“Indeed,” Mr. Philips agreed. “We are not guests tonight, Mrs. Thompson. We are family.”
The housekeeper nodded, her mouth trembling, then turned toward the back of the house.
Elizabeth met Mr. Philips’s eyes over the children’s heads.
For the first time since receiving the letter, she saw the full weight of what waited before them reflected in another face: the dead to mourn, the children to soothe, the household to stabilize, the business to understand, and whatever legal tanglesfollowed to unravel. She could not do it all. Not at once. Not alone.
“I shall look through the rooms and begin a list of what must be done,” Mr. Philips said gently. “You see to the children.”
Elizabeth nodded, though her throat felt too tight for speech.
When he moved away, the children clung more tightly, as though every departure now felt like abandonment. Elizabeth drew in a slow breath and made herself loosen her arms enough to look at them.
“Well,” she said in a voice so falsely bright she scarcely recognized it, “this will not do at all. I have come all the way from Hertfordshire, and not one of you has told me whether you have ever heard the story of Tom Thumb.”
Sophie sniffed. “No.”
Edward shook his head, though he tried to wipe his face quickly as though remembering he was nearly a young gentleman.
Thomas only hiccupped and held up his wooden horse.
“No?” Elizabeth widened her eyes. “Then it is a very good thing I arrived when I did. I should not like to think of my cousins going another day in ignorance of such an important personage. Come along upstairs, and I shall tell you all about him while you eat your supper.”
“Was he brave?” Edward asked in a small voice.
“Exceedingly brave.”
“Did he have a mama?” Sophie whispered.
Elizabeth’s smile faltered for only an instant before she steadied it. “He had people who loved him very much.”
The answer seemed to satisfy them enough to move.
Elizabeth rose slowly, gathering Thomas’s blanket and taking Sophie’s hand while Edward kept close to her other side. As they began climbing the stairs, she kept speaking, inventing details asshe went because the children needed her voice more than they needed accuracy.
Yet halfway up, she glanced once toward the closed door of the parlor where Aunt Gardiner had so often sat with her sewing and Uncle Gardiner had read aloud by the fire.
For one terrible moment, the house seemed to tilt around her.
Elizabeth shut her eyes briefly. Oh, please let this be only a dreadful dream.
Then Thomas tugged at her skirt, Sophie sniffed beside her, and Edward looked up with red, trusting eyes.
Elizabeth opened her eyes, tightened her hold on their hands, and continued up the stairs.
∞∞∞
One week later…
At last, the Gardiner house no longer felt quite so much like a place awaiting burial.
It was still painfully altered. No amount of scrubbing could entirely remove the damp smell left by the flood, and every room seemed to echo now that the children were gone. Yet there was order where there had been confusion. The nursery had been packed first, with trunks of clothing, toys, and books sent after the children to Longbourn in Mr. Philips’s carriage. Edward, Sophie, and little Thomas had cried so bitterly when they learned Elizabeth would not accompany them that she had nearly changed her mind on the spot.
Only the promise of Jane’s gentle company, Kitty and Lydia’s livelier games, and Mrs. Bennet’s certain determination to smother them with more cake than sense, and the promise that Mrs. Thompson and Lizzie would follow as soon as possible, hadfinally persuaded them into the carriage. Elizabeth had stood upon the steps until the vehicle disappeared from sight, smiling and waving long after she could still see their small faces pressed to the window.
Then she had gone back inside and cried for five minutes in the linen closet.
After that, there had been no time.
