“From Miss Darcy,” she said, with the grave importance of a girl carrying intelligence between two invalid kingdoms. “She asked if you were awake enough to read. I said I did not know and had better ask before I promised anything on your behalf.”
Elizabeth held out her hand.
The note was small and carefully folded. The hand on the outside was neat but visibly tired, as if the writer had paused more than once with the pen between fingers that stiffened when held too long. Elizabeth opened it.
Miss Bennet,
Mrs Reeves tells me you are improved this morning and that the surgeon has given you another day, which I hope signifies better things than it would have yesterday. If you would like a book, Nan can bring one down from my room. She says you have already had Cowper, which I think was Papa’s favourite and Fitzwilliam’s when he wants to pretend he is not anxious. I do not know whether you prefer history or poetry or something else entirely. If you are too tired to answer, I shall not be offended.
Yours, Georgiana Darcy
Elizabeth read the note twice.
When she looked up, Nan Reeves still stood at the foot of the bed with the book under her arm, watching her with the conscientious patience of a girl who had been made a reader, messenger, and witness all in one winter and had not yet learned to be careless in any of the roles.
“Tell Miss Darcy,” Elizabeth said slowly, “that I am not too tired to answer. Tell her I should like very much to borrow whatever book she most wishes another person to read, which is not the same as asking for the best book in the room. And tell her that Mr Cowper has already been of service to me in the small hours, though I cannot claim acquaintance strong enough to know whether he excels in anxiety or only its management.”
Nan considered this. “That is rather a lot to remember.”
“Then come to the table and write it down for me.”
The girl’s face brightened in a way that made her all at once fifteen rather than merely useful. She crossed to the table, found paper in the drawer with the confidence of long service to one house, and held the ink for Elizabeth while she wrote from the bed with awkward care and a hand that tired before the second line was done.
By the time the note was folded, and Nan had gone upstairs with it, Elizabeth had done more writing than she had in a fortnight and was exhausted as if she had walked ten miles.
But the exhaustion was companionable. It belonged to effort. It belonged, astonishingly, to the beginning of something.
She lay back. Outside, beyond the window, the winter light sat pale upon the valley. Somewhere below the house, the water that had not taken her leg ran under stone and ice toward people she had not yet met. Somewhere above her, in the south chamber, a sixteen-year-old girl with painful hands was opening a folded sheet of paper and reading Elizabeth’s answer.
For the first time since leaving Longbourn, Elizabeth found herself thinking not only of how to get away, but of what might happen before she did.
Chapter Thirteen
Hadleycarriedtheheart-shapedspade over one shoulder as if it weighed nothing, though the iron blade was broad enough to fell a smaller man. He had come up to the house after breakfast, wiped his boots on the stone with a care born less of respect for the flagging than of long habit, and asked for Mr Darcy in the tone of one inquiring whether the next necessary pair of hands had been found at last.
Darcy sat in the study with three letters open before him and none answered. One was from his solicitor in London acknowledging the first set of instructions about the northern property. Another from Pemberley, Reynolds reporting that Georgiana’s room had been aired every third day in expectation, now less confident, that she would return before the weather turned. The third was the unfinished sheet on which he had tried for half an hour to draft a second direction regarding money, labour, and the repairs Hadley said the water-meadows required before lambing began in earnest.
He had not written beyondYou will authorise whatever immediate expenditures are requiredbecause the phrasewhatever immediate expenditureswas the sort of gentleman’s nonsense from which real work suffered. It conveyed liberality while leaving another man to decide what it meant, and he had spent enough of his life unpicking the damage done by orders issued in that tone.
So when Norton opened the study door and said, “Hadley is here, sir,” Darcy laid down his pen as if the summons brought relief rather than interruption.
Now he followed the drowner down the slope below the house, the frost breaking under their boots in dry white crackles, the mere to their right and the lower meadows stretching beyond it in washed winter light. The day was clear as January days sometimes were after hard cold—every stone in the field walls distinct, every birch branch dark against the pale sky, the distant rise above the village carrying a thin bright edge where the sun touched it. The beauty offended him a little. Beautiful land was often land disguising practical failures.
Hadley wasted no preliminaries.
“You see that hatch yonder,” he said, pointing with the spade handle toward a low timber structure where the first of the carriers took off from the main run. “It should have been lifted and cleared twice before winter set in. Wasn’t. Silt’s set in under the gate. If we get another thaw and then a hard frost over it, the whole thing will lock, and we’ll spend half a day breaking ice where a sensible man would have taken the mud out in October.”
He moved on before Darcy could answer, as if answers were not the point. They walked the bank, and as they passed the valley translated from picture to use. Here, the carrier that should have taken water across the meadow to warm the root and sweeten the grass before lambing. Here, the place where the wall had slipped because the drain behind it had gone untended. Here, the narrow cut that ought to have been kept open with a boy and a shovel twice a week and had instead been left until reeds and frozen rubbish made a dam of neglect.
Hadley spoke of water as Aldridge spoke of flesh—not as symbol, but as a thing moved by conditions and punishing stupidity without malice.
“If it flows here,” he said, stamping the heel of his boot near the lip of a channel, “then the lower meadow takes warmth three weeks earlier than by weather alone. Earlier grass means stronger ewes. Stronger ewes mean less burying in March. If it doesn’t flow, you may still get lambs, but weaker ones and more dead, and the women will curse the cold in their hands while stripping skins off those that never drew breath.”
The directness did not offend Darcy. He had spent too many years in rooms where men refused to name consequences until they arrived and proved expensive.
“How many meadows depend on this run?”
“Yours? Three directly. Two more if Hadley Close and the lower Pemberton ground are done proper after. Used to be better managed. The first water in the valley. Your cousin let the carriers choke and the men go unpaid, and now every man farther down thinks himself clever if he gets in before Merebank, which would have made my grandfather spit.”
