Chapter Sixteen #2
“I had thought to spend the winter at these books, Miss Bennet.
You appear to have shortened the work by half before noon.
The man who set this column down was… shall I say not what a steward ought to be.
My cousin was hardly a scrupulous man, but the man he hired to manage his estate had managed to outdo even him.
You have unmade three months of the steward's work in three minutes.”
“Then he must have been industrious indeed. Or particularly idle.”
“Both. Often in the same column.”
From the hearth, Jane said, without looking up from the cloth she was refolding for no cause Elizabeth could discern, “Lizzy has always been better at catching a false note than the rest of us. She could tell when Hill had altered the butcher’s account long before Papa bothered to look.”
“The housekeeper, I presume? She altered the butcher’s account?” Darcy asked.
“Only once,” Elizabeth said. “And not from vice. She had paid twice by mistake and could not bear to explain it to my mother. I made her tell Papa instead. He laughed, paid the difference, and told her if she meant to commit household crimes in the future, she must choose ones less stupid.”
Darcy looked down at the page again. “I begin to understand a handful of things at once.”
“Only a handful? I had hoped my character might furnish at least a dozen.”
“Your character may. Your accountancy, for the present, furnishes four.”
He turned the page. They went on.
The intimacy of the next half hour consisted almost entirely of nouns and numbers.
Stone. Timber. Lime. Two shillings sixpence.
Three men for four days. Carriage impossible in weather.
Wages entered and not paid. Repairs charged and not performed.
Yet because every exchange required them to bend over the same paper, to follow the same line with eye and finger, to interrupt and correct and answer, the thing took on an energy Elizabeth had not looked for.
He explained the meadow carriers, and she understood them with a speed that surprised him each time anew.
She challenged an expenditure on walling, and he answered too fully, sketching with the pencil in the margin the line of a bank under thaw.
She asked who Ashby was, who Hadley, who Norton, and with each answer, the valley grew more legible.
There was pleasure in it—real pleasure, of the mind first and then, more treacherously, of the shared attention that made the mind’s movement visible.
At one point, he said, “No, you are reading that line as a debit to wages when it is a debit to cartage,” and took the book slightly toward him.
“I am reading it as illegible,” Elizabeth said. “A debit to cartage would imply the existence of a consonant not actually present on the page.”
“There is a consonant.”
“There is a blot.”
“Miss Bennet, if every blot were taken for deception, the nation would collapse under the weight of its own correspondence.”
“Perhaps it ought.”
“That is revolution by stationery.”
“The safest kind.”
He laughed then, outright enough that Jane looked up quickly from the hearth and then down again with such speed Elizabeth might have doubted the look had she not been prepared for it.
Silence entered after that. Not uncomfortable silence. Worse. A silence too full of what had just transpired. Jane got up, making a sort of scuffle about settling her sewing basket, and went out—sending Elizabeth a warning glance as she left the door conspicuously open to the hall.
Darcy cleared his throat and turned the page.
“Here,” he said, more carefully, “are the arrears Hadley believes owing to the men who cleared the lower run last March. Mr Reeves entered them as paid. Hadley says two were paid in part and one not at all.”
Elizabeth studied the names. Two she did not know. The third, she had heard already from Mrs Hadley.
“Pemberton. Tom’s father?”
“Yes.”
“Then he was working while his son’s lungs were already poor.”
Darcy looked at her. “You have heard about the boy?”
“Mrs Hadley informed me this valley contains more than one human body in distress. I am now trying to be equal to the information.”
Something in his face changed—softened, perhaps, though softness was too weak a word for what happened in him when admiration met caution, and both were forced to occupy the same expression.
“You are very quickly equal to more than I expected,” he said.
Elizabeth ought to have answered lightly. She did not.
“So are you.”
Jane returned then with the broth tray, saving or interrupting them—Elizabeth could not tell which. “Mrs Reeves says my sister is not to spend the entire evening proving herself useful at the expense of her strength.”
“Mrs Reeves is a tyrant,” Elizabeth said.
“Mrs Reeves has fed you through two days of self-pity and one of recovery,” Jane returned. “You may call her a tyrant only after you have drunk the broth.”
Darcy stood at once and took the ledger from Elizabeth’s lap before the motion of reaching for the cup could disturb her leg. His fingers brushed her wrist as he did it.
This touch, too, was incidental. That did not save it.
He set the book down on the table, but not before Jane had seen the page, the marks in two hands, the margin carrying Darcy’s strong pencil notations and Elizabeth’s smaller, sharper corrections in ink. Jane’s gaze lingered there a fraction longer than on the cup she offered.
“You have been annotating one another,” she said.
Elizabeth took the broth. “Only the accounts.”
“Of course.”
The answer was civil. Elizabeth heard the strain all the same.
Darcy must have heard something, for he said, with a quickness almost unlike him, “Miss Bennet has an eye for false entries that would have saved me six months’ labour when I first came into Pemberley.”
Jane looked at him then. Not long. Not staring. Long enough to make Elizabeth wish, with sharp helplessness, that he had said anything else.
“How fortunate for every estate she visits,” Jane said.
Darcy drew back half a step. Elizabeth held the broth in both hands, though it was too hot for comfort. Jane turned to the hearth and busied herself adjusting a cloth that required no adjusting.
“Well. If I begin charging consultation fees,” Elizabeth said, “you may both hold yourselves answerable for the corruption.”
Jane smiled at last, but faintly. Darcy inclined his head in grave acceptance.
“Then I shall pay in ledgers,” he said. “It is the only currency you have yet shown any warmth toward.”
“An infamous slander. I have shown warmth toward broth on at least three occasions.”
“Under protest.”
“A protest does not invalidate the warmth.”
“No more than a correction invalidates a page.”
There it was again—the private movement under the words, too quick and exact to be anything but its own species of understanding.
Jane must have seen it. How could she not? Elizabeth wished, absurdly and too late, that she could gather back every sentence and redistribute them into safer shapes.
But language, once spoken, belonged to the room.
Darcy gathered the smaller account book under his arm and the left the larger one behind beside Elizabeth’s chair. “I will send the second volume tomorrow,” he said. “If you have not exhausted your appetite for mismanagement.”
“On the contrary, you have sharpened it. I find it preferable to the dulling effects of laudanum, and better than the view which I can hardly see through that window.”
He looked at her with that same almost-smile, the one that made seriousness seem not absent in him but briefly companioned. “The view, Miss Bennet, has been praised beyond its deserts for generations. I should rather earn a better commendation.”
And then he was gone.
Jane did not speak until the sound of his step had faded along the passage.
“He likes you,” she said.
There was no accusation in the words. That would almost have been easier to bear. There was only truth spoken by a woman too fatigued for pretending not to see.
Elizabeth set down the empty cup. “He is kind.”
Jane gave a brief, unsteady laugh devoid of mirth. “Lizzy, do not answer me as if I were Mama. I know the difference. Kindness is what he has shown all of us. This is something else.”
Elizabeth looked at the ledger on the table. At the page bearing both their marks. At the pencil Darcy had forgotten and left behind by the blotter.
“If it is,” she said carefully, “it can lead nowhere.”
“So you say. Be careful, Lizzy. Men of Mr Darcy’s situation in life can hardly afford—”
“I know, Jane. I know better than you can possibly comprehend.”
Jane watched her drink her broth an instant longer.
When she turned back to the fire, Elizabeth saw her clasp her hands very tightly, as if some effort of self-command required physical anchoring.
The sight pricked her with a guilt not yet named, for naming it would have forced her to follow it farther than she was prepared to go.
Later, when Jane had accidentally dropped into a fitful rest in the chair by the hearth, Elizabeth reached for the ledger once more.
The page they had last examined lay open where he had left it. One pencil, two hands upon the paper. It was absurd that a leaf of figures should look intimate.
She touched the margin where his note sat beside hers and drew back almost at once, as though the paper had kept some trace of his hand and might expose her for testing it.
Leaving had been simpler while Northmere was only pain, danger, and concealment.
Northmere with ledgers, laughter, and a man who had said he would rather earn a better commendation was another matter altogether.