Mr Gardiner saw the gentleman to the door. The sound of carriage wheels on wet stone followed a moment later, then receded.
For a time, no one spoke.
Mary closed the piano cover with quiet care. Kitty bent over her muslin as though the pattern required sudden and urgent correction.
Elizabeth crossed to the window and drew back the curtain a fraction more. The street below went on in its indifferent business—carts, boots, a boy calling the hour. Nothing in it had altered.
After a moment, she folded the report the gentleman had left upon the table and placed it beneath the others.
“Thank you,” her aunt said softly. “For trying so hard. You left nothing undone, Lizzy.”
Elizabeth offered a thin smile. “Indeed, there is nothing further.”
Theairheldathin brightness that promised neither warmth nor snow. Elizabeth drew her gloves more firmly up her wrists as she and Kitty passed beneath the bare branches that lined the walk. The Serpentine lay ahead, its surface a dull pewter beneath the pale sky, disturbed only where a pair of waterfowl cut across it in deliberate progress.
They had not spoken since leaving the house.
Kitty kept half a pace behind, as she had once done when Lydia’s opinions set the direction of their walks. The habit had lingered; the influence, mercifully, had not.
They turned along the edge of the lake. A nursemaid guided two thickly bundled children toward a bench; a gentleman in a dark coat stood reading near the rail. The city moved about them without intrusion. The gravel was raked. The hedges were squared. Everything on this path had been tended into order by someone whose name no one troubled to learn.
“He sounded certain,” Kitty said.
Elizabeth did not mistake the subject. “He sounded finished.”
Kitty’s answer was lost to a cough—thin, dry, caught behind her glove before it could draw notice from the nursemaid on the nearby bench. “That is worse.”
“Yes.”
They reached the bend where the trees thinned, and the water widened. The surface lay flat and civil, holding nothing beneath it that could not be accounted for. Elizabeth rested her gloved hand upon the railing and looked across it.
“Do you believe him?” Kitty asked quietly.
“I believe Mr Hawthorne has done all that may be done without conjecture. That is not the same thing as believing we know what has occurred.”
Kitty drew a breath that was nearly a sob and mastered it before it formed. “Poor Jane! I try not to think of—” She did not finish.
Elizabeth’s hand shifted on the rail, not quite reaching, not quite withdrawing. “We must not imagine what we cannot see. It serves no one.”
The wind moved across the water. The surface darkened, then smoothed again—obedient, contained, a body of water that went nowhere and threatened nothing.
Elizabeth drew her cloak more closely about her shoulders and stepped away from the railing. “Let us walk a while longer,” she said. “It will do us good.”
Kitty nodded, and they resumed their course around the smooth perimeter of the lake.
Chapter Two
Heenteredthelowerroom and set the gathered debris beside the hearth, where damp rope and splintered timber would dry before being cut down for kindling. The interior would be warm soon—if that mattered to anyone, for it did not to him. He closed the door firmly behind him and crossed to the narrow table beneath the south window.
The letter lay where he had left it.
He did not sit at once. He removed his gloves, laying them parallel upon the table’s edge, and brushed the worst of the salt from his sleeves. The floor bore the faint grit of the morning’s work; he swept it aside with the heel of his boot before drawing out the chair.
Only then did he unfold the paper again.
The seal had cracked cleanly. The impression upon it—an old crest, pressed without flourish—was still visible where the wax had cooled unevenly. He read from the second paragraph downward this time, as though to test whether the phrasing would alter upon repetition.
It did not.
