“It is nothing,” Elizabeth said, lowering her hand. And it was, now. Or near enough. “Thank you.”
Jane hesitated. “It isnotnothing. I can hear and see that much. I have never known you to flinch from company or complain of headaches. I only wish I understood what to do with it.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I do not understand it myself.”
“If it is pain, I can fetch Hill again. She can make you some tea. If it is worry…” She stopped herself, a faint crease appearing between her brows. “I know you do not always wish to speak of such things. I only mean that I will help. Listen, if that is all I can do.”
Elizabeth’s mouth curved. “I know. Go on, you needn’t hover over me. Mama will be looking for you.”
When Jane left, Elizabeth did not follow her down to the drawing room.
She waited until the sound of her sister’s steps had descended the stairs and faded, then rose and followed. But she did not go to the drawing room, where her family were gathered, but the other way—barefoot and careful—toward her father’s library.
The books were where she had left them. Some were familiar—volumes Papa had always kept, their spines worn by his idle reach—others newer, their bindings still stiff, the shop-scent not yet worn away.
What she did not know was whether the collection was deliberate or haphazard. Grouped for pleasure, variety, or some other reason. If Papa had gathered them with intention, he had done so without comment—and she suspected that no question of hers would alter that silence.
She pulled one from the stack at random. Then another, and another, until her lap was full.
Elizabeth opened one at random and was rewarded with three pages of agricultural speculation that managed to say nothing at all. Another offered a cheerful catalogue of Roman remnants—coins, broken tiles, a road whose course could no longer be traced with confidence. She closed it with a soft thud.
“What am I meant to do with you?” she muttered, low enough that only the shelves could hear.
She tried again. Ballads this time—fragmentary, moralised beyond usefulness, every verse footnoted into submission. Papa’s hand, she thought suddenly. This was exactly the sort of thing he read when he wished to pretend he was not looking for something else.
Elizabeth set that book aside and took up another, thinner, its title promising aHistory of Ballads and Tales as Translated by Rev Josias Harroweand delivering instead a collection of observations so cautious they scarcely qualified as conclusions. Most claimed to be translations, transcriptions, or a consolidation of earlier writings of irregular spelling and composition.
She skimmed, impatient now, her thumb running down the margin as though the page might confess under pressure.
Why these? Why her?
She turned another page. And another. Each passage slipped past without catching—until one did not.
It was buried in a paragraph so hedged and qualified that it nearly escaped notice altogether, offered as a reflection rather than a claim, framed with the careful distance of someone unwilling to be held responsible for what they recorded.
They set her where the land was first made known,
At the far verge where water meets with stone.
No crown was laid upon her brow,
Nor sceptre put within her hand;
She was but given to the ground,
As fire is given unto the hearth—
Not to command,
but keep the land.
She wandered not,
nor was she borne away;
She stood as first she there was set.
Yet in due time the keeping waned,
