Chapter Two
The cup had returned half-finished.
Darcy stood at the sideboard in the small dining room, examining it—the porcelain, the faint trace of mineral water clinging inside, the level barely lower than when Mrs Reeves had brought it to Georgiana an hour before.
Half a cup. Less than half. He had requested a full cup that morning because yesterday she had drunk three-quarters.
He had taken that as a sign and adjusted his hopes accordingly.
The hopes were premature. Always premature—for every morning of the past six weeks, every cup carried up from the springs offered to a girl who would not drink what she did not wish to, who had refused it more often this week than the last.
He set the cup down. Mrs Reeves stood at the door with the tray, awaiting dismissal or a question. “Did she say anything?”
“Only that she was not thirsty, sir. She is sitting up. Nan is reading to her.”
Nan. The cook’s eldest girl, fifteen, attending Miss Darcy after Mrs Younge gave notice three weeks ago, and the London agency had yet to send a replacement. Nan could read. Nan was patient.
Nan was not what Georgiana required. All knew it, Nan most of all—she had said as much to her mother the first morning, in tears.
Her mother told her to try her best, and Nan had pursued that for three weeks while Darcy wrote to London, Buxton, and Pemberley, enquiring whether anyone respectable could come north for winter to tend a sixteen-year-old girl with a complaint no London physician could name.
“Tell her I will look in after I have walked the bank. Half an hour, no more.”
Mrs Reeves nodded and left. Darcy lingered at the sideboard, hand on the cup’s rim. The water was clear, the faint mineral edge the sole hint it ever held anything.
He had been in this valley six weeks. He arrived early December, after London physicians admitted they did not know how to treat his sister.
They had variously named her condition—rheumatic heart affliction, chronic exhaustion, residual disorder of the humours post-scarlet fever—and recommended rest, country air, waters at Bath, Cheltenham, Buxton, and a course of bleeding he refused outright.
None expressed certainty or offered more than vague hope that Georgiana might recover in time, if not deteriorate first.
In mid-November, an old man named Whitcombe came to the London house. A retired Derbyshire country doctor, nearly eighty, brought to town by his daughter for the season, he had heard of Miss Darcy’s illness and presented himself.
Georgiana had been ill long enough to make every day intolerable.
Merebank had fallen to Darcy that spring on the death of a distant cousin, but the estate was small, remote, and half-ruined, and the solicitor’s letter concerning it had been thrust aside almost unread.
He had no patience for a crumbling Derbyshire property while Georgiana declined before him.
Bath was the object. If she could bear removal, he meant to take her there and force some benefit from the waters.
Whitcombe then told a half-remembered story from his father’s practice—a woman in Derbyshire recovered from rheumatic fever after some weeks at Merebank, where springs rose beneath a small lake in a valley above Bakewell.
The water there, his father had once said, possessed a remarkable potency beyond that of the better-known English mineral springs.
Whitcombe could not account for it. He had never seen the place himself. But he remembered the name.
Merebank. His own neglected property. The thing he had scarcely troubled to think of stood on the edge of the very water Whitcombe described.
Bath lost its hold at once. If the account were true, there was no reason to drag Georgiana across England in search of relief when relief might already lie in his hands.
Within days, he removed his household to Merebank and took her north.
The house had been shuttered ten years, barely habitable.
He spent three days writing to Pemberley for a cook, valet, and what staff Mrs Reynolds could spare.
The servants arrived in the second week, and the house began to assume a shape fit for a sick girl.
Mrs Younge accompanied Georgiana from London, stayed three weeks before declaring the valley unsuited to her constitution and that the journey back suited it better.
Darcy paid her off. She left. The agency had yet to send a replacement.
Nan read to Georgiana upstairs because she was the best the house could offer.
But the waters had not yet benefited his sister.
Darcy thought her colour perhaps a fraction better than in London—that the joints in her hands were less stiff in the morning, that she ate more at midday—but could not tell if he saw or wished it.
Six weeks was not long. The old physician’s story concerned a woman who spent weeks at Merebank, without specifying how many.
Darcy told himself two months minimum before judging.
He had tried to write to a doctor in Buxton asking whether the medical community held any opinion on the Merebank waters to compare with his own observations. The letter remained unfinished.
He took his coat from the hall hook and went out.
The path from the house to the mere had grown familiar from walking twice daily for six weeks in every weather the valley produced.
He knew where the slope steepened, where loose stones lay beneath snow, where spring channels crossed under frost, where ice thinned mornings, where blackthorn bogged a sleeve too near.
Since the first week of December, he had carried buckets up this path—Mrs Reeves heating the water on the kitchen range, Mrs Bannon delivering the cup, the water drawn directly from the springs each morning by Darcy himself, since he distrusted the boy Thomas to fetch water that might determine his sister’s recovery or decline.
That morning, the bucket stood at the kitchen door, filled on his return from the springs at first light.
He now walked the bank for another reason.
Mrs Bannon had said—grudgingly, as was her way while complaining about her labour—that the mere’s level was lower that week than she recalled in years past. At the southern bank, where springs surfaced, the water now stood a foot from the path, unlike previous visits.
He had not observed. Filling the bucket at the same place each morning, the water lay at his feet, unnoted.
He gauged now. Walking the eastern shore in brittle late-morning light, boots sinking into crusted snow, the mere flat and grey to his right, the southern bank ahead in view.
The level was indeed lower. The pale watermark on stones marked previous high water.
Present water lay eighteen inches below.
Eighteen inches in six weeks, or eighteen inches in six years, and he had not been here to note it.
He did not know which. Not yet steward enough to understand the mere’s winter behaviour, whether it always dropped through January, whether the drop lay within ordinary bounds or signalled something else.
He had meant to ask Hadley—the drowner on the estate, an older man in the cottage near the weir who had kept the water on these meadows as long as anyone remembered—but Hadley had been at the lead mine in the neighbouring valley for four days, attending his injured eldest brother, and had not been at the weir since Darcy last walked the path on Tuesday.
He descended to the southern bank. The springs rose here, where limestone channelled the aquifer upward.
The water was perceptibly warmer than the mere—not warm, not near bath temperature, but warmer than air, than snow—visible in small disturbances where spring water rose, meeting the lake’s colder body.
He was fifty yards from the springs when he saw the blood.
Not much. A smear on the ice near the shore, dark against white, already freezing into the surface.
He traced it with his eyes—more smears, a trail of wet drag marks scored into snow, chaotic evidence of a body hauling itself across frozen ground.
From a ragged hole in the ice to the bank.
The hole was already refreezing, water beneath dark.
Then came the sound.
Low, animal, from the birch cluster near the southern shore. Not a fox—he knew a fox’s winter cry. Not any named creature’s. A human sound, forced through clenched teeth, from a body in trouble that forbids screaming, which demands breath, and breath was spent elsewhere.
He ran before the sound finished. His boots punched crusted snow on the slope, lost balance on frozen grade, recovered, lost again. He did not care. The sound still came from the birches, growing weaker.
She lay against the largest trunk. A woman—young, dark-haired, clothing soaked and stiffening cold. Her legs lay before her. Her left leg—
He stopped three feet away, body locked like a horse facing a fence it will not take—all muscles seizing utterly. Her left leg angled where no intact limb could. Below the knee, skirt fabric heavy with ice and heavier with something else.
Blood.
Enough to have left the trail behind her on the ice. Pooling beneath the broken limb on frozen ground, melting frost where it gathered, faintly steaming in January air.
Through a tear in her stocking, he saw the cause—the fabric shredded from inside, a shard white where none should be—the jagged end of bone catching winter light.