A rifle report—clean, sudden, unmistakable.
Elizabeth felt it first as a jolt behind her eyes, a flare of white that made the room lurch. Kitty gave a small, strangled sound. Lydia’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes bright and terrified all at once.
“What was that?” Kitty whispered.
Another voice rose outside—angrier now, too close—and then several at once, overlapping, indistinct.
Mama tore the cloth from her face. “That was a gun,” she cried. “I heard it! Oh—oh—he is dead. I know it. I know it! Mr Bennet is dead in the yard, and no one will tell me—”
“Mama,” Jane said urgently. “I am sure Papa is—”
But the words came too late. Mama’s eyes rolled back. She slumped sideways with a soft, boneless sound, the salts scattering across the floor.
Jane caught her just in time. “Mama? Mama!”
Kitty dropped to her knees, fumbling for the bottle. Lydia stood frozen, staring at the door as though she expected it to burst inward at any moment.
Elizabeth tried to rise.
The floor tilted sharply, and she caught herself against the crate, breath coming shallow and fast. The sound of the shot still rang in her ears, louder now in memory than it had been in truth.
Outside, someone shouted an order. Another voice answered—hoarse, urgent. No one said whether the shot had been meant as a warning or a threat. No one said whether it had found its mark.
Elizabeth pressed her hand flat to the wood beside her and waited, heart hammering, for the next sound to tell them which it had been.
The tray had beenpushed aside more than once. A cup stood perilously close to the book’s corner, its tea gone dark and still, a skin drawn across the surface. A plate bore the remains of something once warm—now untouched, forgotten—its edge nudged back to make room for another volume opened and closed again.
Matlock shifted it without comment, sliding porcelain and bread aside with the back of his hand until the table cleared just enough to bear the weight of the book between them. He turned another page. The sound was dry—the careful rasp of vellum lifted and set down again.
Darcy leaned forward despite himself, one hand braced against the table’s edge as though the surface might tilt if he did not hold it steady.
“This one is a later transcript,” Matlock said, indicating the cramped hand crowding the margin. “Copied in the twelfth century from somethingolder. You can see where the scribe was in doubt about the spelling—here, and here. He did not understand the place-names, but he preserved them anyway.”
Darcy bent closer. The ink varied from line to line, dark where the quill had bitten too deeply, faint where the hand had faltered. Corrections pressed in from the margins, some careful, some impatient. This was not invention. It was labour.
“And this?” Darcy asked, tapping a different leaf. “The hand is not the same.”
“No,” Matlock agreed. “That is later still. Fifteenth century, perhaps. Copied from a fragment that had already lost its beginning.”
Darcy turned the page himself this time, slower. He traced the line with his eye, then read it again, the words refusing to settle into sense. Names repeated. Places shifted. The same phrase surfaced more than once, always slightly altered, as though no two men had agreed how it ought to be rendered.
“You see,” Matlock said, “why it was never a single book. No one trusted one account alone.”
Darcy sat back. “I see a great deal of effort,” he said. “I see patience. But I also see a fondness for embroidery. One man copies another, and another after him, each persuaded he is clarifying what came before. That is not history. It is accumulation.”
Matlock looked up. “And yet accumulation is often all history has to offer.”
Darcy huffed a short breath. “You cannot expect me to believe that this”—he gestured at the spread of pages between them— “was preserved for its narrative qualities alone.”
“I never claimed as much. Quite the opposite.”
“But it does not saywhy, or what we are expected to do about it. Without a reason, it is nothing more than entertainment. Worse, it has become a… a vanity! Nay, a vice, for some. IfI, as you insist, am the… whatever you call it, the supposed heir of this… nonsense, then I must have something sensible upon which to act!”
“Sensible!” Matlock snorted. “You act as if you are waiting for Bedevere himself to step from the pages and take you by the hand.”
“That would be my preference, yes. Nothing in here says what was done,” Darcy said. “It only implies some sort of failure. Who or what failed?”
Matlock glanced at him. “That question,” he said, “has not been answered to anyone’s satisfaction in some centuries.”
