The breakfast room faced east and was full of the kind of early light that makes everything look temporarily scrubbed clean. Mary was already there, picking at something on her plate with the focused disinterest of someone who would rather be at the piano. Lydia was talking. Elizabeth could hear her before she reached the door, holding forth on some subject that required frequent emphasis and no apparent discouragement from the fact that no one was answering. Kitty was listening, or performing the appearance of it.

Her father sat at the head of the table with a book open beside his plate, which was so exactly what he would be doing in any house at any breakfast that Elizabeth felt briefly, absurdly grateful for it.

“Lizzy,” he said, glancing up. “You look as though you did not sleep well.”

“I slept,” she said, taking the chair across from Mary. “I dreamed, which is not always the same thing.”

“Classical wisdom on the subject is divided,” Mr. Bennet said. “The gates of horn and ivory, et cetera. I have never been entirely convinced that Virgil knew what he was talking about, but perhaps you dreamed something prophetic and will tell us all what to expect from the day.”

“I dreamed something I cannot remember,” Elizabeth said. “I imagine that limits its prophetic use considerably.”

“A pity. I was hoping for lottery numbers.”

Lydia was saying something about the village, which she had been into yesterday with Kitty and found agreeably provincial in exactly the way she had hoped for when they had set out from England. “—and the little shop with the ribbons, Kitty, you must have seen it, you were standing directly in front of it when I pointed—”

Elizabeth accepted tea from the woman who had brought it and did not ask her name, because she had been told it twice already and could not recall it now and the small failure felt like part of the general unsettledness of the past week. She was aware, in the vague way one is aware of facts that have been explained without being entirely absorbed, that this house belonged to a Dr. Darcy, who was some manner of specialist her father had consulted about her health. She had no clear memory of the consultation, if there had been one, or of the journey here, which her father said had been uneventful. She had woken in an unfamiliar room and been told she was in Bohemia, and that she was to stay here while she recovered.

What she was recovering from had not been specified.

“Where is Mama?” she asked.

The room did not fall silent, but there was a small, distinct pause in which Lydia stopped talking and Mary looked up from her plate and her father did not look up from his book.

“Prague,” Lydia said, with the pleased confidence of someone delivering good news. “Shopping, or so Papa says, though I cannot think what she expects to find there that she could not find in the village, unless it is gloves, and even then—”

“She wished to see something of the city while we were here,” Mr. Bennet said. His tone was mild, but he was looking at Elizabeth now with an attention that was not quite concern and not quite something else. “She left yesterday morning. I believe she mentioned gloves.”

“She did mention gloves,” Kitty confirmed.

“Well, I hope she finds them,” Elizabeth said. “It seems a long way to go for gloves.”

“Your mother,” Mr. Bennet said, “has never considered distance an impediment when the correct gloves are at stake.”

This was true enough that Elizabeth smiled and let the matter drop, or thought she had let it drop, and was reaching for the toast when the door opened and a man came in whom she had not seen before.

He was tall, perhaps thirty or a little older, brown-haired and somewhat severe in the manner of people who are accustomed to being listened to and do not waste effort on being agreeable. He wore, inexplicably, side-whiskers of a style that had gone out of fashion when Elizabeth was a child. They did not make him look older so much as slightly misinformed about what older men actually looked like.

“Miss Bennet,” he said, nodding to her. “I trust you are feeling better this morning.”

She had no memory of feeling worse any other morning, but it seemed unwise to say so. “I am quite well, thank you.”

“Dr. Darcy,” her father said, in the tone of a man performing an introduction he suspected had already been performed and forgotten, “my daughter Elizabeth.”

“We met yesterday,” Dr. Darcy said.

“Did we?” Elizabeth said.

Something crossed his face; not irritation precisely, but a brief tightness around the eyes that suggested he was deciding whether to be irritated and had chosen against it. “Briefly,” he said. “You may not recall. You were tired.”

“I am often tired lately,” Elizabeth said. “It is beginning to feel like a defining characteristic.”

“It will improve,” he said, with the confidence of a man who had said this before and expected to be believed. He did not sit, but took a cup of tea from the servant and stood near the window, looking out toward the grounds with the distracted air of someone whose attention was on something other than the landscape.

“When do you expect Mama back?” Elizabeth asked her father.

Mr. Bennet looked at Dr. Darcy. Dr. Darcy looked at Mr. Bennet. The look was brief but it was there, and Elizabeth saw it, and added it to the list of small inconsistencies she did not yet know what to do with.

“I could not say precisely,” Mr. Bennet said. “She did not give a specific date of return.”

“How unlike her,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes,” her father said. “It is unlike her.”

He returned his attention to his book. Dr. Darcy continued looking out the window. Lydia began talking again, this time about the merits of the local sausages, which she had sampled yesterday and found entirely acceptable.

Elizabeth drank her tea and thought about mirrors, and about the way her father’s voice had sounded when he said it is unlike her, and about the dream she could not quite remember but which had left her reaching for the surface of something that was not water.

Outside, the sun was coming up over the broken tower, and the house full of mirrors waited for the rest of the day to catch up with it.