Set in Stone, Chapter 25.

The morning after her cure was ordinary in the way that mornings after impossible things are never quite ordinary again. Elizabeth came downstairs to find the household operating with a determined approximation of normalcy: Mary at the breakfast table discussing Schumann with more animation than the hour warranted, Kitty pouring tea with the careful attention of someone grateful to have hands to pour with, her mother fussing over Lydia’s complexion in a manner that suggested she had come to some private peace with having briefly been stone and did not intend to discuss it.

Her father had taken up his customary position in the morning room with a volume that Elizabeth suspected he was not actually reading. He looked up when she entered, registered something in her expression, and returned his attention to what might have been Plutarch without comment.

Darcy was in the study when she found him. He had the aspect of a man who had slept badly and then given up on the enterprise around dawn. He looked up from the casebook he had been staring at without turning a page and said, “Good morning,” with the careful neutrality of someone uncertain what the morning had a right to be.

“Good morning.” She closed the door behind her. The study looked different in daylight, less cluttered. The camera equipment had been pushed to one corner. The photographs were nowhere in evidence. She decided not to ask where he had put them.

“I have been thinking,” he said, after a pause that suggested he had been thinking about rather more than he intended to share, “about the hereditary question.”

“Have you.”

“Your younger sisters are still within what we understand to be the manifestation window. What the cure means for her—whether it has preventive application, whether your blood retains its properties now that you are no longer—” He stopped. Started again. “We do not know. And any children you might—that is, we believe the condition’s transmission is matrilineal but not uniformly expressed, and we cannot be certain that it cannot be passed down by a Gorgon’s brother—”

“Dr. Darcy.”

He stopped.

“If my sisters or my hypothetical children turn out to be gorgons, or your hypothetical children, for that matter,” Elizabeth said, “we shall know how to cure them with a few drops of their own blood. Do stop fretting.”

Something in his expression shifted. Not relief, precisely. He was not a man who relinquished a problem simply because someone told him to. But it was a recognition that she had heard both what he said and what he had not said, and had answered both.

“That is a remarkably sanguine approach,” he said, after a moment, “to a condition that three days ago you were attempting to—” He did not finish the sentence.

“Yes, well.” She studied a paperweight on his desk with more attention than it warranted. “I have since been persuaded that there are better solutions available. By a persistently interfering physician who cannot leave well enough alone.”

“I am gratified,” he said, with the particular dryness that she had learned meant he was feeling something he would not name, “to hear my intervention characterized as persistent interference rather than, for instance, timely medical consultation.”

“I am sure your case notes will reflect whichever phrasing makes you appear most competent.”

“They will reflect,” he said, “that the patient demonstrated considerable resourcefulness and a regrettable tendency toward unilateral decision-making in crisis conditions.”

“How unkind. I should have consulted you before drinking your entire supply of rue compound?”

“That,” he said, “would have been the more conventional approach, yes.”

She let the silence sit between them for a moment, acknowledging what they were dancing around the edges of. Then: “I have been meaning to ask. Why did you find rutinum compositum a less grandiose name than medusin? They are both extraordinarily baroque names for a tincture.”

He looked at her as though she had produced a concealed weapon from behind the paperweight. “I did not say I found it less grandiose.”

“You changed it.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer. Then: “Medusism was the condition. Naming it after—after the mythology seemed appropriate. Clinical. It was a phenomenon to be studied, a mechanism to be understood.” He stopped. Continued with visible reluctance. “Rutinum compositum is the treatment. At some point I realized that it should not be named after the condition.”

“Because?”

“Because,” he said, meeting her eyes with the particular discomfort of a man confessing to sentimentality, “the people taking it are not specimens. The name should be something which is accurate but does not frighten them.”

Elizabeth regarded him. His phrasing—the people taking it—landed with more weight than he appeared to have intended. “When did you change it?”

“After Georgiana.”

“Ah.”

The silence that followed was not exactly uncomfortable, but it was a silence full of things they could not yet say. After a moment Elizabeth said, “That was unexpectedly decent of you.”

“I am occasionally capable of decency.”

“No. You are frequently capable of decency but only intermittently capable of expressing it without making it sound like a clinical obligation.”

“I shall add that to my list of accomplishments,” he said. “Immediately below ‘interfering physician’ and above ‘man who independently derived a Greek myth and required a classicist to point it out.’”

“Poor Dr. Darcy. Your professional pride has taken a battering this week.”

“My professional pride,” he said, “has survived worse indignities than being compared to Hermes by a gentleman who knows his Homer better than I do.”

“Only just. And your professional pride is not the part of you I am concerned with.”

He looked at her. “What part are you concerned with?”

“The part,” she said, “that is still wearing those dreadful muttonchops despite my repeated assurances that they are not achieving the effect you believe they are achieving.”

“They confer authority.”

“They do not.”

“They suggest gravitas.”

“They suggest,” Elizabeth said, “that you have made a regrettable decision and committed to it out of stubbornness.”

“That is an uncharitable reading.”

“It is an accurate one. You are five-and-thirty if you are a day—”

“Two-and-thirty.”

“—and you do not require facial topiary to be taken seriously. You simply require people to listen to you for thirty seconds. After that the gravitas arrives on its own.”

He was silent for a moment. Then: “You are suggesting I shave them.”

“I am suggesting you consider it. As a favor to those of us who must look at you regularly. As a favor to your future wife, whoever she may be.”

He seemed to be weighing the favor to the future wife. “I shall take it under advisement,” he said at last.

“You are humoring me.”

“I am,” he said, “considering the source of the advice and weighing it against the considerable inconvenience of admitting you might be correct.”

“I am correct.”

“That,” he said, “is the inconvenient part.”

From the morning room, her father’s voice drifted through the half-open door: “Elizabeth, if you are quite finished reforming Mr. Darcy’s appearance, your mother would like to know whether we are staying another week or returning to Prague.”

Elizabeth did not turn around. “What do you think?”

“I think,” Darcy said, “that another week would be—advisable. From a medical standpoint. To ensure the treatment is fully successful.”

“From a medical standpoint.”

“Entirely.”

“How intellectually rigorous of you.”

“I certainly aspire to intellectual rigor.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I had noticed.”

She left him there, still holding the casebook he had not been reading, looking as though he had been outmaneuvered and was not entirely displeased about it. In the morning room her father had returned to his Plutarch with the satisfied air of a man who had successfully avoided being asked his opinion. Outside, the village was waking to an ordinary summer morning. The tower was still visible from the window, a little less Gothic in daylight.

Mary was explaining to Kitty why Schumann’s late work demonstrated a superior understanding of counterpoint. Lydia was eating toast. Her mother was planning something involving lace that would require a trip to the village and possibly a letter to Jane, who would be sensible about it. The idyll would continue for now, and if Darcy acted on the hints she had dropped for him, once she was no longer his patient, it might give rise to something very interesting indeed.

Set in Stone, Chapter 24.

The landlord had packed Wickham’s effects with the efficiency of a man who wished to be done with the entire business. Three cases, a portfolio, and a wooden crate that proved, upon inspection, to contain painting supplies and several bottles of dubious provenance. They would be shipped back to Wickham’s landlady in Prague. Darcy had brought Elizabeth with him, because if anyone had any say in what should be done with the pictures Wickham had made of her, it was she.

Elizabeth had said nothing when he’d suggested that she join him on the excursion to go through Wickham’s art, and burn anything that seemed to need it. She had simply collected her gloves and followed him down to the village.

Wickham had naturally taken the best room, which faced the square. Morning light came through the casement in the pale, apologetic manner of light that knows it is illuminating a crime scene and wishes it were elsewhere. Darcy opened the portfolio first. Sketches, as expected. Several of Elizabeth, all from the sitting he had interrupted. Wickham’s draughtsmanship was considerably better than his character; the pencil work was confident, precise, the likeness undeniable.

“These are well-executed,” Darcy said, because it was true and because he had learned, over the course of his professional life, that accuracy mattered even when it was inconvenient.

Elizabeth took one, looked at it with the dispassion of a woman reviewing evidence, and set it aside.

He moved to the crate. The painting was wrapped in oilcloth, which suggested Wickham had intended to transport it shortly. Darcy lifted it free, unwrapped it, and—

—stopped.

It was Elizabeth. Her face, at least: the line of her jaw, the set of her mouth, the particular intelligence in her eyes that Wickham had somehow captured despite having known her for less than a fortnight. But the rest—the serpents, the expression of blank annihilating terror, the specific rendering of the transformation’s final stage—that was not Elizabeth. That was Georgiana.

Wickham had painted his own memory onto Elizabeth’s face. The result was technically accomplished and entirely obscene.

Darcy was aware, dimly, that his hands had steadied the frame with more force than the task required. He was also aware that Elizabeth had moved closer and was looking at the painting over his shoulder, and that he should say something, and that he had no idea what one said upon discovering that the man one had recently failed to prevent from falling off a tower had been in the process of producing a functional gorgoneion from one’s sister’s death and Miss Bennet’s likeness.

“That isn’t what I look like,” Elizabeth said.

It was such a perfectly Elizabeth observation—specific, factual, and sidestepping entirely the question of what the painting was for—that Darcy felt something in his chest relax fractionally.

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”

“The eyes are wrong. And I’ve never made that expression in my life.”

“I should hope not.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then: “That’s your sister.”

He had not intended to confirm it. He found himself nodding anyway.

“He painted her terror onto my face.”

“Yes.”

“Why did he paint it at all?”

“A gorgoneion is supposed to possess something of the power of Medusa’s gaze. Someone looking into that image unawares, might fall into a mild hypnotic state. They would perhaps prove easy to manipulate.”

Elizabeth snorted in amusement. “I suppose Wickham was planning to mount it in his study and show it to his creditors, when they approach him waving unpaid bills around.”

“It is possible.”

Elizabeth reached past him, lifted the painting from his hands, crossed to the fireplace, and fed it directly into the flames.

Darcy watched it catch. The oilcloth went first, then the canvas, curling inward as the fire took hold. Wickham’s brushwork—really quite fine, technically—blackened and disappeared. The face that was Elizabeth’s and Georgiana’s and neither of theirs watched from the flames for perhaps five seconds before the serpents ignited and the entire composition collapsed into ember and ash.

“Well,” Elizabeth said. “That’s done.”

Darcy discovered he had been holding his breath. He let it out carefully.

“The sketches,” he said, returning to the portfolio. “These have no power. They’re studies. A competent artist’s record of—” He stopped. Of what, precisely? Of the woman Wickham had intended to bleed and paint and sell? “The landlord said you could keep any of Wickham’s work that pleased you.”

Elizabeth took the portfolio from him, walked back to the fireplace, and shook the contents directly into the fire.

“Miss Bennet—”

“They’re his,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t want them.”

The sketches caught faster than the painting. Wickham had used good paper; it burned cleanly. Darcy watched her face in the firelight. She looked calm, intent, and entirely certain.

“I prefer your photographs,” she added.

Darcy’s internal processes, generally reliable, briefly lost their way.

The photographs. The human-form studies. The ones he had developed in the darkroom while telling himself he was documenting physiological markers and pre-episode presentations, which was true, and which had not explained why he’d returned to certain images longer than the clinical examination required, which was also true, and which he had filed under professional thoroughness and declined to inspect further.

“They’re merely documentation,” he said. His voice sounded normal. This was a relief.

“Of course.”

“I was looking for micro-expressions, postural indicators, anything that might precede an episode.”

“Naturally.”

“It’s standard methodology. Charcot’s work at the Salpêtrière established the principle—”

“Mr. Darcy,” Elizabeth said. “I have seen the photographs. I know what’s in them.”

Darcy developed a sudden keen interest in the middle distance.

“I’m not certain,” he said carefully, “that you do.”

“Then I’ll be more specific. They’re the work of a man who has been trying very hard to convince himself he’s conducting an empirical study, and who has not been entirely successful.”

This was mortifying, and unfortunately also accurate.

“Miss Bennet—”

“I prefer them to Mr. Wickham’s sketches,” Elizabeth continued, “because Mr. Wickham was drawing me in order to use me, and you were photographing me because you couldn’t help yourself. I find the second reason considerably less objectionable.”

There were probably several intelligent responses to this. Darcy could not locate any of them. He settled for honesty, which was often a serviceable substitute.

“I did not intend—”

“I know you didn’t. That’s rather the point.”

The last of Wickham’s sketches collapsed into ash. Elizabeth brushed her hands together, glanced at him, and smiled: not the smile she used in company, but the smaller, more private version he had seen perhaps three times in total.

“Shall we go?” she said. “I believe my father is expecting us for luncheon, and if we’re late he’ll assume we’ve been petrified and organize a search party.”

Darcy collected the remaining cases. His hands were steady. This was something.

“The photographs,” he said. They were walking down the stairs now; he addressed the back of her head, which felt safer than the alternative. “If you would prefer I destroy them—”

“Don’t you dare.”

He nearly missed the last step.

“They’re evidence,” Elizabeth said, over her shoulder. “You might need them. For the research.”

“Ah. Yes. The research.”

“Exactly. The research.”

They emerged into the square. The morning had progressed into something warmer; the village was conducting its ordinary business with the determined cheerfulness of a community that had recently lost a visitor to a tragic accident involving an unsafe medieval structure and was collectively declining to discuss it further.

Elizabeth took his arm. This was new. He found he had no objection to the development.

“Mr. Darcy,” she said, as they turned toward the house.

“Miss Bennet.”

“Your photographs are perfectly respectable.”

“I’m gratified to hear it.”

“The technique is excellent. Very rigorous. Extremely scientific.”

“You are mocking me.”

“Only a little.” She glanced up at him. “You do realize you’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m a physician. We’re trained to project confidence even when the diagnosis is uncertain.”

“Yes. You’re quite good at projecting confidence. It’s everything else that gives you away.”

Darcy discovered, to his surprise, that he was smiling. “I shall work on my expressions.”

“Please don’t. I’ve grown rather fond of the ones you already have.”

They walked in silence for a moment. The house came into view above the trees. It was no longer the mirror-trap it had been a week ago, but simply a house, on a fine morning, with a family in residence and no one currently petrified.

“The painting’s gone,” Elizabeth said quietly. “That’s what matters.”

“Yes.”

“And Mr. Wickham is in pieces at the base of a tower.”

“Also yes.”

“So we can reasonably consider that entire line of inquiry closed.”

“I believe so.”

“Good.” She squeezed his arm once, gently. “Then let us go home, and see if Mary has recovered enough to inflict Beethoven on the household. I find I’ve missed her musical tyranny.”

“A sure sign of returning normalcy.”

“Exactly.”

They walked up the drive together. Behind them, in the village, smoke rose from the inn’s chimney and dispersed into the morning air. Ahead, the house waited, and the final decoction of Gorgon’s blood and rutinum compositum, which should cure Elizabeth of this hereditary condition.

Darcy looked forward to the moment of the cure, but not to the separation which would inevitably follow.

Set in Stone, Chapter 23.

They went to Kitty first.

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

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

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

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

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

Then she blinked.

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

“How long?” she said.

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

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

“You did.”

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

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

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

“No,” Darcy said. “You wouldn’t.”

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

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

“Certainly,” Elizabeth managed.

They left her by the window.

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

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

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

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

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

“How long have I been sitting here?”

“Three days,” Elizabeth said.

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

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

“You were indisposed,” Elizabeth said.

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

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

“Did I miss anything of note?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Elizabeth said.

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

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

“How long?”

“A few days,” Mr. Bennet said.

Mrs. Bennet absorbed this. “The girls?”

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

“Lydia has not run off with anyone unsuitable?”

“Not yet.”

“Kitty is not—”

“Kitty is in the parlour having tea.”

“Mary has not—”

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

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

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

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

“I shall need to lie down.”

“Of course.”

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

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

“That’s all of them,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes,” Darcy said.

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

“The cure worked,” she said.

“It did.”

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

“I did.”

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

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

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

“You are still wearing those,” she said.

“I am aware.”

“I remain unconvinced of their utility.”

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

“And yet they persist.”

“They do.”

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

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

“Is something wrong?”

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

“It isn’t.”

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 22.

The first thing he was conscious of was his hands. The second was that they moved when he willed them to.

Stone did not move.

He looked at his palms, turned them over, flexed his fingers. The action was smooth. Unimpeded. He did not feel as though he had been elsewhere, precisely. There had been no sense of time passing, no dreamlike interval, but the last thing he remembered with clarity was the top of the tower stairs and Elizabeth closer than he had expected and her face.

He remembered her face.

He was standing on a tower parapet. It was night. There was music from the village below, faint and cheerful. Someone was talking: Lydia Bennet, some distance away, recounting something with the energetic inaccuracy characteristic of her narration. He did not attend to the words.

Elizabeth was three feet from him, watching him with an expression he could not immediately parse.

His mouth tasted of something warm and metallic.

He touched his lips. His fingers came away smeared faintly red in the dim light. Not his blood.

The inferential chain assembled itself with the methodical efficiency of long training: petrification upon direct exposure to the transformed state; intact stone body; reversal of petrification requiring the application of blood from the afflicted individual; the blood had been applied to his mouth; Elizabeth’s lower lip bore a small cut that had not been there when he had last seen her in the study.

Conclusion: she had depetrified him.

The medical brain, satisfied with this arrangement of the facts, withdrew. The personal brain arrived more slowly and found the conclusion materially insufficient.

She had kissed him while he was stone and brought him back.

He did not move. He suspected movement would require decisions he was not presently equipped to make.

“Wickham told you I was taken?” Lydia was saying from somewhere to his left, apparently addressing Elizabeth. “Which I wasn’t, obviously, I was at the festival having a perfectly nice time until I saw the lights up here and thought I ought to investigate, and honestly I think it’s rather rude of him to have used me as bait or whatever it was without asking first, though I suppose if he’d asked I might have said no, so perhaps I see his point—Mr. Darcy, are you quite well? You look as though you’ve seen something dreadful.”

“I am entirely well,” Darcy said. His voice emerged more evenly than he had expected. “Thank you.”

Lydia looked unconvinced but was distracted almost immediately by something glinting at the base of the tower. “Is that—oh, is that Wickham? In pieces? How did he get in pieces?”

“He fell,” Elizabeth said.

“From up here? But that’s terribly careless of him.”

“Yes.”

Lydia leaned over the parapet with the unselfconscious interest of someone examining a mildly surprising natural phenomenon. “I don’t think you can put him back together. Some of those bits are really quite small.”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t think you can.”

Darcy realized he was still looking at her. He made himself look at Lydia instead, which was easier and considerably less illuminating.

“Well,” Lydia said after a moment’s contemplation of the scene below, “I suppose that’s one way to end an evening. Shall we go back? I’m freezing and I left my shawl at the festival and Mary will be dreadfully smug if I catch cold.”

She started down the stairs without waiting for an answer, still talking: something about sausages, and a man with an accordion, and whether anyone had thought what Papa would say about this, because Papa would certainly have Opinions.

The sound of her voice receded.

Darcy and Elizabeth regarded one another across three feet of parapet in silence.

He knew he ought to say something. Several things, probably, beginning with an accounting of his own physical state—no residual stiffness, no loss of sensation, motor control entirely intact—and moving on to the more urgent matter of how the reversal had been effected when his research had consistently indicated that the process required not merely the application of blood but a precise admixture with other catalytic agents, none of which had been available on a tower parapet at the village festival.

He said none of this.

What he said was, “You reversed the petrification.”

“Yes.” She was still watching him with that expression he could not parse. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was coming here. I thought—”

“That Lydia was taken.”

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t.”

“No.”

He nodded slowly. The self-reproach would come later, he suspected. Just now she looked tired and self-contained and as though she had already worked through the entire accounting herself and arrived at provisional conclusions he would not presume to interrogate.

“The cut,” he said, which was not what he had meant to say.

She touched her lower lip briefly. “The harpe. He didn’t mean to, I think. He was—” She paused, frowned faintly. “Flailing is probably the most accurate word.”

“Before or after you pushed him off the parapet.”

“During, I think.”

“I see.”

He did not, in fact, see. The precise sequencing of events was unclear but he found he did not require the details immediately. They would emerge in due course. Just now the salient facts were that Wickham was dead, Elizabeth was not, and Darcy had been petrified and subsequently restored by a process that should not have worked outside a laboratory with proper equipment and which had nevertheless worked in a manner he would need to examine more closely when he was not standing on a tower parapet tasting blood and trying very hard not to think about the fact that his patient had kissed him.

His soon to be former patient. The depetrification proved the catalytic principle. If the blood could reverse petrification it could, correctly applied, cure the condition. He had the missing variable. They could proceed.

He was aware this constituted a significant medical breakthrough. He was also aware that the breakthrough had required Elizabeth to throw a man off a tower, cut her lip, and kiss a stone physician in front of her youngest sister, and that his predominant emotional response to this series of developments was not scientific satisfaction.

He decided not to think about this too much.

“We should go down,” he said after a moment. “Lydia will have alarmed the household by now and your father will want to know you’re safe.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. She did not move.

Neither did he.

The music from the festival continued below, faint and incongruously cheerful. A waltz, possibly. He had never been particularly good at identifying music by ear.

“Darcy,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

“When you came up the stairs. You saw—”

“Yes.”

She nodded once, a small precise motion. “Were you afraid?”

“I do not recall that I had time to be.”

Something shifted in her expression: relief, possibly, or recognition, or something he did not have a name for and suspected he would be thinking about at length later when he was alone and no longer tasting her blood.

“That seems fair,” she said.

They went down.

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.