Set in Stone, Chapter 3.

Dr. Darcy’s consulting room was on the first floor, in the east wing Elizabeth had not yet fully explored. She was summoned there or rather, her father mentioned at luncheon that Dr. Darcy would appreciate a word with her at two o’clock if she felt well enough, in a tone that suggested feeling well enough was not actually optional.

She arrived at two to find the door open and Dr. Darcy standing beside a desk that was occupied almost entirely by papers arranged in stacks of alarming precision. He looked up as she entered, then immediately away, directing his attention somewhere past her left shoulder.

“Miss Bennet. Please, sit.”

There were two chairs. She took the one that was not behind the desk. He remained standing for a moment longer than was comfortable, as though he had forgotten the ordinary rhythm of these things, then sat and consulted a notebook that lay open in front of him.

“I wanted to review a few details,” he said. “Your father has provided some background, but there are gaps I hope you can help me fill.”

“I shall do my best,” Elizabeth said. “Though I confess my memory of recent weeks is not what I would wish it to be.”

“Yes,” he said. “That is not uncommon with this sort of condition.”

“And what sort of condition is it?”

He looked up, not quite at her face, but near enough that she could not determine precisely where his gaze was landing. Then he returned to the notebook. “A periodic nervous disorder,” he said. “Somnambulism, primarily, with associated memory disruption following episodes. Your father wrote to me after you had a particularly concerning incident at home.”

“I do not remember it.”

“No,” he said. “You would not.”

She waited for him to elaborate. He did not. Instead he asked her a series of questions. When had she first noticed the fatigue? Were there preceding symptoms? Had she experienced unusual dreams or waking disturbances? She answered as well as she could, which was not well at all. It was rather like being asked to describe a room one had only glimpsed through a doorway while walking past.

“You are finding the medication tolerable, I hope,” he said.

She thought of the bitter draught she had been given that morning, and the morning before that, poured from an amber bottle whose label she had not thought to examine closely. “It is not pleasant,” she said. “But I understand it is meant to be helpful.”

“It is helpful,” he said. “The formulation is my own. Rutinum compositum. A compound preparation, primarily rue, with several other components to moderate the more difficult side effects.”

“Rutinum compositum,” Elizabeth repeated. “That is quite a name for a tincture.”

“It is a precise name for a specific preparation.”

“It is a grandiose name,” she said. “Do all medicines require Latin to be efficacious, or only yours?”

Something that was almost amusement crossed his face, though it did not reach his eyes, which were still fixed on a point safely past her. “The nomenclature is standard practice in pharmaceutical research. If you prefer, I can call it ‘the bitter draught Miss Bennet dislikes.’“

“I think I prefer the Latin after all,” Elizabeth said. “At least it sounds as though it ought to work.”

He made a note in his book. She could not tell whether he was recording her answer or simply occupying himself with something other than looking at her. His manner was odd—not unkind, precisely, but remote in a way that suggested either extreme professionalism or extreme discomfort. She could not determine which, and found she minded not being able to determine it.

“Your father mentioned that you have three sisters,” he said, turning to a fresh page. “All younger, I believe.”

“Four sisters,” Elizabeth corrected. “Jane is older and recently married. The younger three are here with us: Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. You have met them, I think.”

“Yes,” he said. “At breakfast.”

“And yesterday, apparently, though I do not recall that breakfast at all.”

He glanced up again, the same brief, displaced look, and she noticed for the first time that his face, which she had initially taken for severe, was really only tired. He had the look of a man who was not sleeping well and had not been sleeping well for some time.

And the side-whiskers. She had thought them merely unfashionable at breakfast, but now, seeing them in better light and at closer range, she revised her assessment. They were meant to make him look older, more authoritative. It was the sort of facial hair a senior physician in late middle age might cultivate to signal his decades of experience. On Dr. Darcy, who could not be much past thirty, they signaled only that he had miscalculated rather badly what such embellishments actually accomplished.

“Is something amusing?” he asked.

She realized she had been staring. “Not at all.”

“You were smiling.”

“Was I? I had not noticed.” This was a lie. She had noticed. She decided it was not worth pursuing and changed the subject before he could. “How long do you anticipate I shall need to continue the Rutinum compositum?”

“That depends on your progress,” he said. “The compound is suppressive rather than curative. It reduces the frequency and severity of episodes, but it does not eliminate the underlying condition. I am working on a more permanent solution, but the research is not yet complete.”

“How reassuring.”

“I did not say it to reassure you,” he said. “I said it because it is accurate.”

She could not decide whether she disliked him. He was difficult to read, guarded in a way that might be professional necessity or personal coldness, and he had still not looked at her directly for more than a second at a time since she had entered the room. It ought to have been a relief, after her dimly remembered weeks of strangers peering at her with the concerned intensity people reserved for invalids, but instead it was faintly irritating. She had the sense of being assessed without being seen, catalogued without being acknowledged, and she found she did not care for it.

“Is there anything else you require from me?” she asked.

“Not at present,” he said. “I shall want to see you again in a few days to assess how you are tolerating the medication. In the meantime, if you experience any unusual symptoms—dizziness, visual disturbances, anything that concerns you—please inform me immediately.”

“And if I experience the urge to sleepwalk?”

“You will not,” he said. “That is what the medication is for.”

He said it with such flat certainty that she almost believed him. Almost.

She stood, and he stood as well, in a belated mirror of courtesy that again seemed slightly off in its timing. She had the impression of a man who was performing the ordinary social gestures from memory rather than instinct.

“Thank you, Dr. Darcy,” she said.

“Miss Bennet.”

He inclined his head. She left the room and did not look back, though she had the distinct sense as she walked down the corridor that he had not moved from where he stood, and that he had not yet returned his attention to his notebook.

She found her father in the library, which was where he had been most often since their arrival. He had claimed a chair near the window and surrounded himself with books in a fortification that suggested he did not wish to be dislodged.

“Well?” he said, looking up as she entered. “How did you find our host?”

“Odd,” Elizabeth said.

“Mm. Yes. I had noticed that.”

“Does he ever look at anyone directly?”

“Not if he can help it,” Mr. Bennet said. “I assumed it was a professional affectation. Physicians are taught to cultivate a certain manner, I believe, to inspire confidence in patients who might otherwise suspect them of incompetence. Though I grant you the side-whiskers suggest he has not entirely mastered the art.”

“They are extraordinary,” Elizabeth said. “Do you suppose anyone has told him?”

“I suspect,” Mr. Bennet said, “that Dr. Darcy is not a man who invites commentary on his personal grooming choices.”

Elizabeth sat in the chair opposite and considered this. “He said you wrote to him about an incident at home.”

Her father’s expression did not change, but there was a small pause before he answered. “I did.”

“I do not remember it.”

“No,” he said. “I did not think you would.”

“Will you tell me what happened?”

“You were walking in your sleep,” Mr. Bennet said. “You came downstairs in the night and could not be woken. Your mother tried to rouse you and—” He stopped. “It frightened her a great deal. It frightened all of us. I thought it best to seek advice from someone who specialized in such things.”

“And Dr. Darcy specializes in somnambulism?”

“In disorders of the nervous system,” her father said. “He studied in Vienna and has a particular interest in cases that are—difficult to classify. Mr. Bingley knew of him. Jane made the introduction.”

This was the first Elizabeth had heard of Jane’s involvement. Yet another thing she did not yet understand and could not bring herself to ask about directly. “And you trust him?”

“I trust him to know more about your condition than I do,” Mr. Bennet said. “Whether that is the same as trusting him generally, I have not yet determined. He is severe, he is odd, and he has a great many mirrors in his house for reasons he has not explained. But he has treated other patients with similar symptoms, and they have improved under his care, and at present I am willing to overlook a multitude of personal eccentricities in exchange for that.”

“Even the side-whiskers?”

“Even those,” Mr. Bennet said. “Though I admit they test my tolerance.”

Elizabeth smiled despite herself. Her father returned to his book, and she sat for a moment longer in the quiet of the library, looking out at the garden and the distant line of the village, and thinking about mirrors and grandiose Latin names and a man who would not meet her eyes.

Set in Stone, Chapter 2.

After breakfast, Elizabeth decided to learn the house.

It was not a large house by the standards of the country estates she had visited in England, but it had the sprawling asymmetry of a building that had been added to over several generations without particular concern for architectural harmony. The breakfast room fed into a corridor that turned twice before arriving at what appeared to be the main hall, which was dominated by a staircase of dark wood and a mirror fully eight feet tall that caught the light from the landing window and threw it back across the floor in a stripe of reflected morning.

That made the seventh mirror she had counted since leaving her room.

She continued through the ground floor, opening doors with the careful diffidence of a guest who is not entirely certain which rooms she is meant to have access to. A morning room, curtains drawn back to let in the light from the garden. A library, respectably stocked, with medical texts in German and French that suggested Dr. Darcy’s interests were both serious and specific. A small parlor that faced north and would be cold in winter. Each room had at least one mirror, and most had two. They were not uniformly placed. Some hung where one would expect them, over mantels and sideboards, but others occupied odd corners or faced doorways at angles that seemed calculated for something other than vanity.

She came to a door near the back of the house that opened onto a room she had not expected. It was a workroom of some kind, fitted out as a laboratory or a photographer’s studio. There was equipment she recognized from the fashionable portraits her mother had insisted on having made in London, and a great deal she did not recognize at all. A camera on a heavy tripod, draped in black cloth. Trays and bottles arranged on a shelf with the tidy precision of frequent use. In the corner, another mirror, this one angled on an adjustable stand in a way that suggested it was part of the equipment rather than decoration.

Elizabeth stood in the doorway and did not go in.

“He takes photographs,” said a voice behind her.

She turned to find Mary, who had apparently followed her from the breakfast room with the silent persistence Mary brought to most things.

“I can see that,” Elizabeth said.

“Medical photographs,” Mary continued. “For his research. He explained it to me yesterday. The camera can capture details the eye might miss. There is a darkroom through that door, though he asked that I not go in there as the chemicals are corrosive.”

“How obliging of him to explain.”

“I asked,” Mary said. “I find the house very interesting. It has a melancholy history, I think.”

“All houses this old have melancholy histories,” Elizabeth said. “It is more or less a requirement of age.”

“Yes, but this one has the right sort,” Mary said. She was looking past Elizabeth into the room with an expression of earnest approval. “Gothic, but not excessively so. Restrained Gothic. The mirrors are an excellent touch.”

“I had noticed the mirrors.”

“They are everywhere,” Mary said, with evident satisfaction. “I have counted fourteen so far, though I have not yet been into the east wing.”

“Why do you suppose he has so many?”

“I could not say,” Mary said. “Perhaps he is vain.”

Elizabeth glanced back at the studio and thought of Dr. Darcy’s severe face and unfashionable side-whiskers and decided that vanity was not the problem, or not the usual sort at any rate. “Perhaps.”

Mary drifted off toward the stairs, and Elizabeth continued her exploration. She found the east wing: more mirrors, a locked door she did not try, a set of rooms that appeared to be in regular use as bedrooms. At the far end of the corridor was another door, this one partly open, from which she could hear the sound of an organ being played with more enthusiasm than skill.

She followed the sound and found Mary, who had evidently circled back through the house by some other route, seated at a substantial pipe organ in a room that seemed to have been designed specifically to contain it. The instrument was old and very fine, and Mary was attacking it with the focused determination of someone who had found her natural element.

“Is this not splendid?” Mary called over the music, which was something minor-key and vaguely ecclesiastical.

“It is very splendid,” Elizabeth said.

“Dr. Darcy said I might play whenever I wished, as he has no use for it himself. It belonged to the previous owner. I think it is the best thing about the house.”

“Better than the mirrors?”

“The mirrors are architectural,” Mary said. “The organ is Romantic.”

She returned to her playing. Elizabeth left her to it and went to find a way outside.

The garden was extensive and appeared to be maintained by someone who believed in the virtues of tidiness without decoration. The paths were swept, the hedges trimmed, the flowerbeds weeded into strict compliance. It was a functional garden, a little austere, and Elizabeth liked it better for not trying to be picturesque.

She walked the perimeter, found a gate that led to a kitchen garden, and continued around the side of the house until she had a clear view to the east, where the village lay perhaps half a mile distant. It was small even by the standards of English villages: a church, a cluster of houses, the suggestion of a square or marketplace at the center. Beyond it, rising from a low hill at the edge of the fields, was the tower she had seen from her window that morning.

It was a ruin, plainly. Roofless, the top of it broken off unevenly as though something had taken a bite from the stones. It had the look of medieval construction, a watch-tower perhaps, or part of some larger fortification that had been quarried away over the centuries for building stone. Elizabeth looked at it for a moment, decided it was not particularly interesting, and turned back toward the house.

Lydia was on the lawn, attempting to interest Kitty in a game that appeared to involve throwing a ball at a wicket that was not there. Kitty was submitting to this with the resigned patience of someone who had learned it was easier to participate than to argue.

“Lizzy!” Lydia called, waving enthusiastically. “Come and play! Kitty is being terribly dull about it.”

“I am being appropriately realistic about our chances of finding a proper wicket in Bohemia,” Kitty said.

“We do not need a proper wicket. We need only imagination and a willingness to pretend.”

“You have never needed encouragement to pretend,” Elizabeth said, crossing the lawn to join them. “What are we pretending at?”

“That we are at home,” Lydia said, “and that everything is just as it ought to be, and that there is nothing strange about any of this.”

She said it lightly, but there was a small edge beneath the lightness that made Elizabeth look at her more carefully. Lydia looked back with wide, innocent eyes, and threw the ball at the nonexistent wicket, and missed.

“I think you are pretending poorly,” Elizabeth said.

“I think we are all pretending poorly,” Lydia said. “But we are pretending nonetheless, which is at least something.”

Kitty retrieved the ball and threw it back without comment. Elizabeth stood on the lawn and looked back at the house, which rose behind them with its regular windows and accumulation of mirrors, and at the broken tower on the hill beyond the village, and at her sisters, who were pretending competently enough at the moment but who would, she suspected, require better answers than they had been given before the pretending could continue much longer.

Inside, the organ music rose and fell in minor chords, slightly off-tempo, and the mirrors waited in their odd corners to reflect whatever came into their view.

Set in Stone, Chapter 1.

She woke reaching for the surface of something that was not water.

The room was unfamiliar in the way rooms become when one has been in them only a few days. She recognized it but it was only a slight acquaintance. The wallpaper’s pattern of twining, serpentine ivy had not yet resolved into the kind of worn familiarity that would let her stop seeing it. The window was in the wrong place. She had been dreaming, though the substance of it scattered the moment she tried to examine it directly. Something reflected. A pool, perhaps, or a mirror. Something seen first in the water and then…

She could not hold it. The more she reached for the sequence, the more completely it dissolved, leaving only the metallic taste of interrupted sleep and the sense that she had been about to understand something she would have preferred not to know.

Elizabeth sat up. The house was very quiet in the way houses are before the servants have finished opening them to the day. She reached for her wrapper and found it where she had left it the night before, which felt like a minor victory. It had been a week of minor dislocations: learning where things were kept, which doors led where, the names of people whose faces she was supposed to recognize and could not quite place. Her father had explained that she had been unwell. He had used the word episode in a way that suggested it was meant to clarify something, though it had not clarified anything at all.

She went to the window. The grounds below were extensive, well-kept in the manner of a house whose owner was both absent enough to require staff and present enough to notice when they slacked. Beyond the lawn and the line of trees she could see the edge of the village, and beyond that, just visible against the early sky, the broken silhouette of something that had once been a tower.

She turned from the window and caught her own reflection in the glass of a picture frame on the opposite wall. The room had rather a lot of mirrors. She had noticed this yesterday, and the day before that, though no one had remarked on it and she had not asked. They were not covered, as mirrors sometimes were in houses of mourning. They were simply present, carefully positioned, accumulating in corners and on walls in numbers that suggested intention without declaring it.

Elizabeth dressed and went downstairs.

The breakfast room faced east and was full of the kind of early light that makes everything look temporarily scrubbed clean. Mary was already there, picking at something on her plate with the focused disinterest of someone who would rather be at the piano. Lydia was talking. Elizabeth could hear her before she reached the door, holding forth on some subject that required frequent emphasis and no apparent discouragement from the fact that no one was answering. Kitty was listening, or performing the appearance of it.

Her father sat at the head of the table with a book open beside his plate, which was so exactly what he would be doing in any house at any breakfast that Elizabeth felt briefly, absurdly grateful for it.

“Lizzy,” he said, glancing up. “You look as though you did not sleep well.”

“I slept,” she said, taking the chair across from Mary. “I dreamed, which is not always the same thing.”

“Classical wisdom on the subject is divided,” Mr. Bennet said. “The gates of horn and ivory, et cetera. I have never been entirely convinced that Virgil knew what he was talking about, but perhaps you dreamed something prophetic and will tell us all what to expect from the day.”

“I dreamed something I cannot remember,” Elizabeth said. “I imagine that limits its prophetic use considerably.”

“A pity. I was hoping for lottery numbers.”

Lydia was saying something about the village, which she had been into yesterday with Kitty and found agreeably provincial in exactly the way she had hoped for when they had set out from England. “—and the little shop with the ribbons, Kitty, you must have seen it, you were standing directly in front of it when I pointed—”

Elizabeth accepted tea from the woman who had brought it and did not ask her name, because she had been told it twice already and could not recall it now and the small failure felt like part of the general unsettledness of the past week. She was aware, in the vague way one is aware of facts that have been explained without being entirely absorbed, that this house belonged to a Dr. Darcy, who was some manner of specialist her father had consulted about her health. She had no clear memory of the consultation, if there had been one, or of the journey here, which her father said had been uneventful. She had woken in an unfamiliar room and been told she was in Bohemia, and that she was to stay here while she recovered.

What she was recovering from had not been specified.

“Where is Mama?” she asked.

The room did not fall silent, but there was a small, distinct pause in which Lydia stopped talking and Mary looked up from her plate and her father did not look up from his book.

“Prague,” Lydia said, with the pleased confidence of someone delivering good news. “Shopping, or so Papa says, though I cannot think what she expects to find there that she could not find in the village, unless it is gloves, and even then—”

“She wished to see something of the city while we were here,” Mr. Bennet said. His tone was mild, but he was looking at Elizabeth now with an attention that was not quite concern and not quite something else. “She left yesterday morning. I believe she mentioned gloves.”

“She did mention gloves,” Kitty confirmed.

“Well, I hope she finds them,” Elizabeth said. “It seems a long way to go for gloves.”

“Your mother,” Mr. Bennet said, “has never considered distance an impediment when the correct gloves are at stake.”

This was true enough that Elizabeth smiled and let the matter drop, or thought she had let it drop, and was reaching for the toast when the door opened and a man came in whom she had not seen before.

He was tall, perhaps thirty or a little older, brown-haired and somewhat severe in the manner of people who are accustomed to being listened to and do not waste effort on being agreeable. He wore, inexplicably, side-whiskers of a style that had gone out of fashion when Elizabeth was a child. They did not make him look older so much as slightly misinformed about what older men actually looked like.

“Miss Bennet,” he said, nodding to her. “I trust you are feeling better this morning.”

She had no memory of feeling worse any other morning, but it seemed unwise to say so. “I am quite well, thank you.”

“Dr. Darcy,” her father said, in the tone of a man performing an introduction he suspected had already been performed and forgotten, “my daughter Elizabeth.”

“We met yesterday,” Dr. Darcy said.

“Did we?” Elizabeth said.

Something crossed his face; not irritation precisely, but a brief tightness around the eyes that suggested he was deciding whether to be irritated and had chosen against it. “Briefly,” he said. “You may not recall. You were tired.”

“I am often tired lately,” Elizabeth said. “It is beginning to feel like a defining characteristic.”

“It will improve,” he said, with the confidence of a man who had said this before and expected to be believed. He did not sit, but took a cup of tea from the servant and stood near the window, looking out toward the grounds with the distracted air of someone whose attention was on something other than the landscape.

“When do you expect Mama back?” Elizabeth asked her father.

Mr. Bennet looked at Dr. Darcy. Dr. Darcy looked at Mr. Bennet. The look was brief but it was there, and Elizabeth saw it, and added it to the list of small inconsistencies she did not yet know what to do with.

“I could not say precisely,” Mr. Bennet said. “She did not give a specific date of return.”

“How unlike her,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes,” her father said. “It is unlike her.”

He returned his attention to his book. Dr. Darcy continued looking out the window. Lydia began talking again, this time about the merits of the local sausages, which she had sampled yesterday and found entirely acceptable.

Elizabeth drank her tea and thought about mirrors, and about the way her father’s voice had sounded when he said it is unlike her, and about the dream she could not quite remember but which had left her reaching for the surface of something that was not water.

Outside, the sun was coming up over the broken tower, and the house full of mirrors waited for the rest of the day to catch up with it.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 41. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

Longbourn, the 26th of November

Darcy and I were married this morning, an hour apart, to two sisters, in the same small church, by the same overworked parson, and I do not think I have ever in my life been so thoroughly managed by other people while every one of them assured me I was doing exactly as I pleased.

We waited together in the cold vestry beforehand, the two of us, while the bells argued overhead and Mr. Bennet's man went at a spot of candle-grease on my sleeve with the flat of a heated knife.

"You are very white, Charles," said Darcy.

"I am very happy. It comes out the same colour on me." I got my collar to sit. "How is it you are not just as pale?"

"I used up my pallour in a lane in October," he said. "I have none left over for church."

The service I will not give an account of, having attended very little of it. I was occupied in looking at Jane, who was the handsomest thing that county has produced or is ever likely to, and in getting a ring past a knuckle, which no one warns a man is the whole of the difficulty in getting married. Then it was done, and she was Mrs. Bingley, and I turned about and Darcy was standing up in my place with Elizabeth, and did the whole thing over again with a steadiness I envied and a colour I did not.

The breakfast was at Longbourn, and my new mother-in-law was in such a state of triumph that I had fears for her heart. She had married off two daughters in a single morning, one of them to ten thousand a year, and she went along the tables telling everybody who could not get away from her that she had known from the first how it would fall out.

"I said to Mr. Bennet the very first evening," she told me, her hand on my sleeve and her eye on the plate, "I said, that young man will do for one of my girls, you mark me. And was I ever wrong? And now Lizzy and her Mr. Darcy besides, and Lydia with her Colonel — four daughters married and only Kitty of them left on my hands. Some people have all the luck in the world and never once know how it came to them; but I am sure I shall not grudge Lizzy hers, though she was always the difficult one."

She knows nothing. I set that down as the strangest fact in a year of them, and I am the one soul seated close to her who feels the whole weight of it. She sits at the head of her board with her girls safe and has no notion anything was ever wrong, nor from what, nor by whom, nor at what price, nor to whom the whole of it is owed. Long may she never find out.

I got my first proper look at Mr. and Mrs. Darcy together while the cake was being murdered by a great-aunt with a blunt knife. His wife said something to him from behind her glove that I was not meant to catch. He laughed aloud at whatever it was. I do not know what she said. I begin to think that is the point of the thing. I never know what she said. I only know it undid in one morning a reserve I have spent ten years failing to dent.

My mother-in-law has already done the sums on the next generation, aloud, at table, to the pardonable horror of both brides, and has settled on a great many grandchildren and begun upon their names. I let her run at it. Somebody in a family ought to be looking that far down the road, and it will not be Darcy and it certainly will not be me. I could not tell you the first thing about the children who will come after us. I hope only that they are happy, and take their mothers' looks over their fathers', and think kindly, when they are old, of the two foolish men who married the Miss Bennets.

Everybody knows Mr. and Mrs. Darcy settled matters between them on a walk to Oakham Mount. Nobody knows one word of what passed there, Elizabeth being as close as a locked desk on the subject and Jane too delicate to ask. I am neither. I asked Darcy what he said on the walk. He looked at me the way he looks at a man who has missed the point of a thing. I record for posterity that I generally have.

Late in the day, when the last carriage had gone off down the drive and the two brides were upstairs conspiring over something that needed both of them, Darcy and I were left a moment in the emptying room.

"You are happy," I said. I had not meant it for a discovery. It arrived as one. I had walked at this man's side through a murder and a scandal and a year of grey mornings and never once been able to say those words and mean them.

He looked at me with a faint smile and a gleam in those keen eyes, and he said, "You have observed something at last, Bingley."

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 40. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

It took me four days to get Mr. Darcy alone, and I will say this for my mother: I had watched her clear rooms all my life and thought it a foolish art, and it turned out to be a heritable one.

We walked out on the fifth morning toward Oakham Mount, six of us, and I disposed of my forces. Jane and Mr. Bingley required no management; they fell behind of their own accord, at the pace of two people for whom arrival had stopped being the object of walking. Kitty I sent home from the second stile with a commission about my mother's shawl, invented on the spot and accepted without suspicion, Kitty being used to a world in which errands descend on the youngest present like weather. The hedges were red with hips, and a wind was working the stubble on the far slopes, and none of it cared what I was about, which steadied me.

That left the lane, and Mr. Darcy, and me. "Mr. Darcy," I said, "I am going to ask you a question, and I have decided to ask it badly, because I have found I ask my best questions badly. You will oblige me by not helping."

He stopped walking. "You have my word."

"Why have you said nothing?"

He did not pretend to misunderstand me. I will always honour him for that; a smaller man would have bought a minute with of what do you speak, Miss Bennet, and he stood in the lane and paid the question its full price on sight. He was quiet for the space of several steps we did not take. Then he said:

"You told me that you had less claim on me than Georgiana has."

I had not heard my own sentence since the morning I said it, and it sat differently in his voice — heavier, and worn at the edges, like a coin that has been carried about in a pocket and turned over daily.

"You said that to me in your father's breakfast room," he said, "in the middle of asking me for the largest thing anyone has ever asked me for. A woman stands in front of a man and argues him out of the deepest conviction he owns and in the very middle of prevailing, with the whole room hers, she stops to tell him that her claim on him is a lesser one. I did not take that for rhetoric. I took it for kindness. I believed you were telling me, in the gentlest form the morning allowed, that you did not choose to matter to me."

He paused, but I could not bring myself to speak just yet.

"And there was this besides: after Lydia, after the settlement, any word of mine came with a bill fastened to it. If I had spoken that week, or the week after, I could never have been certain what emotion moved your answer. Gratitude is a debt, and I would not court you with one in my hand. So I have been waiting for the debt to age, and to see if I had understood you rightly that day, when you spoke of your claim on me. And keeping, in the meantime, to the roads."

"And the weather."

"The weather," he agreed, "in my bolder moments."

There is a kind of misreading that insults a woman and a kind that honours her, and I had been handed the second kind and found it no lighter to carry. He had taken me at my word. That was the whole of his crime. He had heard me say less claim and had built around that sentence, with the thoroughness he brought to everything, a policy of doing nothing forever and he would have kept to it, I understood, for years if I had not spoken. The careful are not cured by waiting. They are only confirmed.

I had three answers ready. They were all of them clever, and all of them sideways, and mentally I threw them into the hedge. My heart was going like a hare with the hounds after it. It is a terrible thing, saying plainly what you want. I understood at last, standing in that lane, why the whole world talks of the weather when it once to talk of serious matters.

I forced myself to speak. "I love you. I have loved you since somewhere between a stile with burdock at it and a breakfast table in Gracechurch Street. I want every claim on you that you will give me. You asked me a question once, at Hunsford, and I answered it in ignorance. Ask it again. I am better informed now."

He looked at me for a long moment. Now that I had convinced him that the answer would be different this time, he asked a certain question again.

What he said I will not set down entire, even in a manuscript meant for no eyes but the family's; a woman is entitled to keep one page blank. I will record that it was longer than his question at Hunsford, and humbler, and that the words dearest, loveliest Elizabeth loomed large in it. When he was done I gave him a different answer from the one at Hunsford, and we stood in the lane while the wind went on with the stubble, two people out of arguments at last.

We caught up with Jane and Bingley at the turn, walking back. Jane, who shone at everything that autumn, shone at us and asked whether we had not found it a beautiful morning.

"Tolerable," I said.

"The roads," said Mr. Darcy, "have never been finer."

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 39. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

The rest of that business was settled in the following weeks, and I will give it as it reached me, in parcels. I did not burden Jane with the whole sordid story, because it would have shocked her to know that there was so much wickedness in the genteel world.

Anne de Bourgh left us on a Tuesday, in the Fitzwilliams' carriage, bound for London and a house where her company had been asked for rather than required. Lydia talked, I am told, the whole way to town; Anne said afterward in a letter that it was one of the things she had been looking forward to. She went wrapped to the chin as always. But she sat forward in the carriage, looking out, and that was new.

Mr. Wickham sailed for New South Wales the first week of October, a free man on the passenger list of a transport otherwise carrying men in irons — which was, when I came to think of it, as neat a portrait of his whole career as anybody could have drawn on purpose. Mr. Darcy had dealt with the matter through men whom he had done a good turn for at one time or another. No court ever heard the name of anyone I loved.

The colony, I have read, grants land to a settler in proportion to the capital he can show and the recommendations he carries; Mr. Wickham could show none, and the letters he carried were exactly warm enough to get him aboard and not one degree warmer. His passage was paid. Nothing beyond his passage was paid, or ever would be. He landed where nobody had heard his voice or lent him five pounds on the strength of his smile. The law entitled him to what he could earn, and to nothing else. He understood the whole arrangement at once, I imagine. He is free, on paper, to come home whenever he chooses. The confession Darcy keeps is also on paper.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh reached Italy before the first frosts. I set it down plainly, because I would not have anyone mistake the shape of it: this was not an escape. She had spent thirty years as the fixed point around which a county turned: the living in her gift, the parsonage in her management, the roads, the dinners, the marriages, the very glazing of the windows disposed according to her judgment. And she woke one morning in a hired house in a country whose language she did not speak, attended by servants who stayed for the wages, with nothing left in her gift and no one left in her charge, and thirty years of practice in an occupation that no longer existed. Rosings was leased out like Netherfield, to a man who treated the Collinses well. There are people for whom exile is a lighter sentence than a scaffold. I have never been sure Lady Catherine was one of them.

And in the second week of October the knocker went back on the door at Netherfield.

Mr. Bingley came down from town with Mr. Darcy two days behind him — the gentlemen had had business together in London, and whatever had passed between them there, Mr. Bingley arrived in Hertfordshire ready to be social. He was at Longbourn the first morning, and the second, and by the fourth my mother had taken to arranging the drawing-room by eleven o'clock as a general prepares a field. On the fifth morning both gentlemen came, and sat, and talked of nothing, until my mother, by a series of manoeuvres so transparent that I could not look at my father, had carried off Kitty to the stillroom, and sent Mary for a book, and discovered that she herself was wanted about the fish. She left Jane and Mr. Bingley at one end of the room with my father, Mr. Darcy and myself at the other, like two sets of chess pieces from different games.

Mr. Darcy and I spoke of the roads.

I want it understood what that sentence contains. We had sat across a breakfast table and shared out the fates of four people between us; I had argued him out of the Tower and he had let me. And on that fifth morning, in my mother's drawing-room, we spoke of the state of the roads between Hertfordshire and London, and agreed that they were tolerable for the season.

Then Mr. Bingley stood up, very red, and asked my father for five minutes in the library, and the whole room pretended it did not know why, except Jane, who looked into her lap and shone.

My father gave him considerably less than five minutes. They came back together, my father wearing the face he wore when he was very pleased and did not intend to show it. He crossed the room and kissed Jane on the forehead and added: "You are a good girl, Jane, and you are going to be an absurdly happy one. I have no fears for you at all; you are each of you so obliging that nothing will ever be decided between you, so easy that every servant in the place will cheat you, and so generous that you will exceed your income within the twelvemonth. It is everything I could have hoped."

After that the room rather went off like a flushed covey. My mother's joy was loud, and long, and I will not transcribe it. Kitty simpered. Mary offered the couple a pious observation, which was received by Mr. Bingley with a bow of perfect and impenetrable good will. Jane went from one of us to the next as though happiness were a thing she was anxious to divide fairly, having too much of it.

And Mr. Darcy — Mr. Darcy crossed the room and wished his friend joy, and I watched him do it. He looked at Bingley the way a man looks at a thing he helped to mend and has just seen hold weight. To Jane he said that Bingley was the best-tempered man of his acquaintance. It was said with so little irony that Jane, who hears the best in everything, heard it exactly right, and coloured with pleasure.

He was warm. That is the whole difficulty set down in one word. He was present, and glad, and warm, ten feet from me, in a room where his friend had just asked for what he wanted and got it inside of five minutes; and he said nothing, and asked for nothing, and spoke to me once more before the gentlemen rode home, and it was about the weather.

I was happy that evening. I want that understood too, because I have read accounts of such evenings in novels, where the overlooked sister sits in a corner being brave, and I was nothing of the kind. It was the first entirely good thing to happen in that house in a year, and I laughed at my mother's raptures and drank my share of the wine my father sent up, and when Jane came to my room that night and was happy at me until the candle guttered, I was happy back, and both of us meant every word of it.

But a heart, I discovered that autumn, can do two things at once and be sincere in both. When Jane had gone to bed I sat on at the window with the candle out. I was not being brave in a corner. I was puzzling over a man who had offered me his heart and hand when he thought my mother was a murderess, and rode ventre a terre to Longbourn when he realized that his aunt was a murderess and had come to pay a call on us. A man who had kept that murderess and her confederate from trial when I asked for it, and then came to call on us and talked of nothing but the weather and the roads.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 38. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 5th of October

Darcy carried me off to his club after dinner. It was a grave place in St James's where the carpet takes your footstep whole and no one has laughed aloud in a generation. He had a bottle brought that wanted an hour to breathe, and then did not pour himself a drop of it. I put my boots to the fire and waited. When Darcy takes that long coming at a thing, the thing is worth a man's patience.

"I did you a wrong last autumn," he said, to the coals. "I have carried it about since, and I find I cannot carry it down into Hertfordshire with me. So you shall have it here, where you may throw the bottle at my head if you like, and nobody we know will be by to see."

"What wrong?" I said, though I had a guess. A man does not need to be clever to know which of his own hurts a friend means, when there has only ever been the one that signified.

"I parted you from Miss Bennet. Last November. It was not chance, and your sisters were only the surface of it, though I let them do the visible part. It was me."

"I know it was you." I had known it since a dinner-table at Pemberley, though I did not say so; a man lets a friend make his confession without telling him the half of it is stale. "You told me she did not care for me."

"Twice. I remember every word of both times, which is a penance of its own." He turned the stem of the untouched glass. "I believed it, and I was wrong, and I have watched with my own eyes this summer how wrong. But that was never why I took you off. The indifference was the excuse I gave you. The reason I kept to myself."

"Then in God's name what was your reason?"

"You remember I never believed the footpads."

I did remember. It came back to me whole: the last night at Netherfield, the boxes in the hall, Darcy at the window telling me a dead woman's purse had come home in her pocket. "You said nothing had been taken from her," I said. "You called it the curious circumstance. I have never forgotten it, though I never once knew what to do with it."

"Neither did I, for the longest while. But I could not let it alone, and I looked, the way I look at things, for who was the better off for Charlotte Lucas being dead. And for the better part of a year, Charles, every road I walked down came out at the door of your Miss Bennet's own family." He said it evenly, the way a man reads out a sum he has checked too many times to doubt. "I thought her mother might have had a hand in it. I could prove nothing. I could say nothing. There is no crueller thing on this earth than to lay the word murder at a mother in a houseful of daughters on a suspicion you cannot carry to a magistrate. But I believed it enough that I would not stand and watch you marry into it. So I brought you to London, and told you the girl was cold, and let you go on thinking me the proudest snob in England, because a snob is an easier friend to keep than a man who suspects your intended's mother of killing her neighbour to advance her daughter's cause."

I thought on that for a time. The fire did the talking for both of us.

"And you were wrong," I said at last.

"Root and branch. Wrong about Jane's heart, and wrong about her mother, and wrong about the whole shape of it. No Bennet harmed Charlotte Lucas." He set the glass down. "There was a name put to me, a person I would have sworn on my father's grave could not have done such a thing. That name was wrong, but it pointed towards another. I have learned this year that when you have crossed off everything that cannot be, what is left is the truth. What was left was my own aunt."

"Lady Catherine." I do not know how I got the name out. It arrived on its own.

"Lady Catherine. Wickham was the hand; she was the purse and the will behind it. How it was done, and how it was hidden, and how at the last it was found — that I will keep, Charles, even from you. Some of it is not mine to give away, and none of it does any living soul the least good now." He looked at me then, straight. "Wickham sails for New South Wales inside the week, a free man aboard a ship of convicts, which is as near to justice as this business will ever come. My aunt is gone into Italy. Neither of them will ever trouble any of you again. That is the whole of it, in the only shape I am able to hand you."

I had forgiven him somewhere in the middle of it, and I told him so, because a man ought not to be left hanging over a fire for his sins any longer than the telling takes.

"You great, grim, solitary fool," I said. "You carried a murder about in your chest for a year sooner than lay an unproved word on a pack of women who had done you no harm. You took the whole world's low opinion of yourself as the price of it, and never sent up so much as a flare. And you sit there braced for the bottle at your head." I found I could not quite manage the light thing I had meant to say. "I forgave you the Jane of it in August, the day I walked into a room and saw her colour before she could help it. This other — I am only sorry, Darcy. Sorry you did not give me the carrying of even the corner of it."

"You'd have made a poor conspirator," he said. "You have a face like a lit window."

"I have. Jane says so too." And we were, for a moment, only two men by a fire again, and I would not trade that moment for a great deal.

"Go down to her," he said. "Open the house. She has grieved the best part of a year on my account, and I should like one thing in the whole of this filthy twelvemonth to come out the way it ought."

And there it was; the thing I have been turning over ever since, and cannot make lie flat. He had spent the evening setting my life to rights, and had said not one word for his own.

"And you?" I said. "You have handed me back my Jane, and put your own aunt out of the kingdom, and paid for God alone knows what besides with your own purse and your own name. When does a thing come round the right way for you, Darcy?"

"I have had the arranging of your happiness. That will serve me very well."

"That is not what I asked, and you know to a hair it is not. There is a lady in Hertfordshire—"

"There is a bottle," he said, "which neither of us has yet had the civility to drink. Pour it out, Charles. We have talked sufficient of me to last me the year."

And he would not be moved off it, and I did not try him twice; I have learned that much about the doors he wants shut. But I know what I know. At Pemberley I had grasped something of what Elizabeth Bennet was to him. Tonight at his club, I sat there while he built my whole happiness back up brick by brick with his bare hands and would not lift one finger toward his own.

I go down on Thursday to take the covers off the chairs. He follows on the Saturday, on business he did not trouble to give a name. I carry two things out of that club that I did not carry in. Firstly: the whole ugly weight of what he saved us all from, which I will not tell Jane though I lie at her side fifty years. Secondly: the sight of a man setting every life about him straight and walking home to his own crooked one alone. I have never in my life wanted so badly to be the clever one of us, and never less known how.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 37. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

We could hear the horse being walked away, and boots in the hall, and Hill's voice; and in that little space my father folded his newspaper and spoke, to neither of us, in the voice he used for reading aloud out of books he did not like.

"I have not been inside the Meryton assembly rooms in five-and-twenty years. It has been my favorite joke, that nothing said in company could possibly concern me. The woman who attacked Mary stayed in this county half a winter, ten minutes' ride from my library, and I never once laid eyes on her." He put the paper by his plate. "I'm afraid my favorite joke has rather curdled."

There was no answer to make, so I made none; and by the time Mr. Darcy was in the doorway my father's face was his own again.

Mr. Darcy still wore a coat, covered in dust to the shoulders. He said, "Where is my aunt?" before he had properly bowed, and then heard himself, and bowed.

"Good morning, Mr. Darcy," said my father. "You are a day behind her."

Darcy took this the way a man takes a stair that is not there. Then his eye went past me to the table, and found his cousin sitting at it with a teacup, and stopped.

"Anne."

"Cousin," said Anne, and did not explain herself.

Mother and Kitty were not yet down, and Mary took breakfast in her room, under Jane's watchful eye. Accompanied by a running commentary from my father, Anne and I gave Darcy the story of his aunt's visit. The walk, the wilderness, what his aunt had said and what she had not troubled to deny, and what Anne had said with her mother standing by. He heard it standing, with his hand on the back of the chair my father had pushed toward him, and he did not once interrupt, and when it was done he looked at me for a long moment.

"You had no confession," he said. "No testimony. Nothing."

"I had her face," I said. "And a year's practice reading the wrong one."

He was quiet. Then: "I was at Rosings last night. Her steward told me where she had gone. We must have crossed on the roads. I came up by St Albans. I had meant…" He stopped and set the sentence down and took up a plainer one. "I threatened Mr. Wickham again with the magistrate, the day before yesterday. Miss Elizabeth had suspected…another member of my family…"

"It's all right," Anne said. "She confessed those suspicions to me already. It was quite understandable, given the information Miss Elizabeth had to work with." She produced the ghost of a smile. "I found her opinion of my competence almost flattering."

Darcy nodded gravely. "In any case, that led me to suspect a different member of my family. I did not mention my suspicions to Wickham, but what he told me confirmed them. He has sworn the whole of it: that he heard Miss Lucas name the road and the hour at your aunt's party; that he carried the intelligence to a woman he knew, inspite of her disguise, to be Lady Catherine de Bourgh; and that she paid him. The sum, the dates, everything. It is signed. I rode to Rosings with a copy of it in my coat."

"You went to confront her," said my father.

"I went to tell her what the law was about to do, to her face, before it did it. She was owed that much." He said it without heat.

He turned to me. "And I will tell you now what the law is about to do, because it must be set moving from this room, this morning. Wickham goes to the assizes — he has hanged himself twice over with his own mouth, and I will not lift a finger off the scale. My aunt goes to Westminster, if her father's blood entitles her to the Lords, and to the common dock of the King's Bench if it does not. I have kept one crime of that man's dark for two years because the light would have fallen on the wrong head, and I have watched what the darkness bought — a woman dead on a road, your sister struck down in a lane, your youngest sister carried out of Brighton at night. Every hour we sit here my aunt is nearer the water. An express to Dover; another to the Kentish bench; my name will carry both. I have waited a long time to have the law in my hand instead of against it, Miss Bennet. I mean to use it."

Nobody in the room doubted that he could. That was the weight of it: it was all there for the taking — the confession signed, the witnesses living, the lever finally on the right side of the stone — and every word of it was just.

"And who pays for it?" I said.

He looked at me.

"I am not going to tell you she deserves less than the Tower. I sat across from her at dinner half a spring. Charlotte was my friend, on an errand to me, on my father's own road. There have been mornings this year when I would have built the scaffold with my own hands." I had not planned any of this beyond the first sentence; I could hear my own voice finding the argument a half-step before I did. "Try Lady Catherine, and Anne stands in every print-shop window in England — the woman whose mother killed to arrange her marriage. She did not choose one act of it. It was all done in her name and around her and without her consent. A trial does not punish her mother without sentencing her too, and she is the one person in this whole business who gets no verdict of her own."

Anne spoke then. "Let my mother go where she can arrange nothing for anybody. Send her money if the estate demands it; send her no letters; let her grow old bullying the people of Italy, where nobody is obliged to obey her. I have been furniture for most of my life, cousin. If you bring her to trial I will be evidence for the rest of my life. The prospect does not appeal to me."

I spoke up then. "And try Wickham in open court, and you give him the one thing he loves most besides himself: an audience. There is a young lady whose history he would lay before the bench the moment it bought him a day's delay. Mr. Darcy knows the lady I mean, and knows what the papers would do with her, and I will say no more in this room."

Darcy's hand tightened on the chair-back.

"And the last of it is Mary. Mary is alive. I have had most of a year to learn the whole worth of that sentence. Charlotte is dead, and Westminster cannot reach her, and God knows the Tower cannot; but Mary is alive, and a trial makes her its second exhibit — the attacked Mrs. Collins, pointed out at every assembly she attends for the rest of her life. Mary is alive. I would not have her suffer for the rest of her life for the sake of those two."

"It is not justice," said Darcy.

"No, it is not justice, but you go to the same Church I do, and you know that true justice is not promised us this side of the grave."

He turned to the window, and the room let him stand there. Hill came in and took away the plates, because houses go on.

"You have spent two years keeping one girl's history out of the light," I said. "I am asking you for the same office. I have less claim on you than she has, and I am asking anyway. "

Darcy stood at the window a while longer. When he turned around he looked first at Anne, then at me, and I could see him make his decision. He sat down.

"Wickham does not go to trial," he said. "He goes to Australia as a free settler, and the confession stays filed where I can reach it; if he sets foot in England again in this life, it is produced, and he hangs on his own signature. He will keep the bargain. He has always been quickest to understand arrangements that are about himself." He drew a breath. "And my aunt keeps her head start. No express, no Bow Street, nobody behind her on the Dover road. She may have Calais, and Italy after it, and the rest of her life to be obeyed grudgingly and insolently by people who are not paid well enough to serve her politely. Anne, Rosings will be looked after. You shall have my solicitor, if you want him." He looked around the table, at my father last. "There it is, said aloud. Transportation for the one. Italy for the other. If any man here can call it justice with a whole conscience, he is a better casuist than I am."

"It will do," said my father. "I have kept accounts long enough to know when a column will not balance. One writes carried forward at the foot of it, and rules the line." He rose. "You will want pen and ink, Mr. Darcy. The library is at your service — I find I have some letters of my own to finish as well."

The two men went out of the room together.

Anne poured herself another cup of tea, and her hand hardly shook at all.

The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 36. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Of the hour we spent with my father I will set down very little. He heard us through without once looking away from Anne, which I had never seen him do with any guest; he asked her two questions that had not occurred to me in a year of carrying the matter; and at the end of it he sat a while turning his spectacles in his hand, and then said, "Well," and got up, and was, from that hour, of use. "Your mother," he told me at the library door, "will be told that Miss de Bourgh is paying us a visit out of solicitude for your sister Mary. It has the advantage of being plausible, and no other virtue whatever."

The house took Anne in the way houses do, without opinions. Hill carried linen up to the spare room; Cook, informed there was a baronet's daughter at table, sent up to Meryton for fish; and Anne sat in our parlour with her hands quiet in her lap and drank her tea, and asked, in a voice that hardly shook at all, whether Longbourn kept a fire in the evenings, for she felt the cold. She looked as she had always looked. She held her cup as though someone might yet take it from her. I made no observations aloud.

My mother came back from Meryton at five o'clock with Kitty, the Colonel, and Lydia, and was in raptures before her bonnet was off. To have missed Lady Catherine de Bourgh's call was a calamity from which, she assured us all, she would not soon recover. To have gained Miss de Bourgh in exchange was a stroke of fortune she attributed, on no evidence, to her own management. The visit's cause she never thought to question. Great families were forever falling out; it was, she said, one of the burdens of rank; look at what she herself had suffered from her own daughters. Nobody corrected her arithmetic, and she went off to instruct Cook about the fish that had already been sent for.

The Colonel had stopped in the parlour doorway at the sight of his cousin. Anne looked back at him. He bowed, said he was glad to find her looking so well, and asked nothing. Lydia, to her credit or to the griffin's, was too full of Meryton's admiration to notice anything so quiet as Anne de Bourgh.

It was at dinner, watching Anne decline a second helping of soup under the full artillery of my mother's hospitality, that I noticed that my old suspicion of Mr. Collins was gone. For most of a year, it had sat in me like a stone in a shoe, never provable, never quite dischargeable. Now that I knew the truth, I could see him as the pompous, foolish clergyman he truly was, rather than the homicidal maniac I had feared.

The next morning I was at the breakfast table, reading a letter from my aunt Gardiner and getting no further than the date, when a horse came up the drive at a pace our drive was not accustomed to. There had not been time — I want that set down; I had counted the hours myself — there had not been time for any word of yesterday to reach London and bring anyone back again.

Hill got the whole name out this time, and had the pleasure of it.

"Mr. Darcy, ma'am."

I stood up before I had decided to.