Chapter Seven
The letter to Buxton lay before him, no longer blank—three paragraphs composed in the hour after Mrs Marsden’s departure, the question at last taking shape.
He wrote and read it. Now he sat with it open in the chill, the sentences no longer his focus, for his thoughts dwelt on the mere—had done so for the better part of an hour—and would remain so until he acted.
He thought of the woman in the ground-floor chamber whose leg had been broken by the very water he had carried uphill each morning for six weeks for his sister.
The irony was sharp. The water had failed to heal his sister, so far as he could tell, and now had injured a stranger with no quarrel against it—and both failure and injury stemmed from the same mere.
The mere was the one thing Darcy had trusted, yet understood not.
He did not know what the water was. He did not know what it did.
He had hauled buckets uphill for six weeks, driven only by the memory of a dying old man recalling a story his father told fifty years before, and the water had neither clearly aided his sister nor spared this woman once touched by it.
He folded the letter, returned it to the drawer, and rose.
The house was quiet in a manner unknown since Miss Bennet’s arrival—no sounds from the parlour, no footsteps on the stairs, no Mrs Bannon appearing in doorways with her aggrieved patience.
Mrs Marsden’s presence had drawn the crisis away like a cloth pulling moisture from the air, drawing it from the hallways to the room at the passage’s end, where it could be tended by one who knew her duty.
He was neither required nor able to remain in the study with the folded letter and the silence yawning at the windows. He took his second coat—the intact one, not the one that had been cut in strips for a stranger’s leg—and went outside.
January dusk filled the valley like water in a basin, the last light draining from the hills toward the mere.
The air was bitter, and his breath clouded before him.
The path from the house descended the slope he had climbed that morning with Miss Bennet in his arms, her blood staining his shirt, her fingers on his neck.
In daylight, the path was an obstacle. In the dark, it was the same ground he had crossed for six weeks—frozen and still, leading down to the water that had set all this in motion.
The mere was a black mirror in the dusk.
Snow on its surface took the blue of the fading sky, and the trees along the far bank stood as dark columns against white.
No wind stirred. The surface was so still that the first stars emerging above the eastern ridge were doubled in the water—each point of light matched by its twin below, the sky and its reflection meeting in an indistinguishable seam.
He walked the northern bank, not the eastern shore where he had seen blood—he was not ready to tread that stretch in darkness—but the near bank where the ground was firm and the mere stretched before him in full breadth.
The weir lay to his left, a dark mass, the hatches frozen, the overflow silent.
The valley was dark in every direction except behind him, where the house stood.
He came to the water’s edge. The cold bit through coat and shirt to the skin beneath, unmarked because his gaze rested on the mere, the only thing in the valley warranting attention.
The mere was unremarkable. Four acres of spring-fed water in a limestone hollow, mineral-rich and cold, of no measurement by any estate’s usual standards.
It had been a single line in the solicitor’s description of the property Darcy inherited six months prior, “All that piece or parcel of mineral water called the Mere, containing four acres or thereabouts, together with the banks and margins thereof,” and had not concerned him until an old man in London spun a story.
On that story’s strength, Darcy had brought his sister north in winter, carried buckets uphill each morning for six weeks, and finally penned a letter to a doctor in Buxton with questions to which he did not yet know the answers—whether others had observed what he had, whether the water held qualities measurable rather than merely believed, whether Georgiana’s slight improvement was reality or wish.
Now the same water had pulled a woman through its ice and fractured her leg below the knee.
The same water, perhaps, whose minerals kept the springs from freezing even in cold—allowing Miss Bennet to walk upon snow that looked like meadow but was a thin crust atop the spring’s warmer channel.
She had not known. There had been no sign.
The mere had given, at every dusk for six weeks, the look of a flat, safe field.
He turned toward the house. Merebank, from below, was a dark mass on the hill—the chimneys cold save for three.
He climbed the slope. The gate’s broken hinge caught his sleeve, tearing a thread from his coat cuff.
He did not stop. In the last twenty-four hours he had lost a waistcoat, a shirt, and much of his composure, and the sleeve was a trifling addition to a tally he did not care to reckon.
The kitchen was warm. Mrs Reeves stood at the range. Mrs Marsden sat at the table with a bowl before her—the second broth, kept warm—eating slowly, the spoon moving with the care of one who had not eaten since dawn and hesitated to eat too quickly. She looked up as he entered.
“Mr Darcy.”
He had taken his hat off at the door, and he hung it on the rack. “Mrs Marsden. Mrs Reeves. How is Miss Bennet?”
Mrs Reeves acknowledged him with a nod and returned to the range. Mrs Marsden set down her spoon.
“My sister sleeps. The second laudanum dose took an hour ago. She will sleep through the night unless pain wakes her. I have left the bottle within her reach should she need more.”
“I am very glad to hear it. She will need comfort when she awakens, and from a voice she trusts more than mine.”
“She does trust your voice, Mr Darcy. She told me so. She was very exact about it, but I am afraid that was the only subject she could address with any degree of clarity.”
He found no reply. Exact was a term he rarely applied to himself, and the Miss Bennet he discerned from her dryness by the bank and her refusal of laudanum and sleep was the sort to articulate such matters. He sat, for standing had become difficult. Mrs Reeves set a bowl before him unbidden.
He ate the stew, very good indeed, whether improved from the morning’s portion or by his unsettled hunger. Mrs Marsden finished hers, set down the spoon, and rose.
“Goodnight, Mr Darcy.”
“Goodnight, Mrs Marsden.”
He heard footsteps down the passage to the parlour, the door opening and closing, the faint noise of her moving within the room where her sister slept.
A minute later came the second door’s opening and closing—the steward’s office, where Mrs Bannon had at last produced a cot, and Mrs Reeves made a bed.
Mrs Marsden was settling for the night. The household was closing itself for rest.
He washed his bowl. Mrs Reeves did not object.
She had ceased protesting his occasional kitchen forays in the second week of his residence, upon learning such forays meant he was lost in thought and wished no interruption, and that he did no harm by drying his own cup.
She banked the range, wished him goodnight, and went up the back stairs to her attic chamber, where Nan slept—Nan had come down an hour before, after Georgiana’s sleep took her, had eaten in the scullery, and had retired.
The two women of the Reeves family were now above, under the eaves as they had been for six weeks.
He was alone in the kitchen. The fire banked. The house silent save for minor creaks—the settling wood, the drip of meltwater, a shutter’s tapping on the ground floor.
He returned to the study. His own chamber was upstairs at the corridor’s far end, past Georgiana’s south chamber.
He had moved down to the study since rescuing Miss Bennet—so near the parlour where she lay, and the study’s settee offered a place to lie without climbing stairs past his sister’s door at untoward hours.
He had told himself the arrangement was temporary. He had yet to decide how temporary.
The settee was too short and the cushions thin. He did not lie down at once. He rekindled the fire he had allowed to die in the afternoon and sat at the desk with the letter once more. The sentences endured. Tomorrow he would give the letter to Norton to send with the morning post.
He replaced it in the drawer and looked to the study door opening onto the passage opposite the parlour’s closed door.
Miss Bennet slept behind that door. Mrs Marsden, by now, also slept behind the adjoining door.
The ground floor contained two exhausted women and a man attempting rest on a too-short settee, an arrangement improper by any standard Darcy had learned, and the impropriety was a matter for tomorrow.
Tonight, it was the only option, and he would not pretend otherwise out of scruple.
He lay on the settee with a coat over him and boots on.
The fire revived, the room warmer than in the afternoon.
He closed his eyes and listened to the house—the settling wood, the drip of meltwater, the shutter’s irregular tapping—silence belonging to those who had reached their limits and gone to bed.
He slept some. Of the duration, he was unaware, but he was awakened with a start when the sound came through the wall.
He was on his feet before ending his slumber. The sound came from across the passage—a cry, high and torn, a woman caught in something inescapable. It came again, louder. Words formed or began to, broken by whatever gripped her behind closed eyes.