Set in Stone, Chapter 2.

After breakfast, Elizabeth decided to learn the house.

It was not a large house by the standards of the country estates she had visited in England, but it had the sprawling asymmetry of a building that had been added to over several generations without particular concern for architectural harmony. The breakfast room fed into a corridor that turned twice before arriving at what appeared to be the main hall, which was dominated by a staircase of dark wood and a mirror fully eight feet tall that caught the light from the landing window and threw it back across the floor in a stripe of reflected morning.

That made the seventh mirror she had counted since leaving her room.

She continued through the ground floor, opening doors with the careful diffidence of a guest who is not entirely certain which rooms she is meant to have access to. A morning room, curtains drawn back to let in the light from the garden. A library, respectably stocked, with medical texts in German and French that suggested Dr. Darcy’s interests were both serious and specific. A small parlor that faced north and would be cold in winter. Each room had at least one mirror, and most had two. They were not uniformly placed. Some hung where one would expect them, over mantels and sideboards, but others occupied odd corners or faced doorways at angles that seemed calculated for something other than vanity.

She came to a door near the back of the house that opened onto a room she had not expected. It was a workroom of some kind, fitted out as a laboratory or a photographer’s studio. There was equipment she recognized from the fashionable portraits her mother had insisted on having made in London, and a great deal she did not recognize at all. A camera on a heavy tripod, draped in black cloth. Trays and bottles arranged on a shelf with the tidy precision of frequent use. In the corner, another mirror, this one angled on an adjustable stand in a way that suggested it was part of the equipment rather than decoration.

Elizabeth stood in the doorway and did not go in.

“He takes photographs,” said a voice behind her.

She turned to find Mary, who had apparently followed her from the breakfast room with the silent persistence Mary brought to most things.

“I can see that,” Elizabeth said.

“Medical photographs,” Mary continued. “For his research. He explained it to me yesterday. The camera can capture details the eye might miss. There is a darkroom through that door, though he asked that I not go in there as the chemicals are corrosive.”

“How obliging of him to explain.”

“I asked,” Mary said. “I find the house very interesting. It has a melancholy history, I think.”

“All houses this old have melancholy histories,” Elizabeth said. “It is more or less a requirement of age.”

“Yes, but this one has the right sort,” Mary said. She was looking past Elizabeth into the room with an expression of earnest approval. “Gothic, but not excessively so. Restrained Gothic. The mirrors are an excellent touch.”

“I had noticed the mirrors.”

“They are everywhere,” Mary said, with evident satisfaction. “I have counted fourteen so far, though I have not yet been into the east wing.”

“Why do you suppose he has so many?”

“I could not say,” Mary said. “Perhaps he is vain.”

Elizabeth glanced back at the studio and thought of Dr. Darcy’s severe face and unfashionable side-whiskers and decided that vanity was not the problem, or not the usual sort at any rate. “Perhaps.”

Mary drifted off toward the stairs, and Elizabeth continued her exploration. She found the east wing: more mirrors, a locked door she did not try, a set of rooms that appeared to be in regular use as bedrooms. At the far end of the corridor was another door, this one partly open, from which she could hear the sound of an organ being played with more enthusiasm than skill.

She followed the sound and found Mary, who had evidently circled back through the house by some other route, seated at a substantial pipe organ in a room that seemed to have been designed specifically to contain it. The instrument was old and very fine, and Mary was attacking it with the focused determination of someone who had found her natural element.

“Is this not splendid?” Mary called over the music, which was something minor-key and vaguely ecclesiastical.

“It is very splendid,” Elizabeth said.

“Dr. Darcy said I might play whenever I wished, as he has no use for it himself. It belonged to the previous owner. I think it is the best thing about the house.”

“Better than the mirrors?”

“The mirrors are architectural,” Mary said. “The organ is Romantic.”

She returned to her playing. Elizabeth left her to it and went to find a way outside.

The garden was extensive and appeared to be maintained by someone who believed in the virtues of tidiness without decoration. The paths were swept, the hedges trimmed, the flowerbeds weeded into strict compliance. It was a functional garden, a little austere, and Elizabeth liked it better for not trying to be picturesque.

She walked the perimeter, found a gate that led to a kitchen garden, and continued around the side of the house until she had a clear view to the east, where the village lay perhaps half a mile distant. It was small even by the standards of English villages: a church, a cluster of houses, the suggestion of a square or marketplace at the center. Beyond it, rising from a low hill at the edge of the fields, was the tower she had seen from her window that morning.

It was a ruin, plainly. Roofless, the top of it broken off unevenly as though something had taken a bite from the stones. It had the look of medieval construction, a watch-tower perhaps, or part of some larger fortification that had been quarried away over the centuries for building stone. Elizabeth looked at it for a moment, decided it was not particularly interesting, and turned back toward the house.

Lydia was on the lawn, attempting to interest Kitty in a game that appeared to involve throwing a ball at a wicket that was not there. Kitty was submitting to this with the resigned patience of someone who had learned it was easier to participate than to argue.

“Lizzy!” Lydia called, waving enthusiastically. “Come and play! Kitty is being terribly dull about it.”

“I am being appropriately realistic about our chances of finding a proper wicket in Bohemia,” Kitty said.

“We do not need a proper wicket. We need only imagination and a willingness to pretend.”

“You have never needed encouragement to pretend,” Elizabeth said, crossing the lawn to join them. “What are we pretending at?”

“That we are at home,” Lydia said, “and that everything is just as it ought to be, and that there is nothing strange about any of this.”

She said it lightly, but there was a small edge beneath the lightness that made Elizabeth look at her more carefully. Lydia looked back with wide, innocent eyes, and threw the ball at the nonexistent wicket, and missed.

“I think you are pretending poorly,” Elizabeth said.

“I think we are all pretending poorly,” Lydia said. “But we are pretending nonetheless, which is at least something.”

Kitty retrieved the ball and threw it back without comment. Elizabeth stood on the lawn and looked back at the house, which rose behind them with its regular windows and accumulation of mirrors, and at the broken tower on the hill beyond the village, and at her sisters, who were pretending competently enough at the moment but who would, she suspected, require better answers than they had been given before the pretending could continue much longer.

Inside, the organ music rose and fell in minor chords, slightly off-tempo, and the mirrors waited in their odd corners to reflect whatever came into their view.