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"She means to separate you," Miss de Bourgh says. "She has sent for two doctors and she will send for a third. She will bleed him and blister him and make him miserable, and she will say it is for his health, and it will not be. It will be so that he goes back to thinking he ought to marry me." She twists her fingers in the fringe of her remaining shawl. "And I never wanted to marry him either."

The word either sits between us on the path.

"Either?" I say carefully.

Miss de Bourgh looks at me. Her eyes are that washed-out blue, and they are not the eyes of a ghost at all. They are very sharp.

"I do not know what has happened, Miss Bennet," she says. "I do not wish to know. You looked on Friday, at his bedside, like someone standing on a very narrow plank over a very deep river. I know that look. I have worn it every day of my life." Her voice drops. "But I know that I heard my cousin laugh yesterday, from the corridor. Do you understand? I have known him eight-and-twenty years, and I have never once heard him laugh. And I do not care how it was got. I want him to keep it."

My eyes sting. I blink, hard.

"And I want—" She stops. She looks down at the twig in her fringe as though noticing it for the first time, and plucks it out, and turns it over in her thin fingers. "I want to stop being promised to someone. All my life I have been promised. To Darcy. To my health. To Mama's notions. I have never once been asked." She looks up. "If he marries you, I am not promised to anyone at all. Do you know what that would be like?"

"No," I say softly. "I do not think I do."

"Neither do I." Something flickers at the corner of her mouth. It is the ghost of Friday's smile. "I should very much like to find out."

From far off, toward the house, a bell begins to ring.

Miss de Bourgh's head turns sharply. "That is Mrs. Jenkinson's bell. She is awake."

"Then you must go."

"In a moment." She steps closer, and to my astonishment, she takes my hand. Her fingers are cold and thin and much stronger than they look. "Mama has given orders that you are not to be admitted to his chamber. But the orders went to Mrs. Jenkinson. And Mrs. Jenkinson," says Miss de Bourgh, with the air of a general revealing a battle plan, "does whatever I tell her when Mama is not in the room. She has done so for years. Mama has never noticed. Mama never notices anything I do, because she does not believe I do anything at all."

I stare at her.

The bell rings again, closer.

"Come tomorrow," says Anne de Bourgh. "At eleven. Mama takes her bath at eleven, and she is never out of it before noon. I shall see to the rest." She squeezes my fingers once, hard. "I will help you, Miss Bennet."

Then she smiles. Not the ghost of a smile. The real one, the one that lit her whole face in the doorway on Friday, wide and fierce and a little wicked.

"I have been waiting eight-and-twenty years," she says, "to disobey her."

Chapter Eight — Darcy

"Gentle walks only, sir," says Mr. Pettigrew. "No excitements. Not even a strong opinion."

"I have never had a strong opinion in my life."

Pettigrew looks at me over his spectacles. Fitzwilliam, lounging in the window seat, laughs so hard he has to put down his coffee.

It is Wednesday. I have been in this bed since Friday, and I have counted the roses on the curtains eleven times. I have read every book Fitzwilliam could find in a house where no one reads. I have been visited by Dr. Hollis of Tunbridge Wells, who arrived yesterday with a jar of leeches and a manner of great confidence, and who left again within the hour, with the leeches, and a manner of rather less.

"I do not know what you said to him, sir," Pettigrew says now, packing his bag. "He would not tell me. He only said that you were the most unreasonable patient he had ever attended, and that he would not stay where his professional judgment was called medieval."

"I called the leeches medieval. Not him. He took it personally."

"He did, sir."

"Does my aunt know?"

"Her ladyship has written to a gentleman in Brook Street." Pettigrew clicks his bag shut. "A Dr. Crane. He has a great reputation for diseases of the mind."

"How many does that make?"

"Three, sir. If one counts Sir Augustus, who is still at Brighton."