Set in Stone, Chapter 8.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How enlightened of him,” Elizabeth said dryly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will this take long?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“And the dosage remains tolerably comfortable?”

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

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

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

“It is.”

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

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

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

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

“Does it require it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And then?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Because the camera notices what you cannot?”

“Because the camera does not look away.”

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

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

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

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

“Would I understand what I was looking at?”

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“I see,” she said.

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

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 7.

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

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

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

“I can,” Darcy said, “and I do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t see how.”

“Then you must trust that I do.”

“That’s not an answer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth looked at him. “Dr. Darcy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s still not an answer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you prefer to think so,” he said.

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

“The garden is perfectly safe,” Darcy said.

“How reassuring.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 6.

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

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

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

“Miss Bennet?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Should they not be?”

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

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

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

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

“What happened to her?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had not forgotten it now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what it was that Dr. Darcy would not.

Set in Stone, Chapter 5.

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

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

She came in and sat in the chair opposite.

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

“What are you reading?” she asked.

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

“Do you.”

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

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

“Haven’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And if there isn’t?”

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

He was doing it now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, my dear?”

“Is Mother really in Prague?”

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

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

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

“You might have told me,” she said.

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

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

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

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

She did not ask any of these things.

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

“And the other reasons?” Elizabeth asked.

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

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

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

“Elizabeth,” he said, without looking up.

“Yes?”

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

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

“No,” he said. “I have not.”

“But you will. Eventually.”

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

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

“Goodnight, Father,” she said.

“Goodnight, Elizabeth. Sleep well.”

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

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

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 4.

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

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

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

He suspected he knew what she had been assessing.

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

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

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

He found this vexing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you believe the medication is sufficient?”

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

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

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

“Which you are working toward.”

“I am.”

“With success?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And my wife?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am working on that as well.”

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

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

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

“I am aware,” Darcy said.

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

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

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

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

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

He thought about it anyway.

Set in Stone, Chapter 3.

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

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

“Miss Bennet. Please, sit.”

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

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

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

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

“And what sort of condition is it?”

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

“I do not remember it.”

“No,” he said. “You would not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he said. “At breakfast.”

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

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

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

“Is something amusing?” he asked.

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

“You were smiling.”

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

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

“How reassuring.”

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

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

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

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

“And if I experience the urge to sleepwalk?”

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

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

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

“Thank you, Dr. Darcy,” she said.

“Miss Bennet.”

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

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

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

“Odd,” Elizabeth said.

“Mm. Yes. I had noticed that.”

“Does he ever look at anyone directly?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I do not remember it.”

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

“Will you tell me what happened?”

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

“And Dr. Darcy specializes in somnambulism?”

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

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

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

“Even the side-whiskers?”

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

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 2.

After breakfast, Elizabeth decided to learn the house.

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth stood in the doorway and did not go in.

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

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

“I can see that,” Elizabeth said.

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

“How obliging of him to explain.”

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

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

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

“I had noticed the mirrors.”

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

“Why do you suppose he has so many?”

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

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

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

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

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

“It is very splendid,” Elizabeth said.

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

“Better than the mirrors?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set in Stone, Chapter 1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth dressed and went downstairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What she was recovering from had not been specified.

“Where is Mama?” she asked.

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

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

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

“She did mention gloves,” Kitty confirmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We met yesterday,” Dr. Darcy said.

“Did we?” Elizabeth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How unlike her,” Elizabeth said.

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

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

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

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