Elizabeth closed her eyes.
This was worse than Netherfield.
But why? Mr Collins had gone back to Kent as soon as the roads cleared—Mr Collins, whose very voice caused ripples of agony down her spine. The air should have eased. The strain should have lessened. She had told herself as much with quiet confidence the day she had watched his carriage depart before the storm.
Instead, her troubles spiralled on without him, and her body seemed determined to collapse into the space he had vacated.
She reached her room at last and sat upon the bed, waiting for the nausea to pass. It did, eventually, leaving behind a weakness so complete she could not have said where it began. She lay back and stared at the ceiling, listening to the house move around her.
Below, a door closed. Mr Hill was chopping more firewood. Someone laughed.
Elizabeth turned her face toward the window. The light had faded again, though the hour had scarcely changed. Outside, the garden lay under a thickening coat of snow that was so deep only the most intrepid spikes showed through. The rosemary, once so stubbornly green, sagged beneath it.
She did not know when she began to cry. Only that the tears came without effort or sound, slipping down into her hair and vanishing there, as though even that small evidence of distress were unwilling to remain.
Whatever this was, it had not left with Mr Collins.
And whatever it required of her, it was no longer content to wait.
Chapter Thirty
The break in theweather lasted three days.
Long enough for the roads to turn to slush, then harden again with frost. Long enough for Mama to declare the worst of winter past and drag Mary back to Meryton to admire lace. Long enough for Papa to walk the perimeter of the fields once more and pronounce himself cautiously satisfied.
Then, on the fourth night, the wind came.
It did not announce itself properly. There was no long warning, no gradual thickening of cloud. It arrived late, sharp, and furious, rattling the shutters with a violence that suggested long-checked impatience rather than the natural teeth of winter. Freezing rain followed first—hard, slanting pellets of ice, driven sideways so that it found every weakness the house had not yet discovered. Only after that did the snow fall, wet and heavy, clinging to what the rain had already slicked into a frozen glare.
By morning, nothing moved.
No carts on the road. No messengers. Even the servants ventured out only in turns, quick and unwilling, returning with cheeks stung raw and boots soaked through. The world beyond Longbourn had narrowed to what could be seen from the windows, and even that changed by the hour as the wind worried at drifts and stripped branches bare.
Papa said little at first. He stood at the window longer than usual, his hands clasped behind his back, watching the line of the barns through the blowing snow. When he did speak, it was to ask after roof tiles, then shutters, then whether the grain bins had been checked again since dawn.
“They were sound yesterday,” Mr Hill reminded him. “The doors held through the stoutest of the gusts.”
“Yes,” Papa replied, gazing out the window. “Yesterday.”
By the second day of the storm, he could not be kept indoors. He pulled on his boots and coat and went out with two of the men, returning an hour later with water on hiscuffs and a look Elizabeth did not care to see upon his face. He said nothing at dinner, but he did not eat much either, and when Mama began to complain of the inconvenience of being cut off from society, he waved her off without humour.
“The inconvenience,” he said, “is not the point.”
When the storm broke after several days, it did so almost grudgingly. It would be some days more before the roads were passable by anything but the most intrepid. Papa bundled himself in as many layers as could be found and went out to his barns, with ledger and pencil in hand.
He came back slower. Frozen from beak to boots.
The harvest had been sound. Of that, there was no question. The bins had been dry, the roofs intact. And yet, grain that should have kept dry and sound for years at a time had begun to heat in places.
Not everywhere. Not evenly. One bin untouched, another only lightly spoiled along one edge. Damp where there had been no leak. Warmth of spoilage where there should have been cold.
“It makes no sense,” Papa said that evening, more to himself than to anyone else. “If it were water, it would spread. If it were rot, it would be predictable, would smell foul. This is… just dry and black. I have never seen the like. It is almost as if…” He trailed off, then shook his head. “We will know more tomorrow.”
Elizabeth listened from her chair by the fire.
She had been unwell for more than a fortnight now. Long enough, she should have recovered from any mild complaint several times over. The illness that had struck her down at Netherfield—whatever it had been—had come upon her suddenly and released her just as cleanly. This did neither.
There was no fever. No single point of pain she could name and address. Only a weakness that ebbed and returned without pattern, a general agony that refused to be dislodged. Some mornings, she could sit up and read a page or two. Others, she could scarcely bear the light.
