Set in Stone, Chapter 4.

Darcy waited until Miss Bennet’s footsteps had faded entirely down the corridor before he returned to his desk and wrote, with some force, Patient aware of nothing. Treatment tolerated. Proceeding as established.

He looked at what he had written and found it clinically adequate and personally unsatisfying, which was becoming a familiar combination where Miss Bennet was concerned.

She had been staring at his face. He had noticed this approximately four minutes into the consultation and had devoted considerable effort thereafter to not noticing it further, with mixed results. The staring had not been of the usual variety: neither the alarmed scrutiny people brought to physicians they did not trust, nor the vacant quality that preceded an episode. It had been something closer to assessment, and then, worse, amusement.

He suspected he knew what she had been assessing.

The side-whiskers had been a deliberate choice when he had grown them three years ago, after Georgiana. They were meant to suggest professional maturity, the sort of weathered experience that made patients feel they were in capable hands. He had observed that senior physicians wore them. He had reasoned that adopting the outward markers of seniority might compensate for his relative youth when delivering diagnoses that required authority to be believed.

The reasoning had been sound. The execution, he was beginning to suspect, had been less so.

Miss Bennet had smiled at him. Not the brittle, performative smile people produced when they were nervous. A real one, suppressed quickly but not quickly enough, accompanied by the distinct impression that she had drawn a conclusion about him he would not enjoy hearing stated aloud.

He found this vexing.

He found her vexing, in several distinct ways he was not prepared to enumerate at present. She was his patient, which meant she was a case to be managed with appropriate clinical detachment. The fact that she was also sharp-minded, handsome in a manner that showed no interest in whether one found her handsome or not, and apparently capable of reading him with uncomfortable accuracy…these were inconvenient variables that had no place in the treatment protocol and which he had been attempting to suppress with the same disciplined focus he brought to resisting her inadvertent compulsion.

The compulsion was manageable. The rest of it was proving less so.

There was a knock at the door. Darcy closed his notebook and said, “Come.”

Mr. Bennet entered with the cautious formality of a man entering a room he has been invited into but does not expect to be welcomed in. “Dr. Darcy. I wondered if you had a moment.”

“Of course.” Darcy gestured to the chair Miss Bennet had recently vacated. “Please.”

Mr. Bennet sat and arranged himself with the deliberate casualness of someone preparing to discuss something unpleasant while pretending it was nothing of the sort. “I wanted to ask after Elizabeth’s progress,” he said. “She seems—improved, I think, though I confess I am not certain what I am measuring improvement against.”

“She is tolerating the medication well,” Darcy said.

“And you believe the medication is sufficient?”

“For suppression, yes. It will not cure the condition, but it should prevent the more dangerous manifestations so long as she continues the treatment.”

Mr. Bennet absorbed this in silence. Then: “How long must she continue it?”

“Indefinitely,” Darcy said. “Unless I can determine a more permanent solution.”

“Which you are working toward.”

“I am.”

“With success?”

“With progress,” Darcy said, which was not the same thing and which Mr. Bennet was intelligent enough to recognize as not the same thing. “The difficulty lies in isolating the catalytic element. The compound I have developed is effective at managing symptoms, but the underlying mechanism remains—elusive.”

“Elusive,” Mr. Bennet repeated. “Yes. That is one word for it.”

There was a pause. Darcy had the sense they were both calculating how much could be said without saying it directly. It was a familiar negotiation. Most families preferred euphemism when it came to supernatural conditions. They wanted their daughters treated but not named, cured but not categorized, and they became profoundly uncomfortable when the vocabulary grew too specific.

Mr. Bennet, to his credit, seemed less interested in euphemism than in accuracy, but he was still choosing his words with care.

“My wife’s mother,” Mr. Bennet said slowly, “had a similar condition, we believe. She died many years ago. Elizabeth met her once, as a small child. I do not know whether that is relevant.”

“It is,” Darcy said. “The condition follows maternal lines. If Mrs. Bennet’s mother was affected, it would explain the hereditary transmission.”

“And my wife?”

“Was a carrier,” Darcy said. “She did not manifest symptoms herself, but she passed the condition to her daughters. Not all of them will develop it—Jane appears to be past the window—but the younger girls remain at some risk until their mid-twenties.”

Mr. Bennet’s expression did not change, but his hands tightened slightly on the arms of the chair. “I see.”

“Elizabeth’s case is manageable,” Darcy said. “The medication is effective, and if I can identify the catalytic component, I may be able to offer something more than ongoing suppression. But it will take time.”

“Time,” Mr. Bennet said. “Yes. We seem to have rather a lot of that at present, given what my daughter has done to her mother without knowing it.”

The bluntness was unexpected. Darcy had grown accustomed to families who lacked the vocabulary for directness. Mr. Bennet, apparently, was not one of them.

“Miss Bennet was not conscious during the episode,” Darcy said. “She will not remember it, and she cannot be held morally responsible for something she did not choose and was not aware of doing.”

“I am aware of that,” Mr. Bennet said. “I am also aware that she would not forgive herself if she knew. Which is why I have not told her, and why I would prefer she not learn of it until you are certain you can reverse the process.”

“I am working on that as well.”

“Are you?” Mr. Bennet said. “Forgive me, Dr. Darcy, but you have been working on these things for some time before we met you, if I understand correctly. I am not questioning your competence. I would not have brought my family here if I doubted it. But I would appreciate some sense of whether we are waiting for a solution or simply waiting.”

It was a fair question. Darcy did not enjoy it, but it was fair. “The curative mechanism requires an element I have not yet isolated, but I am close. That is not reassurance. It is an accurate statement of where the research stands.”

Mr. Bennet studied him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Thank you. That is more honest than I expected.” He stood. “I will leave you to your work. Though I will say, in the spirit of unsolicited observation, that my daughter is considerably more perceptive than is convenient for people attempting to conceal things from her.”

“I am aware,” Darcy said.

“Good,” Mr. Bennet said. “Also, the side-whiskers are not working.”

He said it mildly, as though remarking on the weather, and left before Darcy could formulate a response.

Darcy sat alone in his consulting room and admitted to himself, with considerable irritation, that he had known the side-whiskers were not working for at least a year and had persisted in wearing them out of sheer stubborn refusal to concede the point. This did not reflect well on his capacity for rational self-assessment.

Neither did the fact that he had been thinking about Miss Bennet’s smile for the past ten minutes when he ought to have been thinking about catalytic compounds.

He pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him and began drafting notes on the hereditary transmission patterns, which was productive and entirely relevant and did not require him to think about whether his patient found him ridiculous.

He thought about it anyway.