Chapter 19 #2
“Of course it does,” Mrs Reeves said. “You arrived from the south with an invalid sister, a dead cousin’s title papers, and no idea where the good linen was kept.
Then you dragged a second invalid out of the mere and got blood all over your fine white shirt.
The valley would have discussed you if you had done much less. ”
She went back inside before he could answer, leaving Ashby to hide what might, in another man, have been a smile.
Darcy spent the next two hours with Norton over the store lists and then with Hadley at the lower wall where the stones had slipped near the drain.
Work proved, as it usually did, the most reliable discipline available.
One decided what must be mended and mended it.
One decided what must be paid and paid it.
One kept hands and attention occupied and spared the mind its more unproductive habits.
Yet even discipline had limits.
When he came in at last in the late afternoon, cold to the wrists and with the ache across the shoulders that only ladder work could produce in a body more accustomed to riding and ledgers than roof-slope crouching, his first awareness on entering the hall was not of his own fatigue but of warmth and voices from the parlour.
Not many voices. Two.
Mrs Marsden’s, low and even. Miss Bennet’s, lighter, with that current of suppressed life in it which made even fatigue sound like intention.
He stood in the hall unreasonably aware of his cuffs, damp now and drying, of the wind in his hair, of the fact he had come in looking not entirely the composed master of the house but a working man only temporarily restored to gentility by better cloth.
Then, because retreat would have been absurd, he went in.
The parlour was exactly as the south light meant it to be at that hour—warmer in appearance than in fact, the long pale beam across the carpet gone amber at the edges as the sun lowered behind the ridge.
Miss Bennet lay propped against the pillows, a shawl about her shoulders and a second cushion at her back.
Mrs Marsden sat in the chair beside her with mending in hand.
On the table beside the bed lay the meadow ledger open where he had left it the evening before, and several smaller slips of paper weighted under the forgotten pencil.
She looked up at him. Her gaze passed in a quick involuntary movement from his face to the loosened tie of his cravat, from that to the damp darkening the cuffs of his shirt where the coat had fallen back, then to the reddened skin across his hands before returning to his face with a composure so swiftly reassembled that the very speed betrayed her.
It was not the noticing alone that unsettled him.
It was the sense she had seen too much and disliked herself for it.
Darcy knew, with absurd distinctness, not the cold on his hands but that she had imagined them warm.
“Mr Darcy,” Miss Bennet said. “Has the roof submitted?”
“Under protest. Ashby says it may continue to hold if no one praises it within hearing.”
“Then I shall be moderate in my admiration. Sit by the fire before you freeze in that hunched over posture and never recover.”
Mrs Marsden’s needle paused. Darcy saw it. He saw also that Miss Bennet had spoken not as a guest to a host but as one accustomed, already, to issuing useful orders where she saw discomfort.
“I am not frozen,” he said.
“No? Your hands contradict you from across the room.”
He looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. The knuckles were indeed reddened nearly raw from cold and wet slate. The sight ought not to have mattered. Yet because she had seen it first, it did.
Mrs Marsden set down the mending. “There is hot tea. Mrs Reeves left the pot on the hob. I will fetch it.”
“No need,” Darcy said too quickly.
“There is every need,” Mrs Marsden answered and rose with such composed efficiency that refusal would have been discourtesy. She left them, with the door standing open behind her.
Silence entered the room—not empty, not safe.
Darcy glanced back over his shoulder. “Why does she leave every time I enter the room? Have I given offence?”
“Far from it. Jane's way of showing regard is by making herself useful. And you, Mr Darcy, look like a man who could use a hot cup in his hands.”
He nodded. “I see.”
Miss Bennet let her book fall shut over one finger to hold the page. “You have had a day of useful severity, I think.”
“Ashby does not distinguish much between severity and instruction.”
“That is generally how one knows the instruction is worth having.”
He came at last to the fire and held his hands out to the blaze.
Heat found the skin with a sting sharp enough to make him draw breath.
From this closer position he could smell not merely woodsmoke and tea but the faint mineral freshness that now hung always about her, whether from the wound dressings or the water or the mere itself he could not say.
“Has the ledger given you enough employment to prevent mutiny?” he asked.
“For an hour. After that it inspired only questions.”
“That is its proper function.”
“Then it has excelled. This line—” She tapped one of the slips. “If Hadley was charged for two extra men on the lower carrier, why does the wage book show only one village payment made that week? Either your cousin employed a ghost or someone pocketed the second man’s labour.”
He turned. “The second.”
“You answer with readiness that suggests despair has become habit.”
“Experience, Miss Bennet. Not despair. Though I grant the distinction is sometimes slender.”
She looked at him with a brightness sharpened by challenge rather than mirth. “I do not believe you.”
“No?”
“No. A despairing man does not go up on his own roof in January. He sits by the fire and composes letters about the melancholy state of rural infrastructure. A man on the roof means to mend something.” She tilted her head. “You have straw in your sleeve, by the way.”
He glanced down. There it was indeed, a pale bit of old bedding-straw from the cart in the yard caught at the dark wool near his wrist. Before he could brush it away she had already half-lifted her hand by instinct, then stopped, as if the smallest familiar office would have crossed some line she had only just discovered at her feet.
The interruption was tiny. The knowledge in it was not.
Darcy removed the straw himself.
“You observe too much.”
“You bring evidence indoors.”
“You sound like a magistrate.”
“That is because you are trying to defend yourself with facts unworthy of the effort.”
He ought then to have retreated into formality. Instead he said, “And if I admitted the charge?”
Her eyes met his directly. “Then I should conclude the roof was in worse condition than you first reported.” The sentence was light. The colour in her face was not.
He knew with unwelcome clarity how much he liked being met in this fashion—neither flattered nor deferred to, but answered at full strength and made to feel the answer in his body besides. And when he let his eyes linger on her face—
Mrs Marsden returned with the tray before silence could tip the balance. She set down the teapot, cups, and a small plate of biscuits which Mrs Reeves would later deny having sent for any purpose beyond preventing collapse.
“Mr Darcy, you are to drink this while it is hot,” Mrs Marsden said. “Mrs Reeves spoke as if refusal would be viewed as personal insult.”
“I would not willingly insult Mrs Reeves.”
“No one in this house would. It would be like offending weather.”
Miss Bennet took the cup Mrs Marsden handed her, but her eyes remained, longer than necessary, on the movement of his hands around the hotter porcelain.
They drank tea. The conversation, with Mrs Marsden present, returned outwardly to safer channels—Ashby’s judgment of the roof, Hadley’s meadows, Mrs Hadley’s prediction that the next clear day would bring half the valley’s ailments to her door at once.
Yet even in safety he remained more conscious than before of Miss Bennet in her chair—the careful curl of her fingers around the warm cup, the stillness she had learned to keep for the sake of the leg, the strand at her temple loosened by the hour.
Worst of all was the growing certainty that if Mrs Marsden were not there he would have gone on looking.
He did not like such noticing. It was not useful. It lacked the clean shape of estate accounts or drainage. It moved under the mind rather than through it and left him cross with himself for obeying it at all.
To punish himself, he turned his attention to the fire. She reopened the ledger.
“If the west wall must be repointed before the thaw,” she said, “then the expense line here is impossible unless the stone was bought cheaper in hope of compensating elsewhere.”
He came to the table at once. Mrs Marsden watched him.
There was the whole mischief of it. He came because the work called him. He stood near because the page required it. The innocence of these actions made them all the harder to oppose.
“Not cheaper,” he said, bending over the entry. “Deferred. The quarry account shows only half the stone delivered. Ashby believes the rest was promised and never sent because payment had not gone through.”
“Then your cousin lied to both quarry and wall.”
“That particular line was the doing of the steward, Wickham.”
“Was he always so industrious where dishonesty was concerned?”
“From the reports I have now gathered, yes.” Darcy’s voice flattened. “He preferred the appearance of provision to provision itself.”
Elizabeth held the page and then, almost unwittingly, said, “That must offend you more than negligence alone would have done.”
He did not answer immediately.
Jane, very still over her cup, said lightly, “Lizzy, you interrogate the whole household one by one.”
“Only in pursuit of truth,” Elizabeth said.
“That pursuit is not always comfortable,” Darcy observed.
His tone was calm. Something in it nonetheless made Mrs Marsden lower her eyes.
Elizabeth knew at once that she had come too near a private door. Yet the knowledge of his hatred for falsehood, once heard in the parlour at night, had not faded. It altered every conversation now.
“Comfort is overvalued,” she said, because retreat would look too much like fear.
“That depends entirely on whether one is on a roof in January or sitting by a fire with a ledger,” he replied.
Mrs Marsden smiled then, but the smile hurt to see. It held too much effort and too little ease.
By the time the light waned enough to require lamps, Elizabeth was tired in earnest. The pain in her leg had moved from sharpness to deep, resentful ache. Mrs Marsden saw it first, rose, and with the unquestionable authority of an elder sister declared the visit at an end.
Darcy offered at once to send Nan or Martha to attend her. Elizabeth said, “I can manage with Jane.”
The refusal was too quick. It struck with a little force. She saw its effect on him—not injury exactly, but a clean withdrawal as if he had set one feeling down and locked it away before anyone could accuse him of having brought it in.
“As you wish,” he said.
Mrs Marsden looked from one to the other and said nothing.
He bowed and left them.