“You were looking into this before,” he said after a moment. “The fissures. The old watercourses. You had the steward pulling deeds from the last five decades past and muttering about culverts no one remembered digging. I thought you more thorough than reasonably necessary, perhaps even bored into scholarship because we did not amuse you well enough. I did not think you… anticipatory.”
Darcy turned to glance behind himself.
Bingley followed his gaze toward the carriage. Harrowe had drifted away entirely and now stood with the architect near the south wall, gesturing toward the line where brick met soil. Brutus wandered amid the rubble, nose low, tail stiff, tracing the perimeter of the foundation as though the house itself emitted a scent.
“You have brought that fellow from London, I see. Care to tell me who he is? He looks as though he would measure the sky if given a ladder.”
Darcy turned back. “Aldous Harrowe. The man I turned to for research.”
“Research?” Bingley repeated, the word half incredulous. “Darcy.” Bingley glanced round, then turned slightly, as if to block the sound of his words from other ears.
“You told me there was something you could not account for. That Miss Elizabeth’s illness had some meaning. That the ground beneath Netherfield felt wrong in ways you could not articulate. I did not press you then because you seemed…troubled enough.” His brow furrowed. “Have you revised that opinion?”
Darcy looked back at the house. At the main stair window, now boarded. At the faint, jagged seam running like a scar through mortar that had once been immaculate.
“Yes,” he said. “I have.”
Bingley drew a breath. “Then for Heaven’s sake, tell me.”
Darcy chose his words carefully, not to soften them, but to keep them from sprawling into the incoherence of superstition.
“There are several accounts I have been studying,” he began. “Translations of ancient sources, held separately by my family and Lord Matlock’s, and some obtained by Harrowe from the Archives. The persistent assertion that there is a place in this county where stewardship was once bound to something more than land and rent. A line in the ground, dismissed as metaphor because it proved inconvenient to credit it otherwise. And multiple confusions in the translations, some of which have been… attributed wrongly, prepared for in error by my aunt, Lady Catherine.”
Bingley nodded slowly. “You did not say all that before.”
“Because I did not believe it. Since then, I have become… persuaded. Moreover, I am also convinced that the descriptions did not refer to Kent at all, as she asserted, but here. To Hertfordshire. To this estate, to Longbourn, and the fields surrounding them. There are records of a culverted stream beneath this rise. A channel diverted when the house was expanded. The crack beneath your stair follows that course almost precisely.”
Bingley’s face lost what colour it had retained. “You mean to say this was inevitable.”
“I mean to say it was foreseen. Not as an earthquake in particular, but as a fracture. A breach. The land answering a neglect long deferred.”
Bingley let out a low breath. “And Miss Elizabeth?”
Darcy drew in a long sigh and drummed his fingers on his trouser leg. “Her collapses occurred at the very places the records mark as strained. The hollow where she fell. The stair where she faltered and could not pass—you have not heard that, but I was there, and I witnessed it. Each lies upon the same line.”
Bingley swallowed. “You are suggesting,” he said carefully, “that she was… what? Sensitive to it?”
“More than sensitive. Commanded, I suppose. Or possessing some control she did not know how to wield.”
“By Jove!” Bingley breathed. “But what does it mean?”
“There is in the older accounts,” Darcy went on, “a figure—styled the Lady in some versions. The one in whom the land’s condition manifests first. Weakness in her precedes weakness in the soil. Recovery in her forestalls it.”
Bingley stared. “And you believe—”
“Iknow,” Darcy said, before he could soften it, “that when her condition altered in my presence, the ground responded.”
Bingley’s eyes widened. “Responded how?”
“When the bond between us was acknowledged—however briefly—and then broken again, the shock you felt in London was the immediate consequence.”
“Bond… I do not understand.”
Darcy sighed and grimaced. Bingley would force him to confess it again. “With a… a moment of intimacy. Call it… I do not know, affection, desire, the initiation of a union—”
“What are you saying, Darcy?”
“I kissed her!”
