Harrowe’s attention flicked to him, then returned to her with renewed intensity. “You’re aware,” he said, “that the events of last night weren’t… isolated.”
“I am aware they were felt elsewhere,” Elizabeth replied. “If that is what you mean.”
“And more. The land’s been groaning for some time. You’re not the cause.” He said it quickly, as though forestalling an objection. “But you’re… the measure.”
Elizabeth absorbed that in silence. The words settled uncomfortably close to truths she had not yet given shape.
Harrowe stepped nearer, then caught himself and stopped short, as though remembering propriety at the last possible moment. “There are accounts,” he said. “Ballads. Marginalia. Notes dismissed as metaphor because they didn’t fit doctrine. They speak of a meeting.”
Darcy’s breath hitched into a cough he could not quite restrain. He drew out his handkerchief and turned away as his shoulders shook.
Elizabeth tore her gaze from him. “A meeting?”
“A convergence,” Harrowe amended. “Of place and time and persons rightly prepared. Not chance. Never chance.” His hands lifted, shaping something invisible in the air. “The poets made it ceremony. The mystics made it ritual. I believe they were reaching for something they couldn’t understand.”
“And you can?” Elizabeth asked.
Harrowe hesitated. Just long enough for honesty to slip through. “Maybe.”
Darcy made a sound then—low, restrained, edged with pain. Elizabeth turned despite herself, and she began moving towards him.
He shook his head once, imperceptibly. Whether in warning or apology, she could not tell.
Harrowe followed her gaze and softened his tone. “That weren’t stray,” he said. “Presence alone won’t keep it. If you come to it without the right of it, it’ll do harm.”
Elizabeth returned her attention to him. “You speak as though this were a dance.”
Harrowe gave a short, startled laugh. “Mayhap it is.”
She did not smile. “You think,” she said slowly, “that Mr Darcy and I must be placed somewhere specific. At a particular hour. To do… something.”
“Aye.”
“And you do not know what that something is?”
Harrowe’s mouth opened. Closed. “Not… entirely.”
Elizabeth exhaled. The sound was almost a laugh. “How reassuring.”
Darcy shifted as he put his handkerchief away, and a bead of sweat trickled down his cheek. Elizabeth’s hands clenched again, the familiar, unwelcome instinct to go to him rising sharp and immediate. She forced herself to remain still.
“You would have us attempt this,” she said, “on the strength of verse and conjecture.”
“On the strength of pattern,” Harrowe replied. “And on the evidence of what has already occurred.”
Elizabeth’s gaze slid back to Darcy. He met it steadily, though the effort showed now in the tight line of his mouth, the careful control of each breath. He had not spoken a word since she entered. And yet she felt—unmistakably—that he was waiting for her decision.
“I will not be handled like some sort of a… a talisman.”
“No!” Harrowe answered quickly. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“And I will not be frightened into obedience,” she went on. “Nor persuaded by reverence. Whatever this is, it is not a performance.”
Harrowe inclined his head, solemn. “Aye.”
Elizabeth looked between them then—at the scholar who believed he saw the end of the road, and the man who bore its cost in his body already.
“If there is to be an answer,” she said quietly, “it will not be found by injuring one of us to spare the other.”
