Set in Stone, Chapter 20.

The house had gone quiet in the way houses do on the night of a festival when those indoors have nothing to celebrate. Elizabeth found this more oppressive than any amount of bustle would have been. Mr. Bennet had retreated to the library with Ovid again. Darcy was in his study. Elizabeth had heard him moving about in there an hour ago, and then nothing, which suggested he was either very absorbed or very still.

Lydia had announced at dinner that she was going to the festival, with the cheerful certainty of someone who has never been told no in any fashion that registered. There had been a brief discussion about propriety, about safety, about whether it was quite the thing to be gadding about the village when the household was in its current state. Lydia had countered that the household had been in its current state for days now and she was not going to miss the midsummer festival on account of nerves and locked doors, and besides, Kitty would have wanted her to go.

Mr. Bennet had looked as though he were about to speak, reconsidered, and returned his attention to his plate. Darcy had said nothing at all, which Elizabeth had learned to recognize as forbearance.

So Lydia had gone, trailing perfume and taking half the household’s good humor with her. The festival had been audible from the grounds since late afternoon: music and voices and the particular bright clamor of a village that has decided to enjoy itself. Elizabeth had found it oddly reassuring. Life continuing. People who did not know anything was wrong, behaving as though nothing were.

Elizabeth was loitering dreamily in the front garden. The evening was very fine. The warmth of it, the particular golden quality the light took on at midsummer when the sun was reluctant to set. The sky was still bright overhead, shading to rose and amber in the west. The air smelled of grass and woodsmoke and something sweet she could not identify, carried on the breeze from the festival. Then the boy arrived.

He was twelve or thirteen and had the look of someone who had been paid to deliver a message and wanted very much to be done with it. He would not come past the garden gate. The note was addressed to Elizabeth, and the boy trotted away the moment she took it from him.

It was not sealed. The paper was decent but not fine. The handwriting was unfamiliar. It sloped awkwardly, as though it had not been written by the author’s dominant hand. It said:

Your sister is at the tower. You should come at once. Alone.

That was all. No signature. No explanation of which sister, though Elizabeth knew. No detail about what at the tower meant, though the tower had only ever meant one thing since Wickham had mentioned it.

She read it twice. The second time did not improve it.

Elizabeth stood in the twilit garden with the note in her hand and a choice taking shape.

She could bring this to Darcy. That would be the sensible course. He would insist on coming with her, or on going himself, or, more likely, on determining whether the note were genuine before anyone went anywhere. He would be methodical and careful and there would be a delay while he was being so, and if Lydia were actually at the tower in some variety of danger, the delay would matter.

She could bring it to her father. He would want to go himself and she would have to prevent him, and the act of preventing him might require her to look at him directly and say something in a certain tone of voice, and she had done that once already and was not prepared to do it again.

Or she could go. Alone. Now. The way the note had asked her to.

It was very likely a trap. She was aware of this. Wickham wanted something from her—she had worked that much out, though the specifics remained unclear—and the note’s timing, arriving when Lydia was confirmed to be elsewhere and the household was scattered and quiet, was almost certainly not coincidental. The note itself had the quality of theater about it. Your sister. At once. Alone. It was designed to produce exactly the reaction it was producing.

She went upstairs and collected her shawl. The evening was warm for now, but she did not know how long it would remain so. She checked the pocket of her walking dress and found the small vial of Rutinum compositum Darcy had given her to carry in case of—what had he said? In case of unexpected strain. She had not asked him to define unexpected strain and he had not elaborated. She had understood him to mean: in case you find yourself somewhere you should not be, doing something you should not be doing, and need to remain yourself long enough to get out.

She went out through the side door, the one that opened onto the path toward the village rather than the front drive. No one saw her go, or they would have called to her.

The music was clearer out here. She could hear a fiddle, and someone singing, and beneath that the low hum of many people talking and laughing at once. It was a lovely evening. It continued being lovely as she walked, indifferent to her and to where she was going and to the fact that she was doing something either very brave or very stupid and had not yet determined which.

The path toward the tower split off from the main village road and climbed. Elizabeth had walked it once before, in daylight, with Mary, who had wanted to see the ruins and had delivered a small lecture on medieval defensive architecture that Elizabeth had mostly not listened to. The tower had seemed picturesque then: crumbling and harmless, the sort of thing painters liked. By twilight it looked different. Taller, perhaps. Or simply darker against the sky, which was still light enough to make the tower’s bulk something solid and waiting.

She did not hurry. Hurrying would suggest panic, and she was not panicked. She was walking toward something she knew might be dangerous, had chosen to do so, and was reasonably confident she could manage whatever she found when she got there. This was possibly delusion but it was the variety of delusion that kept one moving forward, so she clung to it as she moved.

The music faded as she climbed, replaced by the sound of her own footsteps on the path and the occasional rustle of something small in the undergrowth. A bird called from somewhere in the trees, a bright interrogative sound. The evening continued around her, pleasant and entire and utterly uninterested.

The tower steps were where she remembered them: narrow, uneven, carved into the hillside and then into the tower’s outer wall where the hillside ended. Mary had pronounced them unsafe. Elizabeth tested the first one, found it solid enough, and climbed.

She was halfway up when she realized she had not brought a lamp. The light was going faster now, the sky dimming from rose to violet, and the steps were darker than the sky and darker still where the tower’s shadow fell across them. She kept one hand on the wall and continued. The stone was cool under her palm, slightly rough, veined with cracks she could feel but not see.

At the top there was a gap where a door had been, and beyond it the open space of the parapet. Elizabeth stepped through and stopped.

Wickham was there.

She had known he would be. The knowledge did not make his presence less unpleasant.

He was standing near the far edge of the parapet, backlit by the last of the sunset, which made him a silhouette and nothing more. He did not turn when she entered. He said, “Good evening, Miss Bennet,” in a tone that suggested they had met by chance in a drawing room and were about to discuss the weather.

Elizabeth stayed where she was, just inside the gap. The parapet was perhaps twenty feet across, open to the sky, the low crumbled wall running around its edge waist-high in places and knee-high in others. There were gaps where the stone had fallen away entirely. It was not a place one would choose to have a difficult conversation, which was very likely why Wickham had chosen it.

“Where is Lydia?” she said.

“At the festival.” He turned now, and she saw he was holding something: a short, curved blade, the metal dull in the fading light. Not threatening her with it. Simply holding it, as one might hold any tool one expected to use shortly. “Eating sausages, I expect, and flirting with the blacksmith’s son. She is perfectly safe. I do apologize for the note. It seemed the most efficient method of getting you here.”

The relief was brief and immediately replaced by a different feeling, part embarrassment and part anger.

“You lied,” she said.

“I simplified.” He smiled. It was the same smile he had used in the drawing room, in the village, in every conversation they had ever had: warm and self-deprecating and entirely pleasant. It looked wrong here. Or perhaps it had always looked wrong and she simply saw it clearly now. “Your sister was never in any danger. You, on the other hand, are going to help me with something, and then we shall both go home and have a nice glass of wine and agree never to discuss this evening again.”

Elizabeth became aware of several things in quick succession: that the blade in his hand was not decorative; that he was standing between her and the only way down; that she had come here alone and not told anyone where she was going; and that this had been, in hindsight, a lamentably poor decision.

She reached into her pocket and closed her hand around the vial.