Set in Stone, Chapter 12.

She was somewhere she had not meant to be.

The knowledge came first, before the room itself resolved: that she had walked here without deciding to walk, that time had passed in some manner she could not account for. The air was cool against her face. Her feet were bare on stone flags. She was standing in the organ room, though she had no memory of leaving her bed.

The organ was playing. Mary’s hands on the keys, the melody something ecclesiastical and droning that Elizabeth did not recognize. The notes were uneven. One struck too hard, another missed entirely, the rhythm lurching. Mary did not appear to notice. She continued playing with the mechanical devotion she brought to all her practice, though the music itself was falling apart under her fingers.

Elizabeth meant to speak. The words did not come. She watched Mary’s hands stumble through another bar, the melody collapsing into something percussive and strange, and then stopping altogether.

Mary’s hands remained on the keys. She had gone entirely still.

Elizabeth took a step forward. The stone was cold beneath her feet. She could hear her own breathing, louder than it should have been in the silence the organ had left behind.

Mary had turned on the bench. Mid-gesture, one hand still resting on the keys, the other half-raised as though reaching for something, or pushing something away. Her face was tilted upward, eyes wide and fixed on a point somewhere above and behind where Elizabeth now stood.

Her expression was not peaceful. It was not anything. It was arrested entirely, caught in the instant before fear became legible as such.

Elizabeth stopped three paces from the bench.

Mary did not move. Did not blink. The hand on the keys remained precisely where it had fallen, fingers curved against the ivory, the smallest finger resting on middle C. Elizabeth could see the faint texture of her sister’s skin, the nail beds, the small scar across her knuckle from a kitchen accident years ago. She could see all of it with the peculiar clarity that comes when the mind is refusing to process what the eye reports.

She reached out. Touched Mary’s wrist.

Stone.

Not cold flesh. Not skin gone rigid in some fit or paralysis. Stone. Solid and cool and unyielding, with the faint roughness of unpolished marble under her fingertips.

She pulled her hand back.

The room was very quiet. No organ music. No sound of breathing save her own. The air smelled faintly of lamp oil and old wood and something else beneath it, mineral and sterile, that she could not name.

She was still standing there, her hand hovering in the air above Mary’s wrist, when her father’s voice came from the doorway behind her.

“Elizabeth.”

She turned. He was in his dressing gown, a lamp in one hand, his face drawn in a way that made him look older than she had ever seen him. He did not look at Mary. He looked at Elizabeth, and his gaze held hers for a moment before sliding away to fix on some point past her shoulder.

“You’ve had a nightmare,” he said. His voice was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that required construction. “You’ve been walking in your sleep again. Come away now.”

She looked back at Mary. Still motionless. Still stone.

“No,” Elizabeth said.

“Elizabeth—”

“She isn’t breathing.”

“You’ve had a fright. Come back to bed, and in the morning—”

“She is stone.” Her voice came out louder than she had intended. It rang against the walls and did not echo so much as stop, as though the room itself absorbed sound differently now. “Father, she is stone. Look at her.”

He did not look. He took a step into the room, the lamp casting long shadows across the floor, and held out his free hand to her. “Come away.”

She did not move.

“What happened?” The question came out flat. She was still looking at Mary. At the hand on the keys. At the face tilted upward, frozen mid-expression, the eyes fixed on nothing.

On where Elizabeth must have been standing.

The thought arrived with the cold precision of something inevitable. Mary had been looking up. Elizabeth was standing below that line of sight now, but she had been somewhere else when the music stopped. Somewhere Mary had seen.

Her father was speaking again: something about the evening air, about her health, about Dr. Darcy’s concern that she not overexert herself. She turned to face him.

“What happened to Mary?”

“I don’t know.” He said it too quickly. “A fit of some kind, perhaps. Dr. Darcy will know what to do. In the morning we’ll—”

“Tell me what happened.”

She was looking at him directly. She did not mean to press, or did not think she meant to, but something in her gaze must have sharpened because he flinched. A small movement, barely perceptible, but she saw it. Saw the way his hand tightened on the lamp handle. Saw the way his mouth opened as though to refuse, and then did not refuse.

“I don’t know,” he said again. The words came slower this time. Dragged out against some resistance she could feel without understanding. “I heard the music stop. I came to see. She was—” He gestured vaguely toward the bench without looking at it. “As you see her. I found you here a moment later.”

“And what do you think did this to her?”

“Elizabeth, you should not—”

“Tell me.”

The compulsion in her voice surprised her. She had not known she could produce that sound, level and hard and flat. Her father’s face went slack. Not blank, but emptied of the careful control he had been sustaining. He looked at her, and she saw the exact moment when he stopped trying to deflect.

“You.” His voice was very quiet. “I think you did this to her.”

The room seemed to contract. She was aware, distantly, that she was still standing too close to Mary, that her father had not moved from the doorway, that the lamp in his hand was shaking very slightly.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“No.” He looked away first, breaking whatever line of force had held him. “You never do.”

The knowledge settled over her with the weight of something she had been carrying without knowing. Sleepwalking. The episodes Darcy had been so careful not to name. The mirrors everywhere in this house, placed where someone walking at night might see a reflection before they saw a person.

The tripwire cameras he had mentioned obliquely and not explained.

She looked down at her hands. They appeared ordinary. Flesh and bone, the nails trimmed short, a small ink stain on her right middle finger from yesterday’s letter-writing. Nothing monstrous. Nothing that could turn a living woman into stone.

When she looked up again, her father was watching her with an expression she could not read.

“Did I do this?” Her voice came out steadier than she expected.

He took a long breath. Let it out. “Dr. Darcy will explain it better than I can.”

“I want you to explain it.”

“Elizabeth—”

She met his eyes again. Held them. “Tell me.”

This time the resistance was more visible. He was a strong-willed man, her father, and whatever force she was exerting cost him something to withstand. But he did not withstand it. His shoulders sagged very slightly, and he spoke.

“Your mother’s mother carried something in the blood. A condition. It passes through the female line, but it does not manifest in every generation. Your mother was spared. You were not.” He paused. Swallowed. “Dr. Darcy has been attempting to treat it. The sleepwalking is—when the treatment is insufficient, you become something else. You do not remember it afterward.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Your mother was the first.”

The words arrived at her understanding slowly, as though traveling through some thick medium. The absent mother. The locked room she had not been permitted to see. The careful explanations about Prague, about shopping, about any day now.

“Mary is the second,” she said.

He nodded.

Elizabeth looked at Mary. At the hand resting on middle C. At the face turned upward toward where Something must have stood.

“Come away now,” her father said. “Please.”

She let him lead her from the room. He did not touch her. He walked ahead with the lamp, and she followed, and neither of them looked back at Mary on the organ bench.

In the corridor he stopped. Set the lamp on a side table. Turned to face her with his hands loose at his sides and his face gray in the dim light.

“You compelled me,” he said quietly. “Just now. You made me tell you. That is the power of your gaze, when it isn’t…that.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” He almost smiled. It did not reach his eyes. “Dr. Darcy warned me it might happen. That you might develop the ability before you understood what it was. He said it would feel to you like asking a question very firmly.”

She had asked firmly. She had looked at him and pressed, and he had answered, and the sick weight in her stomach now was the understanding that she had done to him what she would never have chosen to do. Had reached into his will and bent it toward her own without knowing, without meaning to, without any possibility of taking it back.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be.” He picked up the lamp again. “I should have told you days ago. I was trying to spare you. That was cowardice, not kindness.” He gestured down the corridor toward her room. “Go to bed. I’ll speak with Dr. Darcy. He’ll know what to do about Mary.”

“Can he help her?”

Her father did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was very tired. “He is trying. That is all I can tell you.”

She went to her room. She did not sleep. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap and watched the window lighten toward dawn, and did not let herself think about Mary’s face, or her mother’s absence.

When the household began to stir she was still sitting there, upright and still, her hands cold and her mind turning over the same three words her father had spoken.

You did this.

Set in Stone, Chapter 11.

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

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

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

Kitty drifted toward the window. Elizabeth broke the seal.

Dearest Lizzy,

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

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

She continued.

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

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

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

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

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

*Your affectionate sister,

Jane*

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

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

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

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

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

“Is Lydia outside?” Elizabeth asked.

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

“With Mr. Wickham?”

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

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “He is.”

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 10.

The darkroom smelled of hyposulphite and collodion, which was familiar, and of something else underneath that might have been his own apprehension, which was not. Darcy had given the plates two hours to settle before bringing them down. Long enough that dinner had been served and the household had dispersed to its evening occupations. Long enough that he would not be interrupted.

He lit the safety lamp and checked the solutions. Developer, stop bath, fixer: all as they should be. The two plates from this afternoon’s session were where he had left them, and he took the first with more care than strictly necessary.

The image emerged slowly. Elizabeth at three-quarters profile, her attention directed at the lens. The exposure had caught the line of her jaw and the set of her mouth, both suggesting something he could not quite name and did not particularly wish to.

He moved the plate to the stop bath and watched the development cease. The image was clear. Technically sound. He had been looking for micro-expressions, postural markers, any involuntary signal the body might offer before an episode. What he found instead was a woman looking at something beyond the frame with the kind of attention that suggested she was faintly amused by what he had asked her to do.

It told him nothing useful about the condition.

He fixed the plate and set it aside to dry, then worked his way through the second, third and fourth.

The fifth had been taken toward the end of the session, when she was starting to grow weary. She had relaxed slightly, not dramatically, but enough that the camera had noticed. The safety lamp’s red glow turned the wet plate strange and luminous as the image surfaced. She looked tired. She also looked—

He moved the plate to the stop bath and did not finish the thought.

The image was, again, technically sound. It showed her as she had been this afternoon: a woman sitting for a medical procedure she had not asked for, conducted by a man whose motives she was still deciding whether to trust. That it also showed her in a way that made him reluctant to look away was a problem of attention rather than content. The photographs themselves were entirely proper. It was his response to them that wanted management.

He fixed the plate. He set it beside the first. He looked at both of them longer than the clinical examination required, and told himself he was checking for artifacts in the emulsion.

The tripwire plates were still in their case at the back of the bench. One episode, four exposures: the mechanism had been triggered four times during her last sleepwalking incident, which had occurred six nights ago in the corridor outside the locked room. He had set the camera at the turn in the passage where the mirrors gave a safe line of sight. The flash powder had woken half the house. Elizabeth had woken in her own bed with no memory of having left it.

He had not yet developed the plates. There had been other matters requiring attention, and the household had needed careful management in the aftermath, and he had told himself there was no urgency.

He was not certain he believed himself.

He reached for the case, then stopped. The two plates drying on the rack showed Elizabeth as she was: present, alert, difficult in ways he was beginning to find less inconvenient than he ought. The tripwire plates would show her as she became when the condition took her.

He needed both sets of data. The human-form photographs were the baseline; the tripwire images were the deviation. Comparing them might yield something he had missed in previous cases. It was sound methodology.

He opened the case.

The red light turned the undeveloped glass into something that looked like pooled blood. He lifted the first plate carefully and moved toward the developer, and did not let himself think about what he expected to see when the image emerged.

Set in Stone, Chapter 9.

Elizabeth found the garden a relief after the morning’s stuffiness indoors. Mary had been at the organ since breakfast, something Lutheran, performed with more conviction than skill, and Lydia had been sulking about some restriction or other that Elizabeth had not followed closely enough to defend or oppose. The air outside was clean and still, and she had brought nothing with her to do, which felt like a small liberty.

“Miss Bennet. You’ve escaped too.”

She turned. Wickham was coming along the gravel path from the direction of the village, a leather satchel over one shoulder and his hat in his hand. He looked as though he had been walking for some time and was pleased about it.

“Mr. Wickham. I didn’t know you were expected.”

“I’m not. I was passing and thought I might call—your sister mentioned you were often in the garden at this hour.” He smiled. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not at all. I was only standing here achieving very little.”

“The best occupation for a fine morning.” He glanced toward the house, then back at her. “Though I confess I had a professional motive as well as a social one. I’ve been looking for a subject—someone I might sketch. The light here is good, and you have the sort of face that would translate well to pencil. If you’re not opposed to sitting still for twenty minutes, I’d be grateful for the opportunity.”

It was a flattering request, delivered without apparent calculation. Elizabeth considered. There seemed no harm in it, and she was curious to see whether his work was any good.

“Very well,” she said. “Where would you like me?”

“There—by the stone bench, I think. The angle’s better.” He gestured toward a spot half-shaded by the wall. “If you’ll sit, I’ll set up.”

She sat. He opened the satchel and withdrew a sketchbook, worn at the edges, and a small cloth roll that proved to contain pencils of various weights. He worked quickly, selecting his materials and positioning himself a few feet away with the ease of someone who had done this many times before.

“Look at me, if you would,” he said, glancing up briefly. “Or just past me—whichever is more comfortable. I’ll need your eyes.”

She looked at him. He met her gaze for a moment, then dropped his attention to the page and began.

The scratch of pencil on paper was strangely soothing. Elizabeth had expected to feel self-conscious, but Wickham worked without fuss, his manner businesslike and unobtrusive. He looked up, looked down, made a note, adjusted something. Occasionally he murmured a request—”chin a fraction higher,” “yes, there”—but otherwise did not speak.

After a few minutes she ventured, “Have you been drawing long?”

“Since I was a boy. My father encouraged it—he thought it might make me a gentleman, or at least keep me out of trouble.” He smiled without looking up. “It did neither, but I kept at it all the same. There. You can move, if you like. I have what I need for the structure.”

She shifted slightly, easing her shoulders. “May I see?”

“Not yet. It’s still rough—I’d rather you saw it when it’s something closer to finished.” He was working faster now, his hand moving across the page in swift, confident strokes. “Your Dr. Darcy has been documenting you as well, I understand. Though I gather his methods run more to the scientific than the artistic.”

There was nothing pointed in his tone, but Elizabeth felt a flicker of discomfort all the same. “He is studying a nervous complaint. The photography is part of that.”

“Of course.” Wickham glanced up, then back to the sketch. “It’s only that I’ve known the man to be somewhat… thorough in his examinations. And somewhat less forthcoming about their purpose than one might wish. But perhaps you’ve found him more communicative than his previous patients did.”

“I find him perfectly professional.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” He made another few strokes, then set the pencil down and studied the page with a critical eye. “There. Not finished, but enough for now. Would you like to see?”

“If you’re willing.”

He turned the sketchbook toward her. The drawing was good…better than good. He had caught something in her expression she had not known was there: a wariness, perhaps, or a watchfulness. The lines were clean and economical, the likeness immediate.

“It’s very well done,” she said, surprised into honesty.

“You’re a good subject. You have a directness about you—it comes through even in pencil.” He closed the sketchbook and returned it to his satchel, the movements unhurried. “Thank you for sitting. I don’t often get the chance to work from life.”

“What do you usually draw, then?”

“Memory. Imagination. Whatever pays, when it needs to pay.” He stood, brushing grass from his trousers. “I’m grateful for the chance to work from something real for once.”

“Mr. Wickham.”

Elizabeth looked up. Darcy was standing at the edge of the garden path, some twenty feet away, his case in one hand and his expression carefully neutral. How long he had been there she could not have said.

“Dr. Darcy,” Wickham said, pleasant and unhurried. “Good morning. I was just leaving.”

“Were you.” Darcy’s gaze moved to the satchel, then to Elizabeth, then back to Wickham. A flicker of anger passed across Darcy’s face and was gone so quickly that she was not sure that she had seen it.

“Wickham was kind enough to sketch me,” Elizabeth said, rising. “He said I was a good subject.”

“How obliging.” Darcy took three steps closer, then stopped, as though uncertain whether to advance or retreat. “I was not aware you were calling today, Wickham.”

“I wasn’t. I was passing.” Wickham shouldered his satchel and inclined his head toward Elizabeth. “Miss Bennet. Dr. Darcy. I’ll leave you to your morning.”

He walked past Darcy without hurry, his stride easy and untroubled. Darcy watched him go, his jaw set, and did not speak until Wickham had disappeared around the corner of the house.

“You should not have allowed that.”

Elizabeth stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“The sitting. You should not have allowed it.”

“I was not aware I required your permission to sit still for twenty minutes while someone draws me.”

“That is not—” He stopped, visibly checking himself. When he spoke again his voice was lower, more controlled. “Wickham is not a suitable acquaintance for you. I would prefer you did not encourage him.”

“You would prefer.” She felt her temper rise: the same cold, pointed anger that had carried her through the worst of his condescension. “Mr. Wickham has been nothing but courteous to me. If you have some objection to his character I suggest you state it plainly rather than issuing edicts about whom I may or may not speak to.”

“I cannot state it plainly.”

“How convenient for you.”

He looked at her directly for half a second, then away, as though the effort cost him something. “Miss Bennet. I am asking you to trust my judgment in this. Wickham is—”

“What? Dangerous? A scoundrel? Or merely someone you dislike?”

“All three.” He bit the words off as though each one were being extracted against his will. “But I cannot give you the particulars.”

“Then you cannot expect me to simply accept your word and govern myself accordingly.”

They stood there, three feet apart, the morning sun slanting between them. Darcy’s hands were clenched at his sides; his expression was rigid, unreadable, and beneath it something that might have been frustration or anger or some feeling he would not permit himself to show.

“No,” he said finally. “I suppose I cannot.”

He inclined his head with the bare minimum of civility, and walked past her toward the house, his stride stiff and deliberate. Elizabeth watched him go and felt the encounter settle into the growing catalogue of grievances she kept against him. Controlling. High-handed. Jealous of any civility shown to her by someone other than himself.

She sat down again on the stone bench and stayed there until the morning had turned toward noon, the scratch of pencil on paper still audible in her memory, the image of her own watchful face held now in Wickham’s satchel like a small theft she had permitted without understanding what she gave away.

Set in Stone, Chapter 8.

The room Darcy had chosen for the purpose was on the second floor, facing east. Elizabeth had passed it before without particular notice; it appeared to be a former morning room, unfurnished except for a single chair positioned against the far wall and what looked like half the contents of a scientific supply catalogue arranged on a series of tables to the left of the door.

The camera itself was a substantial affair on a tripod, positioned some ten feet from the chair. What arrested her attention was not the camera but the arrangement of mirrors. Two tall cheval glasses flanked the chair at angles she could not immediately parse, and a third, smaller mirror had been mounted on an articulating arm attached to the camera itself.

Darcy was adjusting something on the nearest cheval glass when she entered. He straightened, saw her taking in the setup, and said, “Good afternoon, Miss Bennet. Thank you for agreeing to this.”

“You did say it was part of the treatment.” She kept her tone even. Their last exchange had ended poorly; she had no particular wish to repeat the experience, and he had been scrupulously civil at luncheon. She could match that, at least.

“It is.” He gestured toward the chair. “If you would sit, I can explain what I’m attempting to document.”

She sat. The chair was plain, straight-backed, positioned so that the light from the windows fell across her face without undue harshness. Darcy moved to the camera, made some small adjustment to the mirror mounted beside the lens, and then stepped back to the tables.

“You are familiar,” he said, “with Dr. Charcot’s photographic studies at the Salpêtrière?”

She was not, particularly, though the name was familiar from the medical journals she had glimpsed in the library. “In outline,” she said.

“Charcot believed that what is sometimes called hysteria was a physical ailment which could be cured, at a time when many authorities saw such symptoms as either performative or inherent to the female body.”

“How enlightened of him,” Elizabeth said dryly.

“He documented the physical presentation of hysterical episodes in his patients—the specific attitudes, the facial expressions, the postural markers that preceded or accompanied the attacks. The photographs established that certain presentations were consistent across patients, which suggested a physiological basis rather than mere performance.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said, though what she saw was that he had compared her condition to hysteria, which was not flattering. “And you believe my—episodes—have similar physical markers?”

“I believe,” Darcy said carefully, “that the body shows what the mind cannot observe. If there are markers that precede an episode—changes in the eyes, perhaps, or tension in the musculature—then documenting them might allow earlier intervention.”

This was reasonable enough that Elizabeth could not object to it without appearing obstructive. “And the mirrors?”

“To safely observe what might otherwise be—difficult to observe directly.” He moved back to the camera, made another small adjustment. “The human face is remarkably expressive. Small changes are often visible only in reflected light.”

She had the distinct sense that this was true and incomplete. The phrasing—safely observe—carried an implication she could not quite catch. It seemed to fit with the mirrors throughout the house, the care with which Darcy avoided meeting her eyes directly, her father’s Ovidian deflections.

“Will this take long?” she asked.

“Not today. I need a series of baseline images—your ordinary expression, at rest. Later sessions may be longer.”

She nodded. Darcy stepped to the side of the camera, his hand on some mechanism she could not see from where she sat. “If you could look toward the lens, please. Not directly at the mirror beside it—at the lens itself.”

She did. The room was very quiet. She could hear the midsummer sounds from the open window—birdsong, the faint voices of Mary and Kitty somewhere in the garden—and the small mechanical sounds of Darcy’s preparations. The light from the windows was warm on her face.

“Your medication this morning,” Darcy said, still adjusting something. “You took it at breakfast?”

“I did.” She could not keep a certain dryness from her tone. “As instructed.”

“And the dosage remains tolerably comfortable?”

“I have not noticed any particular discomfort.” This was not entirely true. The Rutinum compositum had a faintly bitter aftertaste that lingered despite the honey provided to disguise it but she had no wish to prolong the conversation into a discussion of her digestion.

“Good.” He moved to the other side of the camera. “The formulation is necessarily imprecise. Rue in particular has a narrow margin between therapeutic and excessive doses, and individual tolerance varies.”

“Rue,” Elizabeth said. “That’s Ruta graveolens, is it not?”

“It is.”

“I did not realize its uses extended to—” She paused, unsure how to finish the sentence. Sleepwalking seemed inadequate; episodes was Darcy’s term, clinical and uninformative; whatever it is I am not being told would be undiplomatic.

“Its applications are varied,” Darcy said. He had bent to look through the camera, and his voice came from beside the tripod, slightly muffled. “Vervain and St. John’s Wort complete the compound. The combination is more effective than any single element.”

“Hence Rutinum compositum,” Elizabeth said. “I confess I find the name even more grandiose now that I understand it describes a mixture of garden herbs.”

She had not meant it as a criticism, exactly, but Darcy straightened from the camera with what might have been the ghost of chagrin in his expression. “Scientific nomenclature tends toward the Latinate,” he said. “It confers an air of authority.”

“Does it require it?”

“In some quarters, yes.” He moved back to the tables, selected a plate from a neat stack, and returned to the camera. “If you could remain still, please. This first exposure will take approximately thirty seconds.”

She had been photographed before; she knew what was required of her. She fixed her gaze on the lens, kept her expression neutral, and did not move. Darcy opened the shutter. She heard the soft mechanical click, and the room went very quiet. Thirty seconds was longer than one might think. Her eyes wanted to drift toward the windows, toward the mirrors, toward anywhere but the blank glass eye of the lens. She held.

The click of the shutter closing. Darcy removed the plate, set it aside, and returned with another. “Once more, if you please. Same position.”

They repeated the process. Then again. On the fourth exposure she was conscious of a faint stiffness in her neck from holding the same posture, and on the fifth she allowed herself to shift slightly in the chair, at which point Darcy said, “That will do for today.”

She blinked. The afternoon light seemed brighter than it had been a moment ago. “That’s all?”

“For baseline documentation, yes.” He was returning the unused plates to their box, his movements precise and economical. “If you are willing, I would like to schedule another session at the end of the week—similar images, to establish consistency.”

“And then?”

“Then we determine whether there are any observable changes preceding your night episodes.” He closed the box, set it on the table, and turned back to her. “The goal is to identify a prodromal phase—a warning, if you will—that might allow earlier administration of Rutinum compositum before an episode fully develops.”

This was, again, reasonable. It was also deeply unsettling in ways Elizabeth could not fully articulate. “You believe my face shows something I don’t know I’m showing.”

“I believe,” Darcy said, “that the body often knows what the mind does not. Whether that knowledge is legible in a photograph is the question I hope to answer.”

She stood. The chair had left her back stiff. “I find it rather alarming,” she said, “to think that I might be observed by everyone around me in some state I cannot myself perceive.”

“The markers I am looking for,” Darcy said, “are subtle. Most people would not notice them. I may not notice them. That is why the camera is necessary.”

“Because the camera notices what you cannot?”

“Because the camera does not look away.”

The phrasing caught her oddly. She looked at him. He was standing beside the camera still, his expression unreadable, and she said, “I take it you have tried observation without the camera.”

“I have found it impractical.” His tone had gone slightly stiff. “The photographic plate is more reliable than human attention.”

This was almost certainly true. It was also not, Elizabeth thought, quite what he meant. She let it pass. “When will you develop these?”

“This evening, perhaps, or tomorrow afternoon. The darkroom is adjacent to my study; the process is straightforward.” He paused, then added, “If you would like to see the results, I can show you the plates once they are developed.”

“Would I understand what I was looking at?”

“Perhaps not entirely. But you would see yourself as the camera sees you, which is not without value.”

She considered this. The idea of standing in Darcy’s darkroom, looking at glass plates of her own face, felt uncomfortably intimate in a way she could not quite name. “I think,” she said, “I will wait until you have determined whether the images show anything of significance.”

“As you prefer.” He inclined his head slightly. “Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Bennet.”

She nodded and turned toward the door. She was halfway across the room when she paused and said, without looking back, “Dr. Darcy.”

“Yes?”

“The mirrors. You said they allow you to safely observe what would be difficult to observe directly.”

“Yes.”

“What would happen,” Elizabeth said, “if you tried to observe directly? Without the mirrors?”

The silence that followed was just long enough to be noticeable. Then: “I find reflected observation more reliable,” Darcy said. “Direct observation can be…difficult.”

This was not an answer, or not a complete one. Elizabeth turned to look at him. He was standing very still beside the camera, his expression carefully neutral, and she thought: He will not tell me. He has decided I should not know, and he will not tell me.

“I see,” she said.

She did not see. But she was beginning to suspect there were things being kept from her that the camera itself might inadvertently reveal, and that Darcy’s scrupulous formality was not entirely the product of medical detachment. She decided to ignore this for now, and went downstairs to find her father and his Ovid and the faint reassurance of wit deployed as shield.

Behind her, in the bright second-floor room, Darcy stood beside his camera and did not move for some time.

Set in Stone, Chapter 7.

He found Miss Lydia Bennet in the morning room, attempting to cajole Kitty into an expedition to the village. This was the third such attempt in as many days, and Darcy had exhausted his patience somewhere around the second.

“Miss Lydia,” he said, from the doorway. “A word, if you please.”

She turned with the bright, heedless smile of someone who had never been denied anything that mattered and did not expect to start now. “Oh, Dr. Darcy! We were just saying—Kitty and I—that it’s perfectly absurd to keep us cooped up like this when the weather is so fine. Surely you can’t object to a simple walk?”

“I can,” Darcy said, “and I do.”

The smile dimmed slightly. Kitty, perched on the arm of a chair, watched with the mild interest of someone observing a play she had seen before and already knew the ending to.

“But why?” Lydia’s tone had acquired an edge. “Lizzy goes out. Papa goes out. Even Mary goes out—well, to the churchyard, which is perfectly morbid, but still. Why must Kitty and I stay inside like prisoners?”

Because you are twenty years old and inside the manifestation window, and I have already buried my sister, Darcy thought, and did not say. Because your mother is standing rigid and unmoving in a locked room and I do not yet know how to reverse her condition. Because if you transform in the village square during market day I will have a mob at my door by evening and no amount of medical credentials will save any of us.

What he said was: “Your elder sister is undergoing a course of treatment that requires careful management. Until I am satisfied that her condition is stable, I must ask all members of the household to exercise caution.”

“Lizzy’s condition,” Lydia said, with the particular emphasis that suggested she thought there was nothing wrong with Lizzy at all and that Darcy was inventing problems to make himself important, “doesn’t have anything to do with whether Kitty and I take a walk.”

“On the contrary. It has everything to do with it.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Then you must trust that I do.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I am prepared to give you.”

Lydia’s mouth set in a mutinous line. Kitty shifted slightly, her gaze moving between them with something that might have been nervousness or might simply have been the anticipation of entertainment. Darcy was preparing his next careful, uninformative statement when he heard footsteps in the corridor behind him.

“Lydia,” Elizabeth said, from just over his shoulder. “What’s this about?”

“Dr. Darcy,” Lydia said, with a certain relish, “is being unreasonable.”

Elizabeth moved past him into the room. She was dressed for walking. He noted this with the part of his mind that catalogued details before he had consciously decided they were relevant. Her color was better than it had been the previous morning. The Rutinum compositum was doing its work, then. A small relief in a situation not otherwise abundant in them.

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” Elizabeth said, though her tone suggested she was not, in fact, sure of this at all.

“His reasons,” Lydia said, “are that I am not allowed to leave the house, because you are ill, though you don’t look particularly ill to me, and he won’t explain why one has anything to do with the other.”

Elizabeth looked at him. “Dr. Darcy?”

He should have anticipated this. Elizabeth Bennet was not a woman who accepted authority without question, and she had already made it clear, through a dozen small interactions over the past few days, that she found his manner somewhere between irritating and insufferable. Of course she would side with her sister.

“As I have explained to Miss Lydia,” he said, keeping his voice level, “the nature of your treatment requires certain precautions. I would prefer not to go into the medical particulars in—”

“The medical particulars,” Elizabeth said, in a tone that matched his for studied courtesy and exceeded it for sharpness, “seem to involve my entire family being confined to your house on the strength of your professional opinion. Surely we are entitled to understand what that opinion is based on.”

“You are entitled,” Darcy said, “to the treatment I am providing. The specifics of that treatment are not a matter for general discussion.”

“General discussion,” Elizabeth repeated. “You mean discussion with me.”

“I mean discussion in the morning room with your sisters present when I have not yet established—”

“What you have not yet established,” Elizabeth said, and there was real anger in her voice now, “is any reason why I should trust your judgment on this. You have told me almost nothing. My father has told me almost nothing. And now you propose to restrict my sisters’ movements without explanation, as though we were children, or imbeciles, or—”

She was looking directly at him. He had been managing, until this moment, to keep his gaze somewhere slightly to the left of hers, a trick he had learned with Georgiana, and perfected since, the appearance of attention without the full weight of eye contact. But she had stepped closer as she spoke, and he had not compensated quickly enough, and now she was looking at him with the full force of her frustration and he was looking back and—

—there.

The sensation was immediate and unpleasant: a cold, creeping pressure at the base of his skull, spreading forward into his temples and behind his eyes. Not pain, precisely. Not yet. But the warning of pain, the feeling of his brain being slowly compressed like a wet sponge. His vision narrowed slightly. The room seemed to contract around the point where her gaze met his.

He could look away. Should look away. The intelligent thing, the safe thing, would be to drop his gaze, mutter something about examining a patient file, and leave the room before the pressure became something worse. But if he did that now, in the middle of this argument, it would look like capitulation. Worse: it would look like weakness. And Elizabeth Bennet would remember, and would press the advantage next time, and he could not afford—

“—and I will not,” Elizabeth was saying, “be treated as though I have no right to information about my own condition, or my own family—”

The pressure intensified. His hands, he realized distantly, had clenched into fists at his sides. He forced them open. The small movement cost him something. His jaw ached. He had been holding it rigid without noticing.

“Miss Bennet,” he said. His voice came out flat and colder than he had intended. “I am not at liberty to discuss the details of your case in this setting. If you wish to schedule a formal consultation—”

“I don’t want a formal consultation. I want you to tell me why my sisters cannot take a walk.”

Still looking at him. Still that steady, furious gaze. The pressure was building toward something sharper now, a bright, specific pain gathering at the front of his skull. He thought of Georgiana in those final weeks when she had stopped sleeping and he had stopped being able to meet her eyes without flinching. How he had told himself it was exhaustion. Overwork. The stress of a case he did not yet know how to solve.

He had been wrong then. He was not wrong now. This was not exhaustion.

“Because,” he said, and heard his own voice as though from a great distance, each word requiring a separate, deliberate effort, “certain hereditary conditions present risks for multiple family members within specific age ranges, and until I have determined the scope of that risk, I must insist on caution.”

“That’s still not an answer.”

“It is all the answer I can give you at present.”

He watched her expression shift. He knew what she was seeing: a man who would not unbend, who hid behind professional formality, who held information like a miser hoarding coin. He knew this, and could not correct it, because the truth would require explanations he could not give her. Not yet. Not without first confirming what he suspected about the hereditary mechanism, and that would require time he did not have and tests he could not ethically conduct.

“I see,” Elizabeth said. Her voice had gone quiet. “You will tell us nothing, and expect us to comply regardless. How very convenient for you.”

The pressure released as she looked away. The relief was immediate and left him faintly nauseated. He drew a careful breath and did not let himself sway.

“Lizzy,” Lydia said, from behind her. “Does this mean—”

“It means,” Elizabeth said, still looking at the wall and not at him, “that Dr. Darcy is too important to explain himself to people like us. Isn’t that right, Dr. Darcy?”

He should correct her. Should tell her…what? That he was trying to keep her alive? That her direct gaze had been doing something to him, something she had no notion of and he could not describe without revealing the nature of her condition? That he had rules about eye contact with patients for reasons that had everything to do with staying functional and nothing to do with arrogance?

“If you prefer to think so,” he said.

Her mouth tightened. She turned back to Lydia. “Come. We’ll walk in the garden, at least. I assume Dr. Darcy cannot object to that.”

“The garden is perfectly safe,” Darcy said.

“How reassuring.”

She swept past him. There was no other word for it, she swept, with Lydia in her wake and Kitty trailing after with the satisfied air of someone whose morning had just become significantly more interesting. The door closed behind them with slightly more force than was strictly necessary.

Darcy remained where he was for a moment, waiting for the residual pain to subside. It would, he knew from experience. Another minute or two and the ache behind his eyes would fade to something manageable. By this evening it would be gone entirely, and tomorrow he would be able to convince himself it had not been as bad as it seemed in the moment.

He had protocols for this. He had learned, over the course of Georgiana’s final year, exactly how long he could meet her eyes before the cost became prohibitive. Thirty seconds of direct contact was manageable. Forty-five was inadvisable. A full minute left him shaking and useless for an hour afterward. He had timed it. Had made himself time it, because if he was going to treat patients with this condition he needed to know his own limits.

That had been forty seconds, perhaps. He had held for forty seconds while Elizabeth Bennet looked at him with justified anger and he said nothing that would explain why he could not explain, and now she thought him arrogant and controlling and he could not tell her otherwise.

This, he thought, with the sour satisfaction of a man cataloguing his own failures, is going to be a significant problem.

He retrieved the notebook from his study, the small one he kept for observations he did not put in the formal casebook, and made a brief entry. Patient unaware of compulsive effect. Direct eye contact approx. 40 seconds. Resistance manageable but costly. Presented as emotional rigidity. Misread accordingly. Must find method of explanation that does not require practical demonstration.

He stared at the last sentence for a moment, then crossed it out. There was no method of explanation that would not require telling her what she was, and he was not yet ready to do that. Not until he had something more useful than a diagnosis. Not until he could offer her a solution.

He closed the notebook and went to check on Mrs. Bennet, who remained as she had been that morning and the morning before that: stone, still, unreachable. Another problem he had not yet solved. Another patient he had failed to save in time.

The muttonchops, he thought with sudden, irrational bitterness, were doing absolutely nothing to help.

Set in Stone, Chapter 6.

The village was an improvement on the house, if only because it contained fewer mirrors and more people willing to look at her directly. Elizabeth had begun to notice the latter as a specific absence. Even the shopkeeper that morning had focused his attention somewhere past her left shoulder while asking what the young ladies required.

“Ribbon,” Lydia said, already at the counter with a length of cherry-colored silk against her wrist. “Masses of it. Kitty, come here, does this suit me?”

Kitty came. Elizabeth stayed by the window, watching the square. The festival preparations were visible everywhere: garlands half-strung between the houses, a platform being assembled near the fountain, bunting in cheerful primary colors. The village teemed with activity, indifferent to her troubles. Elizabeth found this both reassuring and faintly irritating.

“Miss Bennet?”

She turned. The man in the doorway was perhaps thirty, dressed with the studied carelessness of someone who had thought about his appearance a great deal and wished to suggest he had not. His coat wanted pressing. His cravat was silk, loosely knotted, the sort of thing that looked effortless and cost accordingly. He had a leather portfolio under one arm and the eyes of someone who had stayed up too late reading poetry and found the experience spiritually nourishing.

“I believe we have not been introduced,” Elizabeth said.

“George Wickham.” He smiled. It was an excellent smile, warm and slightly rueful, the smile of a man confessing to a minor impropriety he hoped she would find charming. “I apologize for the informality. I saw you through the window and thought I should take the opportunity before it escaped me. I have been hoping to meet someone from Dr. Darcy’s household.”

He was looking directly at her. Elizabeth noted this with something close to relief before she registered the rest of what he had said. “You know Dr. Darcy?”

“We are acquainted.” Wickham moved into the shop properly, setting the portfolio on the counter with the ease of someone used to making himself at home in other people’s spaces. “That is—we were, some years ago.”

Lydia had abandoned the ribbon to study Wickham with the frank interest of someone who had found something more entertaining than shopping. “Are you visiting, Mr. Wickham? You don’t sound local.”

“An extended stay,” Wickham said. “I am investigating certain matters on behalf of a friend who could not make the journey himself. He had heard stories—the sort of stories one hears about old houses and strange goings-on—and thought someone should look into them properly.”

“Strange goings-on?” Kitty leaned forward. “What kind of strange goings-on?”

“The usual sort, I expect.” Wickham’s tone was light, dismissive, the tone of a man indulging a pleasant fancy rather than pursuing anything serious. “Lights where there should be none. The watch-tower, primarily—local legend has it as a site of some interest, though I suspect the interest is more antiquarian than supernatural. Still, my friend was insistent, and I had no particular reason to refuse him.” He glanced at Elizabeth. “You are staying at Dr. Darcy’s house, I understand?”

“We are his guests,” Elizabeth said. The phrasing felt careful even as she said it. “My father knows him professionally.”

“Ah.” Something shifted in Wickham’s expression—not disapproval, precisely, but something she could not quite name. Concern, perhaps. Or recognition. “Then you will have formed your own impressions. I hope they are favorable ones.”

“Should they not be?”

“I could not presume to say.” Wickham smiled again, but the warmth had a shadow underneath it now, something he was allowing her to see. “I knew Dr. Darcy rather better once. He is a brilliant man—no one disputes that. Dedicated to his work to a degree I have rarely seen. I simply wonder, sometimes, whether that dedication serves his patients as well as it serves his research.”

Elizabeth kept her expression neutral. She had the distinct sense of being told something important, though what it was remained just out of reach. “You sound as though you speak from experience.”

“I knew someone who was in his care,” Wickham said quietly. “A young woman—a friend, though I wished she might have been more. She was unwell, though the nature of her illness was never entirely clear to me. Dr. Darcy was very certain he could help her. Very certain, and very… controlling, I suppose, about the terms of her treatment. She was not permitted visitors toward the end. I was told it was for her own good.” He paused. “I am sure it was well-intentioned. I simply could not help but feel that she might have benefited from a second opinion. Or from being informed of her own condition, rather than kept in ignorance for fear the knowledge would distress her.”

Lydia had gone quiet. Kitty was watching Wickham with something approaching sympathy.

“What happened to her?” she asked.

“She died.” Wickham said it simply, without dramatics. “I was not there. I was told afterward that it was very sudden—that Dr. Darcy had done everything in his power, but that some cases are beyond even the most dedicated physician. I do not doubt his sincerity. I simply wonder whether she might have survived if she had been treated as a person rather than a problem to be solved.”

The silence that followed was broken by the shopkeeper clearing his throat. “Will the young ladies be wanting the ribbon, then?”

Lydia blinked, as though remembering where she was. “Yes. All of it. Charge it to Dr. Darcy’s account, if you please.”

Wickham picked up his portfolio. “Forgive me. I did not mean to cast a shadow over your afternoon. It is only—when I learned that Dr. Darcy was in residence, and that he had patients staying with him, I felt I should say something. As a precaution, you understand. I am sure your father is looking after your interests admirably.”

“I am sure he is,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was steady. She was not entirely certain what she felt.

“The watch-tower,” Wickham said, as though the thought had just occurred to him. “If you have seen it from the house—it is worth visiting, if you are inclined toward that sort of thing. The locals avoid it after dark, but the view in daylight is quite remarkable. I intend to go myself in the next few days, to see what all the fuss is about.” He smiled. “I suspect I will find nothing more alarming than bats and old stones, but one never knows.”

“You are very brave,” Lydia said, with the admiration of someone who thought investigations in the dark sounded thrilling.

“Or very foolish.” Wickham’s smile widened. “I have never been entirely certain which. Miss Bennet—” He bowed to Elizabeth. “I hope we will meet again. I am staying at the inn, if you should wish to continue our conversation.”

He left before she could answer. The shop felt smaller without him, as though he had taken some of the air with him.

“Well,” Lydia said. “He was interesting.”

Kitty nodded. “Do you think Dr. Darcy is really that dreadful?”

“I think,” Elizabeth said slowly, “that Mr. Wickham believes what he is saying.” She picked up the ribbon Lydia had chosen, running the silk between her fingers without seeing it. “Whether what he believes is true is another matter entirely.”

But the words stayed with her as they left the shop—kept in ignorance, treated as a problem rather than a person, I was not there. She thought of Darcy’s careful questions, his refusal to meet her eyes, the way her father and he had exchanged that look when she asked about her mother. She thought of the mirrors, and the locked rooms, and the sense she had been carrying since her arrival that everyone knew something she did not.

Mr. Wickham had looked at her directly, as though she were simply a person he was speaking to. As though there were nothing to be afraid of.

She did not know what to do with that, either.

The walk back to the house was quiet. Lydia chattered about the festival—such a short time away, and there would be dancing, and lamplight, and very probably sausages—but Elizabeth barely heard her. She was thinking about young women who died under mysterious circumstances, and doctors who were certain they knew best, and the watch-tower on the edge of the grounds that she had noticed from her window that morning and then forgotten.

She had not forgotten it now.

When they reached the house, Darcy was in the hall. He glanced up as they entered, his gaze moving past Elizabeth toward some point on the wall behind her. “Miss Bennet. I trust your morning was pleasant.”

“We met a friend of yours,” Lydia said brightly. “A Mr. Wickham. He said he knew you some years ago.”

Darcy’s expression did not change, precisely. It simply closed, the way a door closes when the person inside does not wish to be disturbed. “Mr. Wickham is in the village?”

“At the inn,” Elizabeth said. She watched his face. “He spoke very warmly of you.”

“I am sure he did.” Darcy’s voice was perfectly even, perfectly controlled, and told her nothing at all. “If you will excuse me, I have work to attend to.”

He left. Elizabeth stood in the hall, holding Lydia’s ribbon, and wondered what it was that Mr. Wickham had not told her.

And what it was that Dr. Darcy would not.

Set in Stone, Chapter 5.

Her father was in the library after dinner, which was not unusual. What was unusual was that he appeared to have been reading the same page for the better part of twenty minutes.

Elizabeth had been watching from the doorway. He had turned the page once, early on, and then his hand had simply stopped moving. The book remained open on his lap. His eyes were directed toward it. Whether he was actually reading it was another question entirely.

She came in and sat in the chair opposite.

He looked up, registered her presence with a small nod, and returned his attention to the book. Or to the appearance of the book. Elizabeth was increasingly certain there was a difference.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“Ovid,” he said. “The Metamorphoses. I find it soothing.”

“Do you.”

“Monsters and transformations,” he said. “Heroes and unintended consequences. One feels less alone in one’s difficulties when reminded that the classical world was also considerably inconvenient.”

She smiled slightly. “I hadn’t realized we were experiencing difficulties.”

“Haven’t you?”

The question was mild. His gaze had returned to the book, which meant he was not actually asking her to answer. That was considerate of him. She did not have an answer prepared.

“I wondered,” she said after a moment, “whether there had been any word from Mother.”

“Ah.” He turned a page. She was almost certain he had not read it. “Not as yet. The shopping expedition is evidently a substantial one. Your mother does not do these things by halves.”

“No,” Elizabeth agreed. “She does not.”

They sat in silence. The fire crackled pleasantly. Outside, the evening was drawing in. It was summer, so the light lingered, but there was a quality to it now that suggested the day was coming to a close. Somewhere in another room, Mary was playing the organ. The music was appropriately Gothic and not at all appropriate for after dinner, but no one had gone to stop her.

“I thought,” Elizabeth said carefully, “that she might have written. Or that we might have heard something.”

“Prague is not so very far,” her father said, “but it is far enough that correspondence takes time. I expect we shall hear when there is something to hear.”

“And if there isn’t?”

He looked up at that. His expression was not neutral, but calm. There was a distinction, and Elizabeth knew it. Neutrality was the absence of feeling. Calm was feeling carefully managed. Her father had always been good at managing his feelings, but she could usually tell when he was doing it.

He was doing it now.

“Then I expect,” he said, “we shall continue as we are. Dr. Darcy has been very accommodating. The house is comfortable. Your sisters are reasonably well entertained. And I have Ovid.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “You have Ovid.”

“Do you know the story of Perseus?” he asked.

The question was sudden enough that she blinked. “A little. He killed the Medusa, didn’t he?”

“He did. A monster so terrible that to look upon her was to be turned to stone. He solved the problem with a mirror — looked at her reflection rather than meeting her gaze directly, and so was able to approach without being petrified.” He tapped the page in front of him. “Athena’s counsel. Perseus would have been considerably worse off without it.”

“It sounds like a practical solution,” Elizabeth said.

“It was. Though one does wonder,” her father continued, without particular emphasis, “what it must have been like for the Medusa herself. To know that she was dangerous. To know that anyone who looked at her would come to harm. Ovid does not spend much time on her perspective, but then Ovid rarely does. He is more interested in the mechanics of transformation than in what one does afterward.”

Elizabeth studied him. His tone was light, conversational. He might have been discussing the weather. He was not discussing the weather.

“Do you think,” she said slowly, “that the Medusa knew what she was?”

“I couldn’t say. Ovid does not tell us. But if she did know—” He paused, turning the book slightly as though to catch the firelight better on the page. “—then one imagines it must have been rather lonely. To be aware of one’s danger to others. To be unable to change it. To be dependent on someone else’s knowledge of mirrors.”

The fire crackled again. Mary’s organ music had stopped, or perhaps Elizabeth had simply stopped hearing it.

“That sounds,” she said quietly, “like a very bleak sort of existence.”

“Oh, myths generally are,” her father said. “Bleak existences producing instructive conclusions. Though I confess I have always thought the instruction in this particular case was rather one-sided. Perseus learns to use mirrors. The Medusa learns nothing, because the Medusa is dead. A tidy resolution for everyone except the monster.”

He said monster without inflection. As though it were simply a word. As though it did not mean anything in particular.

Elizabeth’s hands were folded in her lap. She had not noticed folding them. “Father,” she said.

“Yes, my dear?”

“Is Mother really in Prague?”

He looked at her for a long moment. She could not read his expression. She thought perhaps that was deliberate.

“Your mother,” he said at last, “is not in any immediate danger. Dr. Darcy is doing everything that can be done. And you are not to worry yourself into a state over things you cannot presently change.”

It was not an answer. Or rather, it was an answer that confirmed she should not have needed to ask.

“You might have told me,” she said.

“I might have,” he agreed. “And yet here we are.”

“Here we are,” she repeated. “In a house full of mirrors.”

“Yes. Dr. Darcy is very fond of mirrors. I believe he finds them useful.”

She wanted to press him further. She wanted to ask what, exactly, Dr. Darcy found them useful for, and why her mother required a specialist physician at all, and what any of this had to do with Perseus and monsters and things too dangerous to look at directly. She wanted to ask why her father was reading Ovid as though it were a manual rather than a poem.

She did not ask any of these things.

Her father returned his attention to his book. After a moment, he said, “Athena also gave Perseus a warning. That the Gorgons—there were three of them, you know, though only Medusa was mortal—could not be faced directly. That attempting to do so was fatal. Perseus listened. It is one of the reasons he survived.”

“And the other reasons?” Elizabeth asked.

“Oh, the usual. Divine assistance. Supernatural weapons. A certain amount of luck.” He smiled faintly. “And Athena’s shield, polished to a mirror sheen. The gods are sometimes helpful, when they feel like it. Though one cannot rely on them.”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t suppose one can.”

He turned another page. She thought he might actually have read this one.

“Elizabeth,” he said, without looking up.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Darcy knows what he is doing. Your mother is as well as she can be under the circumstances. And you are quite safe, as long as you follow the instructions you are given. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” she said, “that you have not actually told me what the circumstances are.”

“No,” he said. “I have not.”

“But you will. Eventually.”

“Eventually,” he agreed. “When there is a reason to. At present, the less you worry over things that are being managed, the better for everyone. Including you.”

She stood. The conversation was clearly over, or as over as it was going to be. Her father was watching her now, and there was something in his gaze: concern, perhaps, or sorrow, or simply the exhaustion of a man who had been pretending things were well when they were not.

“Goodnight, Father,” she said.

“Goodnight, Elizabeth. Sleep well.”

She left him there with his Ovid and his firelight and his carefully managed calm. As she closed the door, she glanced back. He had returned to the book. His hand rested on the page, motionless.

She thought of mirrors and monsters and men who coped with impossible situations by reading about other men who had done the same. She thought of her mother, who was not in Prague. She thought of Dr. Darcy, who had looked everywhere but at her face during their consultation, and who apparently found mirrors useful. She did not yet know what it meant. But she was beginning to suspect that when she did know, she would not particularly like the answer.

Upstairs, Mary had resumed her organ practice. The music drifted through the house, minor-key and Gothic and strangely appropriate for a household that was pretending, with diminishing success, that nothing was wrong.

Set in Stone, Chapter 4.

Darcy waited until Miss Bennet’s footsteps had faded entirely down the corridor before he returned to his desk and wrote, with some force, Patient aware of nothing. Treatment tolerated. Proceeding as established.

He looked at what he had written and found it clinically adequate and personally unsatisfying, which was becoming a familiar combination where Miss Bennet was concerned.

She had been staring at his face. He had noticed this approximately four minutes into the consultation and had devoted considerable effort thereafter to not noticing it further, with mixed results. The staring had not been of the usual variety: neither the alarmed scrutiny people brought to physicians they did not trust, nor the vacant quality that preceded an episode. It had been something closer to assessment, and then, worse, amusement.

He suspected he knew what she had been assessing.

The side-whiskers had been a deliberate choice when he had grown them three years ago, after Georgiana. They were meant to suggest professional maturity, the sort of weathered experience that made patients feel they were in capable hands. He had observed that senior physicians wore them. He had reasoned that adopting the outward markers of seniority might compensate for his relative youth when delivering diagnoses that required authority to be believed.

The reasoning had been sound. The execution, he was beginning to suspect, had been less so.

Miss Bennet had smiled at him. Not the brittle, performative smile people produced when they were nervous. A real one, suppressed quickly but not quickly enough, accompanied by the distinct impression that she had drawn a conclusion about him he would not enjoy hearing stated aloud.

He found this vexing.

He found her vexing, in several distinct ways he was not prepared to enumerate at present. She was his patient, which meant she was a case to be managed with appropriate clinical detachment. The fact that she was also sharp-minded, handsome in a manner that showed no interest in whether one found her handsome or not, and apparently capable of reading him with uncomfortable accuracy…these were inconvenient variables that had no place in the treatment protocol and which he had been attempting to suppress with the same disciplined focus he brought to resisting her inadvertent compulsion.

The compulsion was manageable. The rest of it was proving less so.

There was a knock at the door. Darcy closed his notebook and said, “Come.”

Mr. Bennet entered with the cautious formality of a man entering a room he has been invited into but does not expect to be welcomed in. “Dr. Darcy. I wondered if you had a moment.”

“Of course.” Darcy gestured to the chair Miss Bennet had recently vacated. “Please.”

Mr. Bennet sat and arranged himself with the deliberate casualness of someone preparing to discuss something unpleasant while pretending it was nothing of the sort. “I wanted to ask after Elizabeth’s progress,” he said. “She seems—improved, I think, though I confess I am not certain what I am measuring improvement against.”

“She is tolerating the medication well,” Darcy said.

“And you believe the medication is sufficient?”

“For suppression, yes. It will not cure the condition, but it should prevent the more dangerous manifestations so long as she continues the treatment.”

Mr. Bennet absorbed this in silence. Then: “How long must she continue it?”

“Indefinitely,” Darcy said. “Unless I can determine a more permanent solution.”

“Which you are working toward.”

“I am.”

“With success?”

“With progress,” Darcy said, which was not the same thing and which Mr. Bennet was intelligent enough to recognize as not the same thing. “The difficulty lies in isolating the catalytic element. The compound I have developed is effective at managing symptoms, but the underlying mechanism remains—elusive.”

“Elusive,” Mr. Bennet repeated. “Yes. That is one word for it.”

There was a pause. Darcy had the sense they were both calculating how much could be said without saying it directly. It was a familiar negotiation. Most families preferred euphemism when it came to supernatural conditions. They wanted their daughters treated but not named, cured but not categorized, and they became profoundly uncomfortable when the vocabulary grew too specific.

Mr. Bennet, to his credit, seemed less interested in euphemism than in accuracy, but he was still choosing his words with care.

“My wife’s mother,” Mr. Bennet said slowly, “had a similar condition, we believe. She died many years ago. Elizabeth met her once, as a small child. I do not know whether that is relevant.”

“It is,” Darcy said. “The condition follows maternal lines. If Mrs. Bennet’s mother was affected, it would explain the hereditary transmission.”

“And my wife?”

“Was a carrier,” Darcy said. “She did not manifest symptoms herself, but she passed the condition to her daughters. Not all of them will develop it—Jane appears to be past the window—but the younger girls remain at some risk until their mid-twenties.”

Mr. Bennet’s expression did not change, but his hands tightened slightly on the arms of the chair. “I see.”

“Elizabeth’s case is manageable,” Darcy said. “The medication is effective, and if I can identify the catalytic component, I may be able to offer something more than ongoing suppression. But it will take time.”

“Time,” Mr. Bennet said. “Yes. We seem to have rather a lot of that at present, given what my daughter has done to her mother without knowing it.”

The bluntness was unexpected. Darcy had grown accustomed to families who lacked the vocabulary for directness. Mr. Bennet, apparently, was not one of them.

“Miss Bennet was not conscious during the episode,” Darcy said. “She will not remember it, and she cannot be held morally responsible for something she did not choose and was not aware of doing.”

“I am aware of that,” Mr. Bennet said. “I am also aware that she would not forgive herself if she knew. Which is why I have not told her, and why I would prefer she not learn of it until you are certain you can reverse the process.”

“I am working on that as well.”

“Are you?” Mr. Bennet said. “Forgive me, Dr. Darcy, but you have been working on these things for some time before we met you, if I understand correctly. I am not questioning your competence. I would not have brought my family here if I doubted it. But I would appreciate some sense of whether we are waiting for a solution or simply waiting.”

It was a fair question. Darcy did not enjoy it, but it was fair. “The curative mechanism requires an element I have not yet isolated, but I am close. That is not reassurance. It is an accurate statement of where the research stands.”

Mr. Bennet studied him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Thank you. That is more honest than I expected.” He stood. “I will leave you to your work. Though I will say, in the spirit of unsolicited observation, that my daughter is considerably more perceptive than is convenient for people attempting to conceal things from her.”

“I am aware,” Darcy said.

“Good,” Mr. Bennet said. “Also, the side-whiskers are not working.”

He said it mildly, as though remarking on the weather, and left before Darcy could formulate a response.

Darcy sat alone in his consulting room and admitted to himself, with considerable irritation, that he had known the side-whiskers were not working for at least a year and had persisted in wearing them out of sheer stubborn refusal to concede the point. This did not reflect well on his capacity for rational self-assessment.

Neither did the fact that he had been thinking about Miss Bennet’s smile for the past ten minutes when he ought to have been thinking about catalytic compounds.

He pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him and began drafting notes on the hereditary transmission patterns, which was productive and entirely relevant and did not require him to think about whether his patient found him ridiculous.

He thought about it anyway.