Chapter Seven #2
“I must blame something,” Elizabeth returned lightly. “Surely something must be to blame for our disaster.”
She stood, turning to look instead at the door itself.
She studied the way it sat in the frame, the angle of the handle.
Then Elizabeth considered the question of how it had come to be closed in the first place, and why it had been locked at that moment.
Standing in the door frame, she peered down the corridor, feeling for any draughtiness that might account for the door’s sudden closing.
She thought back carefully. The door had been standing open when she entered. She had crossed the room, shelved the book, and turned back. Mr Darcy had been in the doorway. She had moved toward him, intending to leave the room, and the door closed before she could reach it.
“Why did the door close?” she asked, almost to herself.
Mr Darcy had been watching her investigations with the ghost of a smile. Methodical as he was, Elizabeth suspected he had checked all elements before her arrival. “I cannot say,” he said slowly. “I came in behind you, but I did not pull it closed.”
“And I had not yet reached the door when it shut. Nor did I feel a draft of wind — certainly not one strong enough that it could have shut the door.” Elizabeth looked at the door’s edge, the latch, the way the corridor beyond it was angled.
“A well-hung door on a level floor does not close itself. It will stand open or stand shut.” She stepped out into the corridor and crouched to examine the external face of the lock.
Along the lower rim of the brass plate, a small bright scratch, faint but fresh, the kind left by a key turned in haste.
She looked up at Darcy. He crouched and looked where she pointed, and when he raised his eyes to hers, his expression had resolved into something still and certain.
“Someone locked it from the outside,” he said grimly.
It was what she had quietly expected all along. “It makes the most sense,” she said.
They straightened, facing each other in the corridor. She watched him work through it, the same sequence she had been working through since Lucas Lodge, arriving at the same arrangement of facts, the same shape of conclusion. His jaw tightened briefly. “But who, and why?”
“I cannot begin to say,” Elizabeth said.
“The motif seems inscrutable to me. Revenge on one of us, or both? We have so very little to go on. Only a scratch on a lock plate and a door that did not close itself.” Elizabeth glanced back into the study, to the shelf where she had replaced the book.
She took note of the sightline into the room from the corridor outside.
“Perhaps it was merely a prank, but I cannot bring myself to believe it,” Elizabeth said slowly. “Do you think it was an accident that you and I were locked in together? That it might have been anyone?”
Mr Darcy’s expression hardened. “No, I do not. Perhaps it is possible, but I believe we were targeted, though I cannot say for sure.”
Elizabeth kept her voice calm, though her unease persisted. “I cannot pretend to be flattered by the distinction.”
“I assure you,” he said gravely, “it affords me no pleasure either.”
She attempted a laugh, not entirely successfully. “That is not entirely gallant, sir. You imply that imprisonment in my company was a hardship.”
He met her gaze without hesitation. “The hardship lay not in your company, Miss Bennet, but in the consequences imposed upon it.”
Elizabeth did not care to admit how much his response satisfied her.
“If we were targeted, someone who knew your movements and mine well enough to arrange the timing. That narrows it considerably.” She paused and looked back down the corridor. To her credit, the housemaid was still finding details worth studying with no small amount of diligence.
“The servants pass frequently along this corridor,” Elizabeth said. “Any one of them might have paused here without remark.”
“Servants do not generally lock doors at random,” Mr Darcy said.
“No,” Elizabeth agreed. “They do not. Before Miss Bingley came along, we heard footsteps. Retreating ones.”
Mr Darcy was still for a moment. “Yes, I recall that as well.”
“They were not the footsteps of someone who was simply passing by.” She looked at the corridor’s length, measuring it in her mind. “Someone stood directly outside this door, waited a moment, then hastened away.”
“That is consistent with someone who had locked it and wanted to confirm it had held,” Mr Darcy agreed.
“It is also consistent with someone passing by who tried the handle out of ordinary curiosity and thought nothing of it,” Elizabeth said with careful fairness. “But combined with the scratch —” She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.
He nodded. “And the door. We still have not accounted for the door.”
“No.” She looked at the way it sat flush in its frame, the level floor, the absence of any draught. “It did not close itself. Neither of us closed it. Which means someone in this corridor pushed it shut shortly after you came inside.”
They stood for another moment in the corridor, the locked room behind them and the length of an unsolved question ahead.
We will have to do this together. Elizabeth drew in a quick breath in surprise at the thought, and then at how it had not felt quite as she would have expected.
In the study, in the worst of it, she had not found him useless or unkind.
Mr Darcy had been steady, which was not nothing, and honest, which was not nothing either.
Whatever this investigation required of them both, she was beginning to think they were not ill-matched for the work of it.
Elizabeth rested her hand briefly against the door, then withdrew it. “It is a strange sensation to examine the scene of one’s own ruin.”
Mr Darcy’s voice, when he answered, was quieter. “It need not remain so.”
“You believe we may discover the truth?”
“I believe we must try.”
Elizabeth studied his face, searching for doubt, but found only resolve. “Very well,” she said.
Seeing that there was nothing further to be done at the present moment, Elizabeth turned away from the study door. “We should go back,” she said. “My mother will have exhausted Mrs Hurst by now.”
“Almost certainly,” Mr Darcy said, and for a moment, Elizabeth almost thought he would smile.
But the moment passed quickly enough, and Mr Darcy remained solemn. She turned toward the morning room. He fell into step beside her. Neither of them spoke further. The corridor was quiet.
Behind them, the study door stood open, as it had always been meant to be.