“Then your cousin lied to both quarry and wall.”
“That particular line was the doing of the steward, Wickham.”
“Was he always so industrious where dishonesty was concerned?”
“From the reports I have now gathered, yes.” Darcy’s voice flattened. “He preferred the appearance of provision to provision itself.”
Elizabeth held the page and then, almost unwittingly, said, “That must offend you more than negligence alone would have done.”
He did not answer immediately.
Jane, very still over her cup, said lightly, “Lizzy, you interrogate the whole household one by one.”
“Only in pursuit of truth,” Elizabeth said.
“That pursuit is not always comfortable,” Darcy observed.
His tone was calm. Something in it nonetheless made Mrs Marsden lower her eyes.
Elizabeth knew at once that she had come too near a private door. Yet the knowledge of his hatred for falsehood, once heard in the parlour at night, had not faded. It altered every conversation now.
“Comfort is overvalued,” she said, because retreat would look too much like fear.
“That depends entirely on whether one is on a roof in January or sitting by a fire with a ledger,” he replied.
Mrs Marsden smiled then, but the smile hurt to see. It held too much effort and too little ease.
By the time the light waned enough to require lamps, Elizabeth was tired in earnest. The pain in her leg had moved from sharpness to deep, resentful ache. Mrs Marsden saw it first, rose, and with the unquestionable authority of an elder sister declared the visit at an end.
Darcy offered at once to send Nan or Martha to attend her. Elizabeth said, “I can manage with Jane.”
The refusal was too quick. It struck with a little force. She saw its effect on him—not injury exactly, but a clean withdrawal as if he had set one feeling down and locked it away before anyone could accuse him of having brought it in.
“As you wish,” he said.
Mrs Marsden looked from one to the other and said nothing.
He bowed and left them.
Chapter Twenty
Thewomanarrivedjustbefore noon, when the house lay between occupations and was most open to interruption.
Voices reached her first in the passage. Mrs Bannon’s unmistakable note of resistance. Mrs Reeves’s lower, flatter tone of one determined not to let resistance prevail in her domain. Then a third voice, old and rough as sheepwall stone, said something Elizabeth could not catch yet ended the dispute immediately.
The door opened.
The woman who entered was small enough that, by height alone, she could be overlooked in any company of healthier bodies. But she forbade overlooking. She wore a black cloak shiny at the folds from age and weather, a man’s knitted comforter wrapped twice around her throat, and a bonnet long since indifferent to fashion’s demands. Her face was brown and folded as if the valley winds had inscribed themselves upon it for seventy years. The eyes beneath the bonnet were far from old—fierce, pale, and exact.
Behind her stood Mrs Reeves, not deferential but clearing space in the way practical women did for elders whose authority never leaned on title.
“This is her,” Mrs Reeves said, and for a moment, Elizabeth was not sure which of them was being introduced to the other.
The woman looked at Elizabeth and said, “Aye. I see that with the eyes God left me. Shut the door, Nan. If Mrs Bannon means to object, she may object outside wood like other Christians. I'm Bess—Old Bess, if you please, because my daughter was Plain Bess, God rest her soul.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Pleased to meet you.”
Nan Reeves, who had followed up the passage hoping to witness whatever might occur, shut the door at once and remained there, visibly reverent.
