Darcy looked at her. The composure held, but not easily. She had not come to beg for charity. She had come because necessity had carried her to the last practical expedient and left her there with no dignity but that of frankness. The humiliation of it stood plain enough that any gentleness in naming it would only make it worse.
“How much is there?” he asked.
“Very little. I hoped to bring a trunk and perhaps a chest of drawers to the attics here, if Mrs Reeves can spare the corner she mentioned. Or to any outbuilding. I do not wish to inconvenience the house beyond what has already been suffered on our account.”
“The house will survive your box and chest of drawers.”
She looked down briefly, then up again. “If one of the footmen—”
“There is no footman to spare.”
That startled her enough to be visible. “Sir, I did not mean—”
“Nor Hadley. He is at the lower meadow. Norton is gone to Bakewell. Ashby is at the mill race and, if entrusted with a widow’s household goods, would carry them as if they were paving stones. I am the only practical person available.”
The colour left her face altogether. “Oh no. Mr Darcy, that is not necessary.”
“It is entirely necessary, unless you prefer Ashby breaking your crockery for the sake of expedition.”
“You cannot mean to go yourself!”
“I mean exactly that.”
The distress in her face sharpened. “I beg you would not. I ask only for help with the lifting. I do not ask you to concern yourself with such things. Indeed, I would muchrather—”
“Would you much rather leave them there to be thrown into the road?”
She pressed her lips together.
He moderated his tone. “Mrs Marsden, if this business is to be done, it must be done by someone. I have named the alternatives. One is absent, one occupied, one destructive. I remain.”
“That still does not oblige you.”
“No. It merely leaves me free.”
The attempt at lightness did not reach her. He tried again, more dryly.
“Besides, I am bored. If I answer one more letter before noon, I shall begin reforming the county out of spite. Allow me the more innocent employment of carrying a box.”
To his relief that won not laughter but something near it, a minute involuntary disturbance at the corner of her mouth that vanished almost before it formed. “You make mock of my embarrassment, sir.”
“I make mock of paperwork. Your embarrassment I would relieve if I could, but as I cannot, I propose to shorten it by practical means. Give me a quarter of an hour. I will find a handcart and meet you at the kitchen door.”
She still looked as though she thought the whole arrangement preposterous. Yet necessity had not altered merely because she blushed under it.
“You are very obliging,” she said at last, and because the sentence was too formal for gratitude and too sincere for politeness, he understood what it had cost her.
“No,” Darcy said. “Only available.”
He meant to spare her the burden of thanks. He was not sure he succeeded.
Thecottagestoodatthe farther edge of the village road, small and stone-built and damp in the fashion of every dwelling in the valley that had less money than walls required. Darcy had seen it before only from outside when sending broth, linen, and messages. Entering it now with the handcart behind him and Mrs Marsden before him, he had at once the uncomfortable sensation of crossing not into a stranger’s house but into the remains of a campaign fought privately and lost.
The front room had been sitting-room, sickroom, dining room, and probably in harder weather kitchen as well. Nothing in the room declared the wreck. It was thecommonplace of everything that did. A narrow table by the hearth scarred with heat. Two chairs, one sound, one mended twice. A row of brown medicine bottles on the mantel not yet cleared away. A blanket folded square over the settle. Books in a stack on the floor because there was no shelf unoccupied by other necessity. Everything clean. Everything worn. Nothing superfluous except suffering, of which the room had evidently had too much.
Mrs Marsden set down the key and removed her gloves finger by finger as though she could not yet trust her hands to anything larger.
“I am ashamed,” she said, not looking at him, “that you should see it in this state.”
