They reached the edge of Meryton and stepped aside for a cart rattling past, the driver muttering to his companion about the “scarcity of good timber” and “foreign distractions.” Elizabeth caught none of the particulars but felt the weight in his tone—the same weariness she had heard in Mr Bellweather’s voice last week when he spoke of rising prices for muslin.
At the market square, neighbours called greetings—Mrs Gould remarking on the fine weather, Mr Pratt tipping his hat with a cheerful observation about harvest yields. Elizabeth returned their courtesies easily enough, yet some part of her remained half turned inward, tracing the flight of those restless swallows now darting above the apothecary’s roof.
“…so, I thought we might send her one of Mary’s essays,” Jane was saying, her tone tickling with amusement. “Though I am not certain our aunt will understand it any more than the last. Lizzy, are you even listening?”
Elizabeth blinked. Jane’s gentle look reminded her that she was not alone in her reverie.
“I was,” she said, though she had lost the thread.
Jane squeezed her arm. “You have been elsewhere all morning.”
“Only halfway elsewhere,” Elizabeth admitted. “The other half is firmly tethered to my boots. Though whether they tread on earth or air, I cannot always say.”
Jane shook her head and glanced at the bookseller’s shop. “Well, come on. We might as well do a little daydreaming together.”
They ducked into the bookshop, its dim interior cool and faintly scented of ink and dust. The shelves leaned at comfortable angles, and the floor creaked in protest of their tread. A cat slumbered on the windowsill, indifferent to commerce or conversation.
Elizabeth let her fingers drift over the cracked spines, drawn toward the history section out of long habit. A slim volume on Anglo-Saxon etymology tempted her, followed by a curious pamphlet on the migration of swans in the Scottish isles. She flipped a few pages, lingered on a marginal note written in a cramped feminine hand, then returned it to the shelf.
Nothing she needed, but much she wanted.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” Jane asked from the next row, where the bindings were more brightly coloured.
“Only a glimpse of distraction,” Elizabeth murmured. “Or perhaps a forgotten treasure.”
Her gaze caught on a battered book with a green leather binding and no title printed on the edge. The spine was sun-bleached, the gold lettering on the cover mostly worn away. She tilted it free, feeling the dry whisper of its weight shift in her hands.
“Not another ballad book,” Jane teased. “Last time, Papa put Mary up to setting one of them to music, and we heard nothing else for a week.”
“I shall only peek.”
The pages crackled faintly as she turned them. A ballad about St. Melangell—protector of hares. A sailor’s lament for a lost bride. A curious charm for mending broken ploughs (“Best read aloud,” someone had scribbled in pencil). She smiled. None of it useful, all of it delightful.
Confess thy sins by river’s side,
And turn thee not again;
For what the running waters take
The wise recall not then.
Another page, another curious entry:
When orchard wights abroad do roam,
Then bar both gate and door;
Set milk without upon the step,
And call the fruit no more.
Elizabeth gave a soft laugh under her breath. “Nonsense,” she whispered fondly.
Then, nestled in a corner of a brittle page, almost as an afterthought, her eyes caught a final fragment—scrawled in a different hand, darker ink, the lines cramped and slightly slanted:
Love vaunteth not, nor envieth,
Nor seeketh for her own;
