Set in Stone, Chapter 23.

They went to Kitty first.

She stood in the downstairs parlour where she had been moved after the episode, positioned near the window so the morning light would find her when it came. Elizabeth had not been present for the moving and found she was grateful for this. The thought of Kitty carried like furniture through the house was not one she wished to linger over.

Darcy had the syringe. Elizabeth had insisted on the transformation in the study, with the door locked and Darcy’s mirror arrangement in place so she could observe herself throughout. She had not wanted to do it in front of Kitty, even a Kitty who could not see. The process had been brief and entirely under her control — the conscious choice to slip into the form rather than the fury or the nightmare dragging her there — and she had watched herself in the mirrors with something between curiosity and recognition. Darcy had taken the blood sample with the careful efficiency of a man who had done considerably more alarming things in the last twelve hours and was now simply working through a procedure. The syringe, brought back to the parlour in his coat pocket, looked like nothing more threatening than his usual medical equipment.

“The hands,” he said. “A small quantity on each should suffice.”

Elizabeth nodded. Her throat was dry. She had been stone once, briefly, in the dream-like interval between episodes as a child. She did not remember the sensation of returning. She suspected no one did.

Darcy squeezed a little of the blood out of the syringe and onto Kitty’s left hand first, then her right, working with the same methodical care he brought to everything. The stone did not crack. It softened: a shift in texture and colour that moved from Kitty’s hands up through her wrists, her arms, her shoulders, like warmth returning to cold flesh. The grey receding in a visible wave, the pallor of living skin replacing it, the faint flush of blood beneath. Kitty’s dress, which had taken on the uniform dullness of the stone, regained its particular shade of blue. Her hair, which had been lifeless mineral, became hair again.

Then she blinked.

She looked at her hands, at Elizabeth, at Darcy, at the parlour around her. Her expression was entirely blank.

“How long?” she said.

“Two days,” Elizabeth said. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her.

Kitty considered this. “I missed the festival, then.”

“You did.”

“Lydia will be insufferable.” Kitty paused. “Is everyone else all right?”

Elizabeth found she could not speak for a moment. Darcy said, quietly, “Your mother and Mary are still to be attended to. We are doing so now.”

“Oh,” said Kitty. She looked down at her hands again, turned them over, as if confirming that the parts were all still attached. “I don’t remember it. Being—” She did not finish the sentence.

“No,” Darcy said. “You wouldn’t.”

Kitty nodded slowly. Then she looked at Elizabeth with an expression of such uncomplicated relief that Elizabeth had to turn away.

“I’ll sit here, then,” Kitty said. “Unless you need me elsewhere.”

“Certainly,” Elizabeth managed.

They left her by the window.

Mary was in the organ room, still on the bench, her hands suspended over the keys in the precise position they had occupied when the transformation took her. Elizabeth had not been able to look at her properly the night they found her. She looked now.

The statue was technically perfect. Every fold of Mary’s dress, every strand of her hair, every detail of her hands, all rendered in stone with the fidelity of a master sculptor. It was grotesque in its precision. Elizabeth understood, looking at her, why the classical sculptors had so often depicted the gorgon as monstrous. The truth of what the gaze did was considerably worse than snakes and fangs could convey.

Darcy applied the blood. The same careful process: left hand, right hand, the warmth moving up through the stone, colour returning, texture softening. Elizabeth watched Mary’s face as the wave reached it — the grey receding, the living skin emerging, the faint parting of her lips preparatory to speech.

Mary gave a startled cry, and then seemed to realize that there was nothing to fear here.

Mary looked at her hands on the keys, at Elizabeth, at Darcy standing beside her with the syringe still in his hand. She frowned.

“How long have I been sitting here?”

“Three days,” Elizabeth said.

Mary’s frown deepened. “That seems excessive.”

Darcy made a sound that might have been a cough. Elizabeth did not look at him. If she looked at him she would laugh, and if she laughed she would not be able to stop, and this was not the moment for that.

“You were indisposed,” Elizabeth said.

“I don’t feel indisposed.” Mary flexed her fingers experimentally. “I feel as though I have been sitting very still for rather longer than is comfortable, but otherwise perfectly well.”

“That is—” Elizabeth stopped. “That is good.”

“Did I miss anything of note?”

Elizabeth thought of the tower, of Wickham in small stone pieces at its base, of Darcy on the top step and the kiss that brought him back, of Lydia’s arrival and her cheerful narration of events she had not witnessed and would not have understood if she had. “Several things, yes.”

“Pity,” Mary said. “This house has been considerably more eventful than I anticipated when we arrived. I had thought it would be all tisanes and nerves, and instead it has been quite Gothic.” She paused. “Mother is well, I hope?”

“We will attend to her next,” Darcy said.

“Good,” said Mary. She stood, brushed down her skirts with the brisk efficiency of someone tidying up after an ordinary interruption, and walked toward the door. “I shall want tea, I think. And possibly some toast.”

She left. Elizabeth listened to her footsteps receding down the corridor.

Mrs. Bennet was still in the locked room. The key was in Darcy’s possession. He unlocked the door and stood aside.

Her mother was seated in the chair by the window, her hands folded in her lap, her head turned slightly as though she had been looking out at the garden and had simply paused mid-thought. The morning light found her just as it had found Kitty. Elizabeth thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that if one had to be made stone it was better to be made stone somewhere with decent light. It was not a comforting thought, but it was something.

Mr. Bennet was behind her in the corridor. He had not asked to be present. He had simply appeared when they went to unlock the door, and no one had suggested he leave.

Darcy looked at Elizabeth. She nodded. He applied the blood.

The transformation moved more slowly this time, or perhaps it only seemed slower because Elizabeth was watching more carefully, because this was her mother and the weight of it was different. The stone softened. The colour returned. The faint movement of breath.

Mrs. Bennet blinked. Looked at her hands. Looked at the room.

“I wanted to go shopping. I was not shopping,” she said.

“No,” Elizabeth said.

“I thought not.” Mrs. Bennet’s voice was faint but absolutely clear. “It did not feel like shopping.”

She looked at Mr. Bennet, at Elizabeth, at Darcy with his syringe. Her gaze moved over the locked room, the narrow bed, the chair, the barred window, and returned to her husband’s face.

“How long?”

“A few days,” Mr. Bennet said.

Mrs. Bennet absorbed this. “The girls?”

“All well,” he said. “All accounted for.”

“Lydia has not run off with anyone unsuitable?”

“Not yet.”

“Kitty is not—”

“Kitty is in the parlour having tea.”

“Mary has not—”

“Mary is also having tea, and possibly toast.”

Mrs. Bennet nodded slowly. Elizabeth watched her mother take in the information piece by piece, sorting it into some internal order Elizabeth could not quite follow. She looked fragile in a way Elizabeth had never seen her look before: smaller, somehow, as though the horror of seeing her daughter as a Gorgon would never leave her.

Then Mrs. Bennet said, “My nerves are very bad, Mr. Bennet.”

“I know,” he said. “They have been tormenting us both for thirty years now.”

“I shall need to lie down.”

“Of course.”

Mr. Bennet stepped forward and offered his hand. Mrs. Bennet took it. She stood slowly, leaning more heavily on him than Elizabeth thought she meant to, and he bore the weight without comment. They stood together for a moment, her hand in his, neither of them speaking, and Elizabeth understood that this was as much discussion as her parents would have about any of it.

Then her father led her mother out into the corridor, and Elizabeth and Darcy were left standing in the empty room with its narrow bed and its barred window and its morning light that had illuminated nothing anyone wished to see.

“That’s all of them,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes,” Darcy said.

She looked at the syringe in his hand, at the small quantity of blood still remaining in it, and thought of the tower and the transformation and the kiss that had brought him back. The blood had done that. Her blood, applied correctly, had reversed what her gaze had done. She had been the problem and the solution both.

“The cure worked,” she said.

“It did.”

“I can transform at will now. You observed that.”

“I did.”

“And I brought you back from stone, which by your own admission should not have been possible.”

“I am no longer in the habit of classifying things as possible and impossible, Miss Bennet.”

She looked at him. He looked tired and there was a tightness around his eyes that suggested he had not yet made sense of the events of the last twelve hours and did not expect to do so any time soon. The muttonchops were as absurd as ever. She found this unreasonably comforting.

“You are still wearing those,” she said.

“I am aware.”

“I remain unconvinced of their utility.”

“Your opinion has been noted,” Darcy said, “on several prior occasions.”

“And yet they persist.”

“They do.”

Elizabeth smiled despite herself. “We should go downstairs. Kitty and Mary will have questions, and Mother will need attending to, and someone should probably explain to Lydia what actually happened last night before she constructs an entirely fictional account and makes it permanent.”

“An excellent plan,” Darcy said. He did not move.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.” He hesitated. “That is — I wished to say that you managed that very well. The transformation, I mean. It can’t be easy.” He stopped.

“It isn’t.”

They stood together in the locked room for another moment. Then Elizabeth walked toward the door, and Darcy followed, and they went downstairs to where the family was waiting: all of them accounted for and all of them themselves again.