Elizabeth's mouth opened on another question, but she could not make a sound before there was a knock at the door.
No one answered quickly enough, and Darcy came in on the second tap.
He halted on the threshold. Elizabeth saw that Mrs Reeves had not told him whom she would admit. Perhaps spared herself the trouble. Perhaps surprise would serve better.
Old Bess looked at him and gave a short nod, neither deferential nor rude. “There he is, then. The new shoulder.”
Darcy closed the door behind him with care, his eyes first flicking to Elizabeth and then falling curiously on the older woman. “That is a very odd introduction in my own house My name is Darcy.”
“Folks call me Bess. You’ll forgive me if I did not wait in the kitchen like a tradesman while the house decided whether old women may speak in parlours.”
The furrows in his brow grew deeper. “I would not have asked it of you.”
“No. That I know. Else I would not be here.” She planted her stick, unseen until now, more firmly against the floor. “You keep better than your cousin did, though not yet well enough to trust yourself.”
A flash of moral effrontery crossed his face. “That is likely true of most houses and most men.”
Old Bess gave a brief approving grunt. “Better. Pride with ears on it. I can work with that. Come nearer.”
Darcy did, and with a flicker of amusement, Elizabeth fancied it was the first time in better than fifteen years that he had obeyed an elder's bidding. He stood at the foot of the bed, not so close as to crowd but close enough that Elizabeth could see his eyes shift from Old Bess to her face and then to the coverlet’s slight rise over the wound. The old alertness was there instantly, as if entering every room where she lay by first taking stock of pain’s state in his absence.
“The water’s up to mischief and mercy together,” she said. “The girl knows some of that already. You need know the rest. A place can go wrong quietly. A place can come right quietly too, but only if the keeping’s honest. No more paper-mending over rot. No more treating grief as an inconvenience to the accounts.”
Darcy’s face grew very still. “You speak as though my cousin’s faults remain active forces in the valley. It is merely a matter of accounting—funding and neglect, which I am restoring.”
“Lies linger where folk live by what was promised. Ask Ashby. Ask Hadley. Ask Mrs Pemberton if warmth missed from the meadow last spring is dead and gone because the gentleman who missed it is in the ground. The dead go nowhere fast in a valley this small.” Old Bess pointed, with startling accuracy, not at Darcy’s chest but at something more intangible in him. “You have a habit, I think, of deciding which truths suit others and which are best borne by yourself.”
Darcy did not move or ask how the old woman could know such a thing. That was answer enough.
“Sometimes,” he said at last, “other people’s burdens do not require my help to carry.”
“Aye. And sometimes a man says that because he means to spare them and ends by sparing only himself the look their faces wear when they hear. Measure which is which carefully. The water won’t do it for you. Neither will I.”
No reply came. Elizabeth looked at him and saw, perhaps for the first time clearly, not only strength and reserve but the cost reserve exacts from the man who practises it. He stood as if long habit held him upright where others might have moved or bristled or laughed off the old woman’s presumption. Habit and something akin to shame moved beneath it.
Old Bess, satisfied perhaps that she had said all she came to say, took a step back.
“That’ll do. I’m too old to spend a whole day in a rich man’s room telling him what his conscience should have said sooner. Nan, fetch my basket.”
Nan sprang from the door as if released from enchantment.
Mrs Reeves rose, basket in hand. “You might take some broth before you go.”
“I might not. Your broth’s too good and makes me weak in principle.”
This, said of Mrs Reeves, produced the nearest thing to a smile from the housekeeper Elizabeth had yet seen in company.
At the door Old Bess looked back once, not at Darcy but at Elizabeth.
“Don’t mistake being noticed for being owned. And don’t mistake leaving for freedom if you’re only carrying the same snarl somewhere farther off.”
Then she was gone, Nan after her, and Mrs Reeves following because houses always needed translation after prophecy.
Darcy remained, but there was no purpose in his lingering. It was as if he had forgot how to walk out after them.
Elizabeth snorted and gestured after the retreating party. “Does everyone in Northmere begin acquaintance by diagnosing the moral weaknesses of strangers?”
For an instant he looked almost startled, then something dry and unwillingly amused crossed his face. “Only the most esteemed among them.”
