Set in Stone, Chapter 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps they deserved it,” Lydia said.

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

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

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

“Undignified,” Darcy repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Darcy and Elizabeth said simultaneously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 14.

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

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

“Miss Bennet.”

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

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

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

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

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

“And Wickham?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was both. I failed at both.”

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

“Yes.”

“With patients who are not your sister.”

“Yes.”

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

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

A pause. “After Georgiana.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lose confidence in your competence?”

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

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

He had gone very still.

“Miss Bennet—”

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

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

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

“But you think it exists.”

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

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

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

“Good.”

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

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

Elizabeth blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

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

“Which patients?”

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

“How convenient for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 13.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The casebook lay beneath it.

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

Halfway through: a name she recognized.

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

Elizabeth stopped.

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

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

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

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

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

She closed the darkroom door.

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

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

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

The third photograph showed the woman’s face directly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.