Set in Stone, Chapter 7.

He found Miss Lydia Bennet in the morning room, attempting to cajole Kitty into an expedition to the village. This was the third such attempt in as many days, and Darcy had exhausted his patience somewhere around the second.

“Miss Lydia,” he said, from the doorway. “A word, if you please.”

She turned with the bright, heedless smile of someone who had never been denied anything that mattered and did not expect to start now. “Oh, Dr. Darcy! We were just saying—Kitty and I—that it’s perfectly absurd to keep us cooped up like this when the weather is so fine. Surely you can’t object to a simple walk?”

“I can,” Darcy said, “and I do.”

The smile dimmed slightly. Kitty, perched on the arm of a chair, watched with the mild interest of someone observing a play she had seen before and already knew the ending to.

“But why?” Lydia’s tone had acquired an edge. “Lizzy goes out. Papa goes out. Even Mary goes out—well, to the churchyard, which is perfectly morbid, but still. Why must Kitty and I stay inside like prisoners?”

Because you are twenty years old and inside the manifestation window, and I have already buried my sister, Darcy thought, and did not say. Because your mother is standing rigid and unmoving in a locked room and I do not yet know how to reverse her condition. Because if you transform in the village square during market day I will have a mob at my door by evening and no amount of medical credentials will save any of us.

What he said was: “Your elder sister is undergoing a course of treatment that requires careful management. Until I am satisfied that her condition is stable, I must ask all members of the household to exercise caution.”

“Lizzy’s condition,” Lydia said, with the particular emphasis that suggested she thought there was nothing wrong with Lizzy at all and that Darcy was inventing problems to make himself important, “doesn’t have anything to do with whether Kitty and I take a walk.”

“On the contrary. It has everything to do with it.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Then you must trust that I do.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I am prepared to give you.”

Lydia’s mouth set in a mutinous line. Kitty shifted slightly, her gaze moving between them with something that might have been nervousness or might simply have been the anticipation of entertainment. Darcy was preparing his next careful, uninformative statement when he heard footsteps in the corridor behind him.

“Lydia,” Elizabeth said, from just over his shoulder. “What’s this about?”

“Dr. Darcy,” Lydia said, with a certain relish, “is being unreasonable.”

Elizabeth moved past him into the room. She was dressed for walking. He noted this with the part of his mind that catalogued details before he had consciously decided they were relevant. Her color was better than it had been the previous morning. The Rutinum compositum was doing its work, then. A small relief in a situation not otherwise abundant in them.

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” Elizabeth said, though her tone suggested she was not, in fact, sure of this at all.

“His reasons,” Lydia said, “are that I am not allowed to leave the house, because you are ill, though you don’t look particularly ill to me, and he won’t explain why one has anything to do with the other.”

Elizabeth looked at him. “Dr. Darcy?”

He should have anticipated this. Elizabeth Bennet was not a woman who accepted authority without question, and she had already made it clear, through a dozen small interactions over the past few days, that she found his manner somewhere between irritating and insufferable. Of course she would side with her sister.

“As I have explained to Miss Lydia,” he said, keeping his voice level, “the nature of your treatment requires certain precautions. I would prefer not to go into the medical particulars in—”

“The medical particulars,” Elizabeth said, in a tone that matched his for studied courtesy and exceeded it for sharpness, “seem to involve my entire family being confined to your house on the strength of your professional opinion. Surely we are entitled to understand what that opinion is based on.”

“You are entitled,” Darcy said, “to the treatment I am providing. The specifics of that treatment are not a matter for general discussion.”

“General discussion,” Elizabeth repeated. “You mean discussion with me.”

“I mean discussion in the morning room with your sisters present when I have not yet established—”

“What you have not yet established,” Elizabeth said, and there was real anger in her voice now, “is any reason why I should trust your judgment on this. You have told me almost nothing. My father has told me almost nothing. And now you propose to restrict my sisters’ movements without explanation, as though we were children, or imbeciles, or—”

She was looking directly at him. He had been managing, until this moment, to keep his gaze somewhere slightly to the left of hers, a trick he had learned with Georgiana, and perfected since, the appearance of attention without the full weight of eye contact. But she had stepped closer as she spoke, and he had not compensated quickly enough, and now she was looking at him with the full force of her frustration and he was looking back and—

—there.

The sensation was immediate and unpleasant: a cold, creeping pressure at the base of his skull, spreading forward into his temples and behind his eyes. Not pain, precisely. Not yet. But the warning of pain, the feeling of his brain being slowly compressed like a wet sponge. His vision narrowed slightly. The room seemed to contract around the point where her gaze met his.

He could look away. Should look away. The intelligent thing, the safe thing, would be to drop his gaze, mutter something about examining a patient file, and leave the room before the pressure became something worse. But if he did that now, in the middle of this argument, it would look like capitulation. Worse: it would look like weakness. And Elizabeth Bennet would remember, and would press the advantage next time, and he could not afford—

“—and I will not,” Elizabeth was saying, “be treated as though I have no right to information about my own condition, or my own family—”

The pressure intensified. His hands, he realized distantly, had clenched into fists at his sides. He forced them open. The small movement cost him something. His jaw ached. He had been holding it rigid without noticing.

“Miss Bennet,” he said. His voice came out flat and colder than he had intended. “I am not at liberty to discuss the details of your case in this setting. If you wish to schedule a formal consultation—”

“I don’t want a formal consultation. I want you to tell me why my sisters cannot take a walk.”

Still looking at him. Still that steady, furious gaze. The pressure was building toward something sharper now, a bright, specific pain gathering at the front of his skull. He thought of Georgiana in those final weeks when she had stopped sleeping and he had stopped being able to meet her eyes without flinching. How he had told himself it was exhaustion. Overwork. The stress of a case he did not yet know how to solve.

He had been wrong then. He was not wrong now. This was not exhaustion.

“Because,” he said, and heard his own voice as though from a great distance, each word requiring a separate, deliberate effort, “certain hereditary conditions present risks for multiple family members within specific age ranges, and until I have determined the scope of that risk, I must insist on caution.”

“That’s still not an answer.”

“It is all the answer I can give you at present.”

He watched her expression shift. He knew what she was seeing: a man who would not unbend, who hid behind professional formality, who held information like a miser hoarding coin. He knew this, and could not correct it, because the truth would require explanations he could not give her. Not yet. Not without first confirming what he suspected about the hereditary mechanism, and that would require time he did not have and tests he could not ethically conduct.

“I see,” Elizabeth said. Her voice had gone quiet. “You will tell us nothing, and expect us to comply regardless. How very convenient for you.”

The pressure released as she looked away. The relief was immediate and left him faintly nauseated. He drew a careful breath and did not let himself sway.

“Lizzy,” Lydia said, from behind her. “Does this mean—”

“It means,” Elizabeth said, still looking at the wall and not at him, “that Dr. Darcy is too important to explain himself to people like us. Isn’t that right, Dr. Darcy?”

He should correct her. Should tell her…what? That he was trying to keep her alive? That her direct gaze had been doing something to him, something she had no notion of and he could not describe without revealing the nature of her condition? That he had rules about eye contact with patients for reasons that had everything to do with staying functional and nothing to do with arrogance?

“If you prefer to think so,” he said.

Her mouth tightened. She turned back to Lydia. “Come. We’ll walk in the garden, at least. I assume Dr. Darcy cannot object to that.”

“The garden is perfectly safe,” Darcy said.

“How reassuring.”

She swept past him. There was no other word for it, she swept, with Lydia in her wake and Kitty trailing after with the satisfied air of someone whose morning had just become significantly more interesting. The door closed behind them with slightly more force than was strictly necessary.

Darcy remained where he was for a moment, waiting for the residual pain to subside. It would, he knew from experience. Another minute or two and the ache behind his eyes would fade to something manageable. By this evening it would be gone entirely, and tomorrow he would be able to convince himself it had not been as bad as it seemed in the moment.

He had protocols for this. He had learned, over the course of Georgiana’s final year, exactly how long he could meet her eyes before the cost became prohibitive. Thirty seconds of direct contact was manageable. Forty-five was inadvisable. A full minute left him shaking and useless for an hour afterward. He had timed it. Had made himself time it, because if he was going to treat patients with this condition he needed to know his own limits.

That had been forty seconds, perhaps. He had held for forty seconds while Elizabeth Bennet looked at him with justified anger and he said nothing that would explain why he could not explain, and now she thought him arrogant and controlling and he could not tell her otherwise.

This, he thought, with the sour satisfaction of a man cataloguing his own failures, is going to be a significant problem.

He retrieved the notebook from his study, the small one he kept for observations he did not put in the formal casebook, and made a brief entry. Patient unaware of compulsive effect. Direct eye contact approx. 40 seconds. Resistance manageable but costly. Presented as emotional rigidity. Misread accordingly. Must find method of explanation that does not require practical demonstration.

He stared at the last sentence for a moment, then crossed it out. There was no method of explanation that would not require telling her what she was, and he was not yet ready to do that. Not until he had something more useful than a diagnosis. Not until he could offer her a solution.

He closed the notebook and went to check on Mrs. Bennet, who remained as she had been that morning and the morning before that: stone, still, unreachable. Another problem he had not yet solved. Another patient he had failed to save in time.

The muttonchops, he thought with sudden, irrational bitterness, were doing absolutely nothing to help.