“Mrs. Phillips repeated what she heard from her husband, who had it from an older tradesman, who claimed he had it from a mason who worked at Longbourn when the new house was raised. It is not a court record. The entail followed. We will have to confirm the rest with my father.” She drew her cloak more closely around her shoulders. “There is a thread, Mr. Darcy, and it runs from Malcolm’s carelessness into our very parlour.”
“Threads do,” he said. “That is the misery of them. No knot ties itself.”
They had reached the beeches and turned along the ridge path. The air smelled of cold leaves and distant smoke. A rook rose, complaining, from a thorn bush. Elizabeth’s eyes travelled over the familiar horizon and then, as though unable to resist, returned to him.
“The servants’ quarters,” she said. “My aunt was certain they were sealed. The workmen spoke of it. There must be traces.”
“There often are,” he replied. “Discrepancies in the new house plans, a window that appears on the outside of the house without a corresponding room within or a door that no longer opens—or opens to a wall.”
“Do you think me foolish for wanting to look?” sheasked.
“I think you are brave for wishing to know,” he answered, with a gravity that warmed her. “Ignorance is sometimes comfortable, but it is never safe.”
“I cannot help but wonder if the current…incidents at Longbourn are linked in some way to the fire and old servants’ quarters.”
“It would certainly explain how someone could come and go without being seen,” Mr. Darcy concurred. “I suppose our next step is to seek confirmation of the tales.”
She smiled, pausing again before she spoke. “I mean to begin a search on some morning, when the house is fullest and shadows have no license. Jane shall go with me.”
“Good.” He paused. “If you will accept my company when the time suits, I would add another candle to your search.”
“Thank you,” she said, very soft. “Yes. But let us wait until we have more information.”
They walked in silence again, a silence that had nothing of awkwardness in it. Elizabeth’s thoughts, having expended themselves in facts, collapsed back into impressions: the night sounds she had heard, the laughter that had not been her father’s, the candle set like a small, deliberate threat on the corridor floor. She told him of each—quietly, without embroidery. He listened with the attention that had come to feel like a rare courtesy: noflinching, no friendly dismissal—only the man, steady as a pillar, taking in each detail and setting it upon the shelf of his mind in order.
“When the candle was taken in,” he asked, “was the wick fresh-cut or blunt?”
“Blunt,” she replied, surprised by the question. “As if it had been used before and snuffed with fingers.”
“And the holder?”
“Old brass, dulled—nothing I have ever seen before. We have nice candles in the storeroom—my mother keeps beeswax for herself and for visitors—but she swore she had reported a handful from her chambers missing. I was ashamed to doubt her word, but…I doubted it.”
“Doubt is a tool,” he said. “It is no sin to use it.”
She laughed a little at that. “You make it sound like a spade.”
“It is very like a spade,” he returned, and his mouth quirked in a way she had come to recognize as humor attempting to remain solemn.
They had come full circle upon the crown of the hill and paused as if by mutual instinct where the view broke open. The morning had warmed a degree; a light wind tugged at the brims of their hats. Elizabeth looked down at Longbourn and felt the familiar ache, half love and half anger, taught by years of possessing a thingwithout any true claim upon it. The land that ran under her feet, the hedgerows she had known since childhood, the orchard that threw petals like showers every spring—it was hers and was not hers. It would pass out of her hands because a man named Malcolm had left a candle burning, and another man had taken up a pen and written a chain into law.
She did not realize she had spoken aloud until she heard the answer to the thought she had not intended to voice.
“Entails can be barred,” Mr. Darcy said, very quietly. “Though not without the concurrence of the next heir.”
“Mr. Collins,” Elizabeth said, and could not keep the flatness from her voice.
“Mr. Collins,” he affirmed.
“And the cost,” she said. “It would be dear.”
“Yes.”
She folded her hands together on the rail of the stile, pressing the chill of the wood into her palms until her thoughts steadied. “I do not know that it would be right to attempt it,” she said at last, “even if he were amenable. It would be merely to secure a future whose nature is uncertain for a family that must change inevitably. Besides, Mary seems happy for his company. If they marry, then Longbourn will stay with the Bennets. Mr. Collins mighteven be convinced to revert to his ancestor’s name—Bennet.”
A smile—wry, affectionate—touched Mr. Darcy’s eyes. “Your father would agree. He is a philosopher by whose lessons others must live.”
“Just so,” she said, and they were both silent for a moment, each pondering filial tenderness and mild exasperation.
