Set in Stone, Chapter 11.

Kitty arrived in the library shortly before tea with the morning’s correspondence still folded in her hand and the faintly guilty expression of someone who had meant to do something hours ago and had only just remembered.

“For you,” she said, holding out a single letter. “It came this morning. I walked off with it.”

Elizabeth took it without comment. The hand was Jane’s. She had been expecting something. Jane wrote regularly, with the comfortable assumption of being read and answered. The timing produced a small, irrational hope that perhaps Jane had written something useful. Something that explained what was happening in this house, or why their mother had been absent for several days, or why Mr. Darcy would not meet her eyes directly and had responded to Mr. Wickham’s presence yesterday as though he had found a mad dog in the drawing room.

Kitty drifted toward the window. Elizabeth broke the seal.

Dearest Lizzy,

I have your letter, and am glad to know you are settling in comfortably. Mr. Darcy’s house is rather grand, I know, but I hope you will find it becomes more familiar with time. I am sure he is attending to everything that requires attention.

Elizabeth paused. The phrasing was careful in a way Jane’s letters were not usually careful. Jane wrote as she spoke: warmly, with an assumption of being understood. The warmth was still there, but this time it seemed to be backed by a fear of being misunderstood.

She continued.

Charles speaks very highly of Mr. Darcy’s work, and of his attention to his patients. I know his manner can seem reserved, but I hope you will not mistake reserve for indifference. He is a good man, Lizzy, and I trust him. I hope you will too.

Elizabeth’s jaw tightened. Jane trusted him. Jane, who had recommended they come here in the first place, who had written to their father with Mr. Bingley’s assurance that Mr. Darcy was the man to consult, now hoped Elizabeth would trust him as well. It was exactly the sort of thing a wife said when her husband’s friend had been questioned, and it settled in Elizabeth’s chest with the weight of a door closing.

I know it must be strange to be so far from home, and in such an unfamiliar situation. But you are not alone, and you are in good hands. Please write to me if there is anything you need, or anything you wish to discuss that you feel you cannot discuss with Papa.

The offer was genuine. Elizabeth knew that. But it arrived in the same paragraph as the assurance of Mr. Darcy’s character, and the juxtaposition made the whole sound like an attempt to manage her into compliance. As though Jane thought she might be difficult about her treatment, or disagree with the physician’s recommendations, and required soothing.

Please give my love to Papa, and to the girls. Write soon.

*Your affectionate sister,

Jane*

Elizabeth folded the letter. She sat with it in her lap for a moment, and sighed with exasperation. Being managed by someone who loved her was one of the most tiresome things she could imagine.

Jane trusted Mr. Darcy. That was the sum of it. Jane, who had married Mr. Bingley and thus acquired a reason to think well of Mr. Bingley’s friends, trusted Mr. Darcy and thought Elizabeth should trust him too. She had not been here. She had not seen the way he looked past her rather than at her, as though she were a problem requiring careful handling. She had not heard Mr. Wickham’s story about the woman wrongly treated, or seen the flicker of something that might have been guilt in Mr. Darcy’s expression when Elizabeth had pressed him yesterday about what, precisely, he was documenting with his photography.

But Jane trusted him, and so Elizabeth was being gently urged to do the same.

She rose and went to the writing desk. She would answer this evening, when she had decided what could be said that would not sound like complaint. In the meantime, the letter could be set aside with the other things she had noticed and did not yet know what to do with: the house full of mirrors, the careful way her father deflected questions, the locked room she had found on the first floor with no obvious purpose, the tower at the edge of the village that Mr. Wickham had mentioned with such studied casualness.

Kitty was still at the window, looking out toward the grounds.

“Is Lydia outside?” Elizabeth asked.

“I think so. She was bowling at imaginary wickets again earlier.”

“With Mr. Wickham?”

Kitty glanced back, smiling a little. “Perhaps. He’s very attentive.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “He is.”

She left the letter on the desk and went to find her sister.