Set in Stone, Chapter 21.

“The harpe,” Wickham continued, “is from Thessaly. Genuine article, or near enough—the provenance becomes murky past a certain point, but the metal has the correct properties. You will transform—I shall observe from a safe angle—and then I shall collect what I need. The process should take no more than a quarter of an hour.”

“And if I refuse?”

He smiled at her. It was a kind smile, almost regretful. “My dear Miss Bennet, you misunderstand. I am not asking you to transform. I am going to make you transform. There is a difference.”

He took a step toward her.

Elizabeth did not move.

“The Darcy girl,” Wickham said, conversationally, “was terrified at the end. I had not intended that—it was an unfortunate escalation. But fear does serve admirably as a catalyst, and I learned a great deal by observing her.” He took another step. “You are afraid now, I think. Or you will be in a moment.”

He was between her and the stairs. The parapet was at her back. The drop behind her was perhaps forty feet to the base of the tower, where the ground sloped away toward the village. The festival lights were visible through the gaps in the stonework: small and golden and distant.

She was not afraid.

She had walked up here believing Lydia was in danger. She had left the house without telling anyone because she had believed a man who pointed mobs at frightened women had taken her sister and she had believed him.

Wickham lunged.

It was clumsily done. He kept his face averted, his gaze fixed somewhere past her left shoulder, and the movement had the uncoordinated quality of a man trying to startle a horse. He raised the harpe as he came, not to strike but to threaten, and made a sound low in his throat that might have been meant to be menacing.

Elizabeth felt something she had felt before, distantly, in dreams she could not hold: a sensation like a door opening inside her chest. But this time she did not slip sideways out of herself. This time she was entirely present as the night air turned sharp and cold against her skin and the stones beneath her feet seemed to hum with a frequency she could feel in her teeth.

She lunged forward.

Wickham made a startled sound. She saw his eyes widen as he jerked the harpe up between them, no longer threatening but defensive, a panicked flinch…and then she felt the edge of it graze her mouth, a thin bright line of pain across her lower lip, and she shoved him.

He went backward off the parapet without a sound.

She was aware, in some part of herself that was still thinking in words, that she was changing as he fell, that the shove and the transformation were happening in the same moment, that she had pushed him and then become the thing he had prepared for, in that order. The fury came first. What followed was simply what she was.

She heard him hit the ground.

The sound was wrong. Not the wet heavy impact of a body but something harder: a sharp crack, and then a series of smaller sounds like pottery shattering, and then nothing.

The festival music continued below, unconcerned.

Elizabeth stood at the edge of the parapet, breathing hard. She tasted the metallic tang of blood in her mouth. The night air moved across her face and shoulders and she understood, with a clarity that was both distant and immediate, that her hair was not her hair anymore, that its strands moved and twisted with their own desires.

She did not turn her head.

Below her, at the base of the tower, there were small pale shapes scattered across the ground that had been a man a moment ago.

Footsteps on the stairs, quick and uneven. Someone was taking the broken steps faster than was safe in the dark.

She turned.

Darcy straightened at the top of the stairwell, breathing hard, and looked directly at her.

His expression went through something—recognition, then comprehension, then a kind of resigned understanding that looked almost like relief—and then his face went still and his eyes went blank and he became, between one heartbeat and the next, a man-shaped piece of stone standing on the top step with one hand still braced against the tower wall.

The transformation was retreating. She felt it leaving her the way warmth leaves a room when a fire goes out: not all at once but in stages, the night air turning ordinary again, the hum in the stones fading to nothing. Her hair was her hair. Her face was her face.

Darcy remained as he was: stone, silent, his hand still braced against the wall, his eyes still fixed on the space where she had been a moment before.

Elizabeth wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It came away red.

She looked at Darcy—at the stone version of him, standing on the top step—and then at the tower around her and the village below and the small scattered pieces at the base that would not be walking away, and understood with perfect clarity what she would have to do next.

She crossed the space between them. The stone was cool under her hands when she touched his face. Limestone, she thought distantly. Or marble. Something pale. He had come up the stairs fast enough to catch the last edge of her transformation and it had cost him everything and he had done it anyway, and now he was standing here not-breathing while the festival continued below and Lydia was somewhere eating sausages and Wickham was in pieces and none of it was fixable by wanting it fixed.

She looked at the blood on her hand.

Then she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his.

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.

Set in Stone, Chapter 19.

The preparation took the better part of an hour. Darcy moved through it in the methodical manner of a man who had thought through each step in advance and was now simply executing a sequence he had already committed to memory. The mirror arrangement from the camera apparatus, repositioned. The compound measured out in careful graduated amounts, each flask labeled in his small precise hand. The syringe for collecting her blood, on his desk close at hand.

She watched him work. Found it steadying, somehow, to see him move through the familiar motions of his profession. He was not looking at her except in brief assessing glances, the way he might check on any patient before a procedure. She thought he was giving her time to change her mind. She had no intention of doing so.

“Ready?” he asked finally, straightening from the last flask.

She nodded.

He gestured her toward the chair he had positioned in the sightline of the largest mirror. She sat. The room looked wrong in reflection: reversed and slightly distorted. She could see Darcy standing to one side, his face angled away from her direct line of sight. He would be able to watch her transformation in the glass without meeting her eyes. In theory.

“The triggers you remember,” he said, not quite a question.

“Nightmares,” she said. “The sleepwalking episodes.”

“You were not conscious during those.”

She made herself think about it. The organ music running into silence. Waking—coming to—and finding her sister stone. The corridor with her father. I want Mother, take me to Mother. The locked room.

“For Mary, I don’t remember transforming,” she said. “Only the aftermath. For Kitty, well, she said something that made it clear Wickham had been using her to spy on me. I wasn’t angry with her. I was angry with him.”

He nodded, as though this confirmed something he had already suspected. “Anger. Fear,” he said. “Extreme distress. Pain, possibly, though we have not observed that directly. The common element appears to be a loss of conscious control.”

“Which I am meant to produce deliberately.”

“Yes.” He was still not looking at her directly. “I am aware of the difficulty.”

She found, on examination, that she did not know how to begin. One could not simply decide to have a nightmare. One could not manufacture terror on command. She thought about Mary, about the moment of recognition when she had understood what she was looking at. She thought about Kitty. She thought about Wickham, tried to recapture what she had felt when she realized he was spying on her.

Nothing happened.

She tried to push further into the memory, to find the fear underneath it, the horror of understanding what she was capable of. But memory was memory. It had already happened. The sharp edge of it had dulled into something she could hold and remember without being cut by it.

“Anything?” Darcy asked, his voice carefully neutral.

“No.”

She closed her eyes. Tried to reconstruct the nightmare from the first night: something reflected in a pool, then met face to face. Her grandmother’s face, she understood now. A child looking at something she should not have been able to survive looking at. But it was a memory of a dream of a memory, twice removed from the event itself, and it sat in her mind like a story she had been told rather than something she had experienced.

She opened her eyes again. Darcy was watching her in the mirror, his expression unreadable.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Try again.”

She tried fear more generally. Tried to imagine Darcy petrified, or her father, or Jane…but imagination was not experience. The idea of loss produced a dull distant ache, not the fierce torrent of emotions she needed for this.

Five minutes passed. Then ten. She could feel the frustration building. It was not the overwhelming distress that might trigger the transformation, just the ordinary exasperation of attempting a task and finding oneself unequal to it.

“Elizabeth,” Darcy said finally. “Stop.”

She opened her eyes. She had not realized she had closed them again.

“It isn’t working,” she said.

“No.”

He moved into her peripheral vision, still carefully not meeting her gaze directly, and began dismantling the mirror arrangement with the same methodical precision he had used to assemble it. She watched him. Tried to determine whether he was angry, or disappointed, or simply moving on to the next problem. His face told her nothing.

“The episodes are involuntary,” he said, half to himself. “The loss of conscious control may be intrinsic to the mechanism rather than incidental to it.”

She understood him. “You mean I cannot transform deliberately because the transformation itself requires that I not be deliberate.”

“Something like that.” He stoppered the prepared flasks, already thinking ahead to storage. “The triggers are extreme states. Nightmare fear. Acute distress. One cannot manufacture extremity. By definition, if you are attempting to produce it, you are sufficiently in control that you will not produce it.”

It made a certain terrible sense. She had been trying to frighten herself into transforming, and the attempt itself had been the thing preventing it from working. One could not force panic any more than one could force sleep. The harder one tried, the more elusive it became.

“Then the blood—” she started.

“Cannot be collected on demand,” he finished. “Not safely. Not without risking an uncontrolled episode, which rather defeats the purpose.”

She sat with that for a moment. They had come so close. He had explained the mechanism, shown her the path to a cure, and now it turned out the cure required something she could not give him deliberately. The blood might heal, might cure, might restore everyone she had petrified, but only if harvested during an actual episode, which meant waiting for circumstances to provide what intention could not.

“This is not your fault,” Darcy said quietly.

She looked up at him. He was watching her now, directly, and she thought the cost of meeting her eyes had become enough of a constant background tax that he had learned to pay it without flinching.

“I know,” she said. And then, because it was true: “I thought I could do it.”

“So did I.” He moved the flasks to the high shelf, out of casual reach. “The hypothesis remains sound. The method requires revision.”

“Revision into what?”

“I don’t know yet.” He turned back to her, and there was something in his expression she could not quite read. “But you were willing to try. That is—” He stopped. Started again. “That is not a small thing.”

She thought about the brown bottle in the dispensary, and the solution she had been working toward before he had found her. She thought about the difference between trying to stop being dangerous and trying to become capable of being useful. The distance between those two things was considerable, and she had crossed it somewhere in the last hour without quite noticing the moment of transition.

“We will find another way,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment longer. Then nodded, once, and went to lock the study door behind them.

Set in Stone, Chapter 18.

The study was considerably smaller than it had appeared when she had been in it uninvited. The casebook was open on the desk between them, but he was not looking at it. He was looking at her, in the cautious way he had adopted since he had found her in the dispensary holding a full glass of rutinum compositum with the careful attention of someone solving a problem.

“The classical sources,” Darcy said now, “describe the blood of Medusa as having two distinct properties, depending on which side of the body it is taken from. The left side kills. The right side heals, or gives life. Medusa’s blood spilling upon the sea at her death is supposed to have spawned the Pegasus.”

Elizabeth waited. He was choosing his words with the care of a man who had been thinking about this for some time and had not yet determined the correct order in which to present them.

“It is not,” he continued, “a property I have been able to confirm in any useful sense. Georgiana—” He stopped. Adjusted the corner of the casebook with one finger. “I did not take blood from Georgiana. By the time it might have been possible to do so safely, it was no longer necessary.”

By which he meant: by the time Georgiana was dead. Elizabeth did not say so. She thought he probably knew she understood him.

“But the accounts are consistent across sufficient sources that I am inclined to believe there is something in it. And if the healing property exists—if it has ever existed—then it follows that it might do rather more than close wounds.” He looked at her directly, briefly, then away again. “I think it might reverse petrification.”

Elizabeth found she had gone very still. “You think.”

“I have not tested it. I have no method of testing it without—” He gestured toward her, a truncated motion that might have been apology or simple statement of fact. “Without you.”

“And if it does reverse petrification,” she said carefully, “then what?”

“Then it is possible—” He hesitated over the word, which she thought was as close as he would come to admitting uncertainty. “It is possible that the same property, applied not to stone but to the condition itself, might cure it. The blood combined with the Rutinum compositum in the correct proportions. I believe the compound has been suppressing the manifestation without addressing the underlying mechanism. The blood might address the mechanism.”

She looked at him for a moment. He did not look away this time, though she thought it cost him something.

“You have a hypothesis,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Based on Ovid.”

“And Apollodorus. And the earlier fragments, insofar as they survive.” He said this without apparent irony. “The mechanisms described are surprisingly consistent, when you account for narrative embellishment.”

“My father will be delighted to hear you have been doing classical scholarship.”

“Your father,” Darcy said, with a faint edge of something that might have been amusement under other circumstances, “identified my compound as moly before I could bring myself to admit it. I am not inclined to dismiss his sources.”

She supposed that was fair. She found she was turning the thing over in her mind, studying it from several angles, the way one might study a tool to see whether it would serve. The blood heals. The blood might depetrify. The blood combined with the compound might cure. It was a series of conditional statements, each depending on the one before it, and none of them tested.

“But you need the blood,” she said.

“Yes.”

“From me.”

“Yes.”

“In—” She stopped. Found the edge of the desk with her hand and held it, briefly, while she finished the thought. “In the other form.”

He did not correct her terminology. He simply said, “Yes.”

She had known that, of course. Had understood it as soon as he said blood. One did not harvest blood from the mythical Medusa while she was drinking tea in a sitting room looking perfectly ordinary. One harvested it from the woman with snakes for hair whose gaze turned men to stone, and the difficulty inherent in that process was probably why he had not proposed it before now.

“And how,” she said, keeping her voice level, “do you propose to do that without being petrified?”

He had been waiting for the question. She could see it in the way he answered, too quickly, as though he had been holding the words ready.

“Mirrors,” he said. “The camera apparatus. I can observe you safely in reflection. If I can position the equipment correctly, I should be able to collect a sample without direct exposure.”

She looked at him. “You should be able to.”

“I believe I can.”

“You believe.”

“I have not tested it,” he said again, and this time there was something under the words that sounded almost like frustration. “I cannot test it. Not without—”

“Without me,” she finished. “Yes. I am aware.”

There was a silence. She found herself thinking about the brown bottle in the dispensary, the weight of it in her hand, the way the solution had presented itself with such clarity once she had understood the problem. The episodes would stop if she were not there to have them. It had been a simple piece of reasoning, and Darcy had interrupted it, and she had been angry with him for approximately four seconds before she realized he had been correct to do so.

This was the solution he had been carrying instead. This was what he had been working toward since Georgiana, or possibly before. The blood of Medusa, applied correctly. The compound refined to perform its intended function rather than simply suppressing the symptoms. A cure, not a cessation.

She realized, with a small shock of recognition, that she wanted it.

Not simply to stop being dangerous, though that would be enough. But to know what she was and to be able to hold it, to use it, to have participated in her own remedy rather than simply submitting to someone else’s management of her condition. She had been a patient long enough. She found she had no particular desire to continue in that role.

“If it works,” she said, “you could cure my sisters, if they…manifested.”

He blinked at her. She thought the issue had been in his mind but he had not been expecting her to raise it first.

“Possibly,” he said, after a moment. “If one of them is a carrier. There are—” He stopped himself. “Yes. Possibly.”

“Then we should do it.”

“Elizabeth—”

She looked at him directly. He held the gaze for three seconds, then looked away. She found she had learned to count the interval before he did that.

“You thought I was going to kill myself,” she said.

He went very still.

“I was not,” she continued, in the same level tone. “I was solving a problem. I was solving it badly, with incomplete information and the wrong tool, but I was solving it. You have just handed me a better tool and better information. If you think I am not going to use it, you have mistaken me.”

“The risk—”

“Is mine to take,” she said. “You have spent the last several minutes explaining that you need my blood and my cooperation. I am offering both. Unless you have changed your mind about the hypothesis.”

“I have not changed my mind.”

“Then we are in agreement.”

He looked at her again. She thought he was trying to determine whether she meant it, or whether she was still in the place he had found her an hour ago, holding the bottle with the careful attention of someone who had reasoned herself into a dangerous corner. She waited. Let him look.

“I think,” he said finally, “that you are considerably braver than is entirely convenient.”

She felt her mouth twitch. “I shall try to be more cowardly in future.”

“Please do not.”

It came out more quietly than she thought he had intended. He had found her with the rue compound. He had not asked her what she had been thinking. He had simply redirected her toward a different answer, and the fact that he had been carrying that answer ready suggested he had been thinking about it for some time. Possibly since Georgiana. Possibly since he had opened the casebook and written Medusin at the top of the first page, then crossed it out later and written Rutinum compositum instead.

She found she wanted to ask him when he had changed the name, and why, and whether it had anything to do with the photographs he had just moved into the drawer. She found, on further reflection, that she knew the answer to at least one of those questions already, and that asking it aloud would require them both to acknowledge more than was strictly necessary at present.

“We will need to plan it carefully,” Darcy said, pulling the casebook toward him. His hands were steady. “The timing. The apparatus. I will need to prepare the compound in advance so that the blood can be integrated immediately. And you will need to—” He stopped.

“Transform,” she supplied.

“Yes.”

She thought about the tripwire photographs, the ones she had found in this room when she had come here uninvited. She had been a woman with snakes for hair making eye contact with the camera, and she had not been present for any of it, and the thought of doing it deliberately, with Darcy watching in a mirror in reach in case something went wrong, was considerably more alarming than she cared to admit.

But she had already decided. She had decided when he told her the blood might cure her, might cure Lydia, might restore her mother and Mary and Kitty to something other than stone. She had decided when he said he needed her cooperation, because cooperation meant she was not simply a patient anymore.

“Tell me what you need me to do,” she said.

He told her.

Set in Stone, Chapter 17.

“I will have her moved,” Darcy said. “I can send for the Bingleys, if you think you and your father would be comforted by their presence.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I would rather never see Jane again than expose her to this.”

“As you wish.”

“I should like,” she said, “to be alone for a time.”

Darcy hesitated. She could see him weighing whether this was a reasonable request or a request that should not be granted because the person making it could not be trusted alone.

“I will return shortly,” he said at last, and left.

Elizabeth waited until his footsteps had receded down the hall before she moved. She did not look at Kitty again. She went to the small writing-desk by the window and opened the lower drawer. The Rutinum compositum was kept there. Darcy had said she should take it with meals, but that if she felt an episode approaching she should take an additional measure immediately, and that the supply in the morning room was for that purpose. He had also said, on a separate occasion, that rue in excess was dangerous. He had not specified the dosage at which it became dangerous, but he had said the margin was not wide.

She took the bottle from the drawer and set it on the desk. The glass was brown, which she understood was to protect the contents from light. The label was in Darcy’s hand: Rutinum compositum — morgens und abends, mit Essen. She had been taking it twice daily for three weeks. It had not prevented what had just happened to Kitty.

She uncorked the bottle. The smell was bitter and faintly astringent. She had grown accustomed to it at the prescribed dose. It occurred to her that a larger dose would taste worse, and that this was an oddly trivial concern given what she was proposing, and that she was proposing it because the alternative was to wait for Darcy to derive a solution she was not convinced existed. He had not cured Georgiana. He had been trying for some time — she did not know how long, but the casebook had been thick — and Georgiana had ended badly. She did not wish to end badly. She wished to end, which was not quite the same thing but was near enough for present purposes.

The problem was that the episodes were becoming more frequent, that the Rutinum compositum was not preventing them, and that three members of her family were now stone. The solution was to ensure there would be no further episodes. Darcy had not proposed a method for ensuring this. She was proposing one.

She poured a measure into the small glass that sat beside the bottle. Then a second measure. The glass was now half-full. She considered this and added a third measure. The liquid was dark and viscous. She could see particulate matter suspended in it, which she supposed was the plant material insufficiently strained. It looked medicinal, which she found grimly appropriate.

She raised the glass. Her hand was steady. She noted this without satisfaction. It seemed important that if she were going to do this she should do it deliberately. She was solving a problem. The fact that the solution was also herself was regrettable but not, she judged, avoidable.

The door opened.

She did not turn. She heard Darcy’s footsteps cross the room at speed, and then his hand was on her wrist: not pulling, simply a point of contact that communicated interruption more effectively than a word would have. She set the glass down. She still did not turn.

“How much have you taken?” His voice was quiet and very controlled.

“None yet.”

His hand left her wrist. She heard him exhale, a small sound that might have been relief or simply released tension. She turned. He was standing close enough that she had to look up slightly to meet his eyes, which she did for approximately one second before looking away. She no longer trusted direct eye contact. She did not think her eyes would harm him. He had resisted her compulsions before, and she did not think she was angry enough to turn him to stone. But it was a risk she was not willing to take.

“That is three times the therapeutic dose,” Darcy said. He was looking at the glass. “Possibly four, depending on how carefully you poured.”

“Yes.”

“It probably would not have killed you immediately.” His tone was clinical, which she found steadier than sympathy would have been. “It would make you extremely ill. Possibly it would stop your heart, though that is not the primary effect of rue toxicity. More likely it would cause vomiting, convulsions, and eventual liver failure, which would take longer and be considerably less pleasant.”

“But it would stop the episodes.”

“It would stop everything. That is not a solution.”

“It is a solution,” Elizabeth said. “It is simply not one you find acceptable.”

There was a pause. Darcy moved to the window and stood with his back to her, looking out at the garden. She could see his shoulders rise and fall, the careful regulation of breath that suggested he was choosing his words.

“I have another solution,” he said finally. “It requires your cooperation, not your self-destruction.”

Elizabeth said nothing. She found she was very tired, and that the prospect of cooperation was less appealing than the prospect of simply making the problem stop by whatever means were available. She did not say this. She said: “You have been working on this since Georgiana. You did not manage to cure her then.”

“No.” His voice was flat. “I did not have the catalyst. I believe I know what it is now.”

Elizabeth looked at him. His posture was very straight, the stance of a man holding himself together through will rather than circumstance.

“What is it?” she asked.

Darcy turned. He looked at her directly, which he did not often do. His expression was difficult to read: something between exhaustion and resolve.

“Your blood,” he said. “The blood of Medusa. Combined correctly with the Rutinum compositum, I believe it will cure rather than suppress. I cannot do it without you. You must be willing.”

Elizabeth looked at the glass on the desk, then back at Darcy. The rue was still there. The alternative was also there, standing three feet from her and waiting for an answer she was not certain she wished to give.

“I will need to explain the theory,” Darcy said. “It will take some time. Will you come to the study?”

She should say yes. She understood that the only rational response was yes, that Darcy’s solution was both more likely to succeed and less likely to result in liver failure, and that she had been attempting something reckless without fully examining what reckless entailed. She also understood that she was angry: not at Darcy specifically, but at the situation generally, at Kitty in stone by the door, at the rue that did not work, at herself for being the problem that required solving. The anger was not useful. She set it aside.

“Yes,” she said.

Darcy poured the contents of the glass back into the bottle, and offered her his arm. She ignored it. “Lead the way,” she said.

Set in Stone, Chapter 16.

Kitty was explaining the household’s afternoon schedule to no one in particular when Elizabeth came upon her in the morning room. This had become something of a habit in recent days, a cheerful, aimless narration of who would be where and when, delivered to whichever sister happened to be present.

“Lydia’s gone to the village again, of course,” Kitty was saying, examining the stems in a vase of somewhat tired roses. “Mary was in the—well. And Papa takes his tea at four, which means the library will be occupied until at least five, and Dr. Darcy has that appointment in the village at half-past three, so he shan’t be back until—oh, Lizzy! I didn’t hear you.”

“The roses want fresh water,” Elizabeth said.

“Do they? I suppose they do look rather sad.” Kitty touched one of the drooping heads with the absent sympathy she extended to all wounded things. “Mr. Wickham was asking yesterday where everyone took their meals. I told him we’re quite informal here—not like at home, where Mama would have fits if anyone missed dinner. Though I suppose Mama isn’t—” She stopped. “That is. Well. He seemed very interested in the household rhythms. He’s painting something, you know. He says an artist must understand the patterns of a house to capture its character properly.”

Elizabeth felt something cold settle behind her ribs.

“What else did Mr. Wickham ask about?”

“Oh, nothing of consequence. Which rooms we use, which we don’t. Whether Dr. Darcy keeps regular hours. When the servants are about. He was very charming about it—said he didn’t wish to intrude on anyone’s privacy, but that an empty room has a different quality of light than an occupied one, and one must know which is which if one is to paint honestly.”

Kitty pulled one of the roses free and frowned at its bent stem. “He’s been quite kind, really. Yesterday he walked with me in the garden and we talked about—oh, all manner of things. He has a gift for making one feel attended to. Lydia says he’s a dreadful flirt, but I think that’s uncharitable. A man may be pleasant without being designing.”

“Kitty,” Elizabeth said carefully. “When you spoke to Mr. Wickham—did he ask anything about my movements specifically?”

“Yours? Well—he did ask when you took your medication. And whether you walked in the mornings or the evenings. But that was only because he hoped to sketch you again, I think. He said your face had very good bones.” She brightened. “That’s a compliment, isn’t it? It sounded rather clinical, but he meant it kindly.”

“I’m sure he did.” Elizabeth kept her voice level. “Where did you tell him I walk?”

“The south terrace, usually. In the mornings, before it gets too warm. Why?”

“No particular reason.” Elizabeth moved to the window. The south terrace was visible from the tower. It would be visible from several vantage points in the village as well, if one knew where to look. “Has he asked about anyone else?”

“Not particularly. Though—” Kitty hesitated. “He did seem interested in Mary. That is, he asked whether she played the organ at regular hours, or only when the mood took her. I told him she keeps quite a strict schedule—or did, before—” She stopped again, and the roses trembled in her hand.

“Before she was turned to stone,” Elizabeth said. “You may say it, Kitty. We are all living with the fact.”

“Yes.” Kitty set the rose down with a care that suggested she no longer trusted her grip on it. “Before that. He seemed to think it would make a striking painting—Mary at the organ, with the light coming through the high windows. He asked whether the organ room was kept locked.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“The truth—that no rooms are locked except the one upstairs that we’re not to speak of.” Kitty looked up, and there was something uncertain in her face, as if she had only just begun to hear her own words. “Lizzy, have I said something I oughtn’t? You’re looking at me rather strangely.”

Elizabeth felt the fury arrive with a clarity that was almost cold. He had used her. He had used Kitty—sweet, trusting Kitty, who thought a man might be pleasant without being designing—to map the household’s vulnerabilities as methodically as a general surveying a fortification. Every kindness, every charming inquiry, had been reconnaissance. She opened her mouth to answer, and found she could not account for what came next.

The light changed. Or perhaps she changed in the light. There was a sensation of discontinuity, of being present in the morning room and then of surfacing back into it from some place that left no impression on her memory beyond a quality of cold swiftness, as if she had been moving very fast through dark water. She was standing in precisely the place she had been standing. Kitty was exactly where Kitty had been, beside the table with the roses.

She was also no longer speaking. The stairs creaked overhead. Not the measured tread of a person walking, but the quick, light sound of someone descending in haste.

Darcy appeared in the doorway. He looked at Kitty, then at Elizabeth.

“Where is your father?”

“The library,” Elizabeth said. “Why?”

“Fetch him. Quickly.”

But Elizabeth could not tear her eyes away from Kitty. Kitty was standing—no, not standing. Kitty was stone. She stood in the center of the room with one hand extended, as if reaching for something or someone no longer there. Her expression was not exactly frightened, more puzzled, as if she had only just realized she was in the wrong place and had not yet determined how she had arrived there. The folds of her dress were frozen mid-movement. A small clutch of roses lay scattered at her feet, dropped in the instant before she stopped.

Set in Stone, Chapter 15.

The breakfast table had achieved something approaching normality. Lydia was complaining about the sausages. Kitty was not listening. Elizabeth was attending to her tea with what Darcy had learned to recognize as tactical absorption in a neutral task.

Mr. Bennet set down his coffee and said, with the air of a man who has been waiting for the proper moment and has decided this will do, “Dr. Darcy, I have been meaning to tell you that your Rutinum compositum is functionally the same as moly.”

Darcy looked up from his plate. “I beg your pardon?”

“Moly,” Mr. Bennet repeated, as though this clarified everything. “Hermes gave it to Odysseus before he went to see Circe. White flower, black root. Renders the recipient immune to transformation. I believe Homer describes it as ‘hard for mortal men to dig, but the gods can do all things.’“ He paused, and added with visible satisfaction, “You appear to have managed without divine assistance, which I suppose reflects well on modern horticulture.”

Darcy was aware, in the pause that followed, that Elizabeth had stopped pretending to attend to her tea.

“The primary component,” he said carefully, “is Ruta graveolens. Rue. Vervain and St. John’s Wort in the supporting—”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Bennet said, waving this away. “I have no doubt you have a very impressive scientific rationale. I am merely observing that the result is moly. Or at least serves the same purpose of suppressing a dangerous magic.”

“Circe wasn’t dangerous,” Lydia objected. “She was hospitable. She gave them all dinner.”

“And turned half of them into pigs,” Mr. Bennet said.

“Well, yes, but she turned them back afterward. Eventually. I don’t see what she did that was so terrible.”

Kitty, who had been following this exchange with the expression of someone watching a familiar play from the cheaper seats, said, “I think the point is that she shouldn’t have turned them into pigs to begin with.”

“Perhaps they deserved it,” Lydia said.

Elizabeth said, in a voice that Darcy could not quite identify, “I believe we are straying from Papa’s original observation.”

Darcy looked at her. She was looking at her father. Her expression was…amused, possibly, with something else underneath the amusement that he would prefer not to examine.

“My original observation,” Mr. Bennet said, “is that Dr. Darcy has gone to considerable trouble to develop a treatment rooted in empirical neurology and peer-reviewed research, and has arrived at precisely the same place as Homer. I find this both reassuring and faintly undignified.”

“Undignified,” Darcy repeated.

“For modern science, I mean. Not for you personally.” Mr. Bennet considered. “Although I suppose there is something leveling in the notion that the cutting edge of specialist medicine is still taking its cues from Bronze Age poetry.”

Darcy found that he had no immediate answer to this. The problem was that Mr. Bennet was not, strictly speaking, wrong. Rue had featured in the materia medica for disorders of the nerves since Dioscorides. Its use in cases exhibiting the particular symptomatology Elizabeth’s condition produced was documented in sources Darcy had considered pre-empirical and had consulted anyway, in the methodical desperation of a man who had tried everything else.

That the compound worked was observable fact. That he did not entirely understand why it worked was a private frustration he had not shared with anyone, least of all the patients to whom he administered it. Homer’s references to moly had flitted across his mind once or twice while developing the compound, but he had always put them firmly aside.

“Homer,” he said at last, “did not provide a dosage.”

“No,” Mr. Bennet agreed. “I don’t suppose he did. One assumes Hermes handled that part. Being a god and all.”

“The therapeutic dose and the toxic dose are uncomfortably proximate. The administration requires adjustment according to the patient’s presentation, the severity of prior episodes, and the degree of— ” He stopped. Elizabeth was still watching him. He was explaining himself, which he did not generally do at breakfast, to a man who had just reduced six years of careful experimental pharmacology to a question of whether one had read the right bits of the Odyssey. “The point,” he said, “is that the process is rather more exacting than ‘dig up the flower and hope for the best.’“

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Mr. Bennet said. “I’m not suggesting you’ve contributed nothing. Only that you might have saved yourself some time with a classical education.”

Kitty made a noise that might have been a suppressed laugh.

Lydia said, “Does this mean Elizabeth is Circe?”

“No,” Darcy and Elizabeth said simultaneously.

Lydia looked between them with interest. “But if the medicine is the same—”

“The mechanism is not the same,” Darcy said. “Circe’s transformations were volitional acts performed on other people. Elizabeth’s condition is involuntary and affects her own body…” He stopped again. This was not a conversation to be having over sausages. “The parallel is inexact.”

“But close enough to be Going On With,” Mr. Bennet said, in a tone that suggested he was quoting someone and expected to be recognized for it. “Which I think was rather my point.”

Elizabeth said, “Papa, are you suggesting that Dr. Darcy is Hermes?”

The question was directed at her father. Darcy found it necessary to look at his plate.

“Not at all,” Mr. Bennet said. “Hermes was a psychopomp and a cattle thief. Dr. Darcy is a medical researcher with a specialty in neurological conditions of obscure origin. The comparison would be inapt.” He paused, and added with the appearance of careful thought, “Although I suppose there is something to be said for the Hermetic role as an intermediary. Between worlds, as it were. Those who know and those who do not.”

Darcy was still looking at his plate. It had not become more interesting.

“And on that note,” Elizabeth said, “I believe I shall take a turn about the garden.”

She rose and left the room with what looked to Darcy like unnecessary speed. Kitty and Lydia began debating whether Odysseus had been right to tie himself to the mast, a conversation that showed no signs of requiring his participation.

Mr. Bennet caught his eye across the table and said, mildly, “You did know it was moly, I assume.”

“I did not think,” Darcy said, “that a mythological name would meaningfully contribute to the patient’s acceptance of the treatment.” This was after all why he no longer called the compound Medusin.

“Quite right,” Mr. Bennet said. “Much better to let her think you invented it yourself.” He returned to his coffee with the satisfied air of a man who had made his point and did not intend to belabor it.

Darcy finished his breakfast in silence and excused himself as soon as it was decent to do so.

He did not, at the time, recognize the conversation as significant. It was only later in the study, reviewing his notes on the case, contemplating the gap between suppression and cure, that he found himself thinking about moly again. Not the plant itself but what it had been for. Immunity to transformation. Protective, yes. But Circe had been the one to tell Odysseus how to break the spell on his men. The gods provided the defense; the witch provided the restoration.

The blood of Medusa. One side healed; the other killed.

He had been thinking of the compound as the solution. What if it was only half?

He did not pursue the thought that morning. There were other matters requiring his attention, and the notion wanted more research. But it stayed with him, filed in the part of his mind that collected problems not yet ready to be solved, and waited.

At dinner that evening, Lydia referred to him as Hermes. Kitty corrected this to “the god of travelers and also thieves, so really not a compliment,” and the matter devolved into a tedious debate about the Greek pantheon that Darcy did not attempt to adjudicate. Elizabeth, at the far end of the table, met his eyes for half a second and looked away. The corner of her mouth had done something he chose not to interpret.

Mr. Bennet, behind his wine, looked insufferably pleased with himself.

Set in Stone, Chapter 14.

She found him in the morning room, standing at the window with a cup of coffee he did not appear to be drinking. The house was not yet fully awake. She had dressed quickly and come downstairs with the night’s discoveries still sharp in her mind: the photographs, the casebook, the word Medusin in his early careful hand, and underneath all of it the tripwire images that had made belief unavoidable.

He turned when she entered. His expression suggested he had been expecting her, or something like her.

“Miss Bennet.”

“I was in your study last night,” she said. No preamble seemed possible. “I found the casebook. The photographs. Both kinds.”

He set the coffee down with great precision. “I see.”

“Georgiana,” Elizabeth said. “Tell me what happened to her.”

For a moment she thought he might refuse, but that moment passed almost as quickly as it came. He looked tired.

“She was nineteen,” he said finally. “The episodes had begun six months earlier. I was attempting to manage the condition with an earlier formulation of what you now take daily. It was less effective than I would have liked.”

“And Wickham?”

“Had previously introduced himself to her in Prague. Charming, solicitous, deeply interested in her watercolors.” His mouth thinned. “I was occupied with a patient in the city and could not return as quickly as I should have done. By the time I arrived she had left with him. They went into the woods beyond the village.”

Elizabeth waited. He looked at the window rather than at her.

“The transformation was triggered by panic. When I questioned him after the fact, he would not tell me what he said to her—what he did—but she was frightened. Wickham survived by seeing her reflection in a pool. Only her reflection.” He paused. “He escaped to the town and found that a local man had been turned to stone. The village was already searching for the creature that had done it. Wickham guided them to where she was.”

The words were carefully flat. Beneath them Elizabeth could hear what he was not saying: that he had been twenty minutes too late, that he had found the mob before he found his sister, that he could not bring himself to describe whatever remained of Georgiana afterward after the mob had finished with her.

“He told me,” Elizabeth said slowly, “that you had a patient. A woman wrongly diagnosed, wrongly handled, who died because you cared more for your research than her welfare.”

“He told you the truth in outline,” Darcy said. “I did care more for the research than was appropriate. I thought if I could document the mechanism thoroughly enough, I could reverse it. I was wrong.”

“You were her brother,” Elizabeth said. “Not only her physician.”

“I was both. I failed at both.”

She thought of the photographs—the human-form studies with their uncomfortable perceptiveness, the tripwire images with their terrible clarity—and the careful years of work they represented. “You have been attempting to solve the same problem since.”

“Yes.”

“With patients who are not your sister.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him. He looked back. It cost him something, she had learned to see that much, but he did not look away.

“The muttonchops,” she said, surprising herself. “When did you grow them?”

A pause. “After Georgiana.”

“They are not doing what you think they are doing.”

“So you have previously informed me.” The faintest edge of something that was not quite humor. “I have been told they lend an air of medical gravity.”

“They make you look like a man who is trying to appear older and more authoritative than he feels.” She said it more gently than she had intended. “I suspect they are succeeding at the first aim without managing the second.”

“You must allow me to be the final judge of that.”

She found she had moved closer to the window without meaning to. The village below was beginning its morning: smoke from breakfast fires, a cart on the road, the ordinary world proceeding in its ordinary way while they stood in a morning room discussing his dead sister and her own recent collision with the same condition.

“I thought you were keeping me in ignorance because you could,” Elizabeth said. “Because it was more convenient for your work to have a patient who did not ask difficult questions.”

“I was keeping you in ignorance because I did not know how to tell you,” he said. “Because the longer I delayed the more impossible it became to begin. Because I was afraid you would—” He stopped.

“Lose confidence in your competence?”

“I was afraid your emotions on learning the truth might transform you,” he said. “By daylight, when the entire household would be at risk. And if the villagers found out, you would suffer the same fate as my sister.”

“It occurs to me that if you were the man Wickham described, you would not have kept all those photographs of your sister’s case. You would have burned them when she died. But you kept them. Which meant either you were a monster of scientific detachment or you thought the same thing might happen to someone else and you wanted to prevent it.” She paused. “I decided the photographs of me suggested the former interpretation was unlikely.”

He had gone very still.

“Miss Bennet—”

“I do not require an apology,” Elizabeth said. “I require you to tell me what you are doing to cure this condition instead of merely suppressing it. And I require you to stop concealing things because you think I cannot bear to know them. I have seen what I become. I would prefer not to be kept in ignorance of what you think might be done about it.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded.

“The compound suppresses the episodes but does not cure the underlying condition,” he said. “I have been looking for a catalyst—something that would allow the formulation to address the hereditary mechanism rather than merely managing the symptoms. I have not yet found it.”

“But you think it exists.”

“I think it must exist. The classical sources suggest—” He stopped. “That is a longer conversation than we have time for before breakfast.”

“Then we will have it after breakfast,” Elizabeth said. “Provided you stop attempting to spare my feelings by withholding relevant information.”

“Certainly.” The word escaped him with a faint sigh of relief.

“Good.”

They stood there. The morning was lighter now: full sunrise somewhere behind the clouds, the village waking properly, the sound of someone moving in the hall outside. In a moment one of them would open the door and they would go into the dining room and sit down with her father and Lydia and Kitty, and they would have breakfast like civilized people while two of the family remained stone in locked rooms and Elizabeth carried the knowledge of what she had considered doing about it.

“The muttonchops are not as ineffective as you suggest,” Darcy said abruptly.

Elizabeth blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Several of my patients have remarked upon them approvingly. As lending the appropriate air of professional gravity.”

“Which patients?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss other cases.”

“How convenient for you.”

“I thought so,” he said. The corner of his mouth moved very slightly. Not quite a smile. Close enough that she recognized it as an offering.

She took it. “I will reserve further judgment on the muttonchops until I have seen you without them for purposes of comparison.”

“That seems unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.”

“We shall see,” Elizabeth said, and opened the door before he could answer.

The hall was empty. Breakfast was not yet laid. Somewhere upstairs Lydia was singing—badly—and someone else was attempting to convince her to stop. The ordinary morning sounds of a household that was not ordinary in any respect.

Darcy followed her into the hall. They did not speak again before they reached the dining room, but when her father looked up from his newspaper and took in both of them arriving together at this hour, his eyebrow climbed toward his hairline in a fashion that required no accompanying commentary.

Elizabeth sat down. Darcy sat down. Her father returned to his newspaper with an expression of profound classical resignation.

The coffee was very strong and Elizabeth was grateful for it.

Set in Stone, Chapter 13.

She could not sleep. The image of Mary at the organ, entirely still, looking up at nothing, had lodged behind her eyes with the unshakeable persistence of something seen rather than imagined. Stone. She had gone to her room and lain down and stared at the dark canopy for what might have been an hour before admitting that rest was not coming.

The house was quiet. It was also full of mirrors, and Elizabeth found herself marking each one as she passed, hallway, stair landing, the tall pier-glass at the corridor’s turn, as though their presence required accounting for. She had noticed them before. She had not previously felt watched by them.

Darcy’s study was on the ground floor, two doors past the morning room. She had seen him go in earlier that week. She was not looking for anything in particular. Or she was not admitting to herself that she was looking for anything in particular. She was awake, the house was still, and the study door was not locked.

The room smelled faintly of chemicals. Something sharp underneath the tobacco and leather she might have expected. A lamp burned low on the desk. The desk itself was tidy in the manner of a man who worked methodically: casebooks stacked by size, correspondence weighted under a smooth river stone, a pen laid parallel to the blotter’s edge.

The photographs were in a portfolio case propped against the bookshelf. They were of her.

Five plates, varying quality. Some technically compromised: too much light, or she had moved. Others clear. Clearer than she found comfortable. Her hands in her lap. Her expression somewhere between wary and amused. Her eyes looking directly toward the camera in a way that suggested the lens had captured more than she had offered it.

She was accustomed to carte-de-visite portraiture, the posed stillness, the formal dress, the carefully managed presentation. These were not that. These were the work of a man documenting something he thought to be important, or rather, felt to be important. She found his feelings unsettling in ways she preferred not to think about, and set the portfolio aside.

The casebook lay beneath it.

It was morocco-bound leather. The first dozen pages were patient intake forms in Darcy’s precise hand: names she did not recognize, complaints that ranged from the plausibly neurological to the improbably vague. She turned the pages without reading closely, looking for…something. She would know it when she found it.

Halfway through: a name she recognized.

Georgiana Darcy. Female, age 19. Manifestation at 18 years 7 months. Episode frequency increasing since initial presentation. Responsive to Medusin in early stages; compound efficacy declining under stress conditions. Patient exhibits—

Elizabeth stopped.

Medusin. The word sat on the page with the self-conscious grandiosity she associated with men who named their discoveries after themselves or, failing that, after classical precedent. She had found Rutinum compositum overwrought. This was worse. This was the sort of name given to a condition someone believed was mythologically significant, which suggested the condition was both genuine and genuinely strange.

She read the entry carefully. The clinical language was partially comprehensible. She recognized the framework Darcy had used when describing her own treatment, the vocabulary of hereditary transmission and suppressive compounds. What she could not parse was the specifics: what exactly Georgiana had manifested, what the episodes entailed, why mirrors were mentioned three times in the margin notes.

She could tell Georgiana had suffered from something like what she herself had been taking the rue compound to suppress. She could not tell how the case had ended. The entry simply stopped.

She closed the casebook. She did not set it down.

The chemical smell was stronger near the desk’s far corner. She traced it to a door she had taken for a closet: the darkroom, she realized, when she opened it far enough to see the red safelight and the drying lines. The photographs must have been developed here. Darcy standing in the dim red glow, watching her face emerge in the fixing bath, finding reason to return to certain images longer than clinical necessity required.

She closed the darkroom door.

There were more photographs. Smaller plates, stacked in a wooden box beside the casebook, each wrapped in black cloth. She unwrapped the first.

The image was blurred from movement. It showed a woman in a nightdress, standing in what appeared to be the music room. Her posture was wrong: too still, or still in the wrong way. Her hair was not hair.

Elizabeth set the plate down with care and unwrapped the second. The same woman. The same wrong stillness. Closer this time. The camera had captured her in profile, and the profile was inhuman in a manner Elizabeth’s mind attempted and failed to categorize as darkroom error or trick of the light.

The third photograph showed the woman’s face directly.

She was not a blur. She was a woman with snakes where her hair should have been and a gaze that the photograph somehow communicated as terrible even in stillness. Her face was set in a snarl like a beast at bay. Elizabeth looked at the image for longer than she intended. When she finally set it down, her hands were steady, which surprised her.

She unwrapped the fourth plate. This one was of herself.

The nightdress was hers. The posture was not. The hall was the one outside her room. The snakes were fewer than in the other woman’s photographs—Georgiana’s, she understood now—but unmistakably present. Her own face looked back at her from the plate with a snarl like Georgiana’s, but somehow less desperate, more arrogant, with the sense of fierce judgment she associated more with the Furies of Greek mythology than with the Gorgons.

She set the plate down beside the others. She wrapped each one carefully and returned them to the box. She stood in the study for some time, not thinking precisely, but allowing the information she had just encountered to settle into a shape she could hold.

The mirrors were not decorative. The rue compound was not a general nervous tonic. Darcy’s refusal to meet her eyes was not coldness. Mary was stone because Elizabeth was—had become—was capable of becoming—

She did not complete the thought. Completing it required vocabulary she did not possess and conclusions she was not prepared to articulate, even to herself. She went back to her room and lay down in the dark and did not sleep, but the not-sleeping was different now. It had a shape. It had a name, though the name was someone else’s mythology and she had not yet decided whether to accept it.

Medusin. Absurd. Grandiose. Accurate enough that she could not dismiss it.

She lay awake and watched the canopy and thought about mirrors and snakes and her sister turned to stone at the organ, and when the sky began to lighten she was still awake, still thinking, still holding the knowledge she had taken from the study without yet knowing what to do with it.