Darcy turned away first. He knew better than to start a battle of wills with an Irish Wolfhound he could not win.
He set the book down upon the desk with deliberate care. It had come from the lower library—a slim, unassuming volume of county surveys, its leather rubbed thin by age and long neglect. He might have reached for any number of more engaging works, but had passed them all by without pause.
This one had promised certainty. Predictability.
Field boundaries. Parish lines. Measurements fixed to paper by men who understood land could be rendered obedient through ink and scale. No speculation. Nothing that trafficked in imagination.
He had taken it up because the dream had troubled him, though he would not have phrased it so even to himself. Because Brutus’s conduct had demanded explanation that did not involve superstition. Because if something in the ground hadfeltwrong—if distance and direction had seemed briefly unreliable—then the sensible response was to consult what had been recorded when such things still behaved.
If there was nothing there, he would find nothing. And if there was something, then it would be named, dated, and properly accounted for.
He opened it now, standing rather than sitting, one hand braced against the edge of the desk. The pages yielded a faint, dry scent—dust, ink, something vegetal long pressed flat and forgotten.
Parishes. Acreage. Watercourses.
Orderly. Comfortingly dull.
Darcy read a paragraph without absorbing it, then another. His attention slipped, returning instead—unbidden—to the narrow stair, to Elizabeth Bennet standing there with her shawl drawn close, insisting she was only walking.
Please do not tell them.
The words pricked at him anew. Not fear. Resolve. She had known something was amiss, and she had chosen silence over spectacle.
He turned the page. A marginal note caught his eye—not in the same hand as the text, but cramped, angular, written with a pen sharpened to severity.
Boundary altered after the great frost. Marker re-set by custom, not measurement.
Darcy squinted and read it again.
Custom, not measurement.
He scanned the following lines more closely. A reference to a stand of hawthorn not aligned with any recorded hedgerow. A remark—dismissive, almost irritated—that local tenants avoided the ground “out of habit,” though no impediment was visible.
Superstition, the author concluded. Nothing more. Darcy shut the book with a snap and paced toward the rug.
Brutus moved. Not toward him, but closer to the desk, placing himself between Darcy and the window now, body angled, watchful.
Darcy stared at the dog. “This is becoming tiresome.”
Brutus’s tail waved once. No jubilant wag. No rigid agitation. Simply acknowledgement.
Darcy passed a hand over his face and forced himself to think. He returned to the edge of the desk and stood there, one hand braced against the wood.
Elizabeth Bennet had not been on the main stair.
That, at least, was certain. No guest—nolady—wandered the servants’ passages without reason, particularly not one already under scrutiny for her health. And yet she had been there, alert, composed, and determined enough to ask him not to betray her wandering.
Why?
He had no answer for that.
Nor could he account for Brutus’s conduct.
The dog had barredhimfrom the main stair earlier. Not with threat or agitation, but with a calm insistence that defied training and habit alike. Brutus did not guard capriciously. He did not invent dangers. And he had never, in all his years, placed himself bodily in Darcy’s path without cause.
Had the dog done the same with her?
Darcy did not know. He had not asked. He had been too intent upon removing her from notice—and removing himself from her proximity—to examine the matter further.
