Chapter 1
The Mirror at Northmere
Chapter One
The lane had not been travelled in some time. Snow lay in the wheel ruts without disturbance, a week old at least, crusted and grey where the wind had scoured it, soft where the hedgerows gave shelter.
Elizabeth kept to the frozen edge, where the ground was firmest. Her boots, which had been made for London streets and had no business on a northern road in January, punched through the crust with every third or fourth step.
Each time, the snow swallowed her to the ankle.
Each time, the effort of pulling free cost something she could not afford to spend.
She had been walking since first light. The carrier from Matlock had set her down at a crossroads two miles south of the valley.
The man had taken her coin, not looked at her face, said nothing—which was the transaction she required.
No questions. No name given to the driver of the next coach or the woman at the last inn.
She had paid in small coin at every stop since Nottingham, because small coin left no impression.
She had given a different surname at each, because repetition was a thread that could be followed, and threads led backwards to places she could not afford to be found.
The bag was heavy. She carried it herself because there was no one to carry it, because letting it out of her grip—even to strap it to a cart or hand it to a porter—was a separation she could not permit.
What was inside the bag was the reason she was on this road.
The reason she was on this road was the reason she could not be on any other.
The logic of that closed circle had governed her movements for eleven days, and would govern them until she reached Jane.
Eleven days since Longbourn. Eleven mornings of rising before the household she had paid to sleep in.
Eleven departures timed to the mail coach schedule so she could board and disembark between the regular stops.
Eleven evenings of choosing the inn that was busiest, because a busy inn remembers no one.
The soles of her boots had worn through on the outside edges. Her dress hem had stiffened with mud that no brushing could remove. The muscles across her shoulders had tightened into a permanent architecture of strain that announced itself with every step and would not be dismissed.
The valley opened below her without warning.
The lane crested a low ridge between two stands of bare oak, and there it was: a bowl of white and grey, steep-sided, the slopes dark with leafless trees, the bottom flat and luminous with snow.
A house stood on the far side, set into the hillside above the valley floor—large, stone-built, its chimneys cold.
Below it, occupying the valley's flat centre like a plate of silver laid upon white linen, shone the water.
She stopped. The wind, which had been at her back for the last mile, buffeted against her now from the valley's open end, carrying the smell of cold stone, wet earth, something mineral—something clean and old, like water that had travelled a long way underground.
The mere was perhaps a quarter-mile across.
She could see the opposite bank. She could hold the whole of it in her vision, and the whole of it was still—so still that the sky lay upon its surface in perfect replica, cloud for cloud, the bare branches of the trees along the near shore reflected with a fidelity that made the water look less like water than like a second world laid open beneath the first, identical and inverted.
Jane had written that the path to her cottage lay along the valley's western edge. She could see where it would go—skirting the mere, climbing the far slope, disappearing into the trees beyond the house. An hour's walk at most, if the ground was sound.
The ground between her and that path crossed the mere's southern margin, where snow covered the bank, the bank met ice, ice met water—no visible line between any of them.
The snow ran all the way to the centre without interruption.
It looked like a meadow. It looked like the safest, flattest, most walkable surface she had encountered since Nottingham.
Her legs were finished. They functioned—the muscles obeyed the instructions her will provided—but eleven days of hard travel on insufficient food had reduced her reserves to something she could measure. And the measure was low.
The path around the western edge would add half a mile, but the path across the mere's margin would save it. The snow was unbroken, thick, packed by wind into a surface that bore her weight when she tested it with one boot. Solid.
She descended.
The slope was steeper than it had looked from the ridge.
The snow deepened in the lee of the valley wall, the trees that had seemed sparse from above closing around her in a colonnade of grey trunks, their bark slick with frozen damp.
Beneath the canopy, the light changed—dimmer, flatter, the sky visible only in pieces between bare branches.
The wind dropped. The silence that replaced it was not absence but presence, the quiet of a still body of water in winter, a quiet that had weight and texture and occupied the air the way cold occupied the skin.
She reached the bank. The mere was closer now, intimate in a way it had not been from the ridge.
From above, the water had been a blank mirror in a frame of white hills, reflecting sky and trees.
From here, if she had looked straight down, she would have seen her own face looking back at her from the surface of a world she did not know.
She did not look down. She was measuring the distance to the western path—the bank, the margin, the stretch of snow-covered flatness she needed to cross.
The surface was solid. She had tested it.
She stepped from the bank onto the snow that covered the mere's edge.
The snow held. Her weight was nothing to it.
A second step, a third—the ground beneath the snow was firm, the crust did not give—a fourth, a fifth, the snow solid as flagstone, the crossing as ordinary as a woman walking through a field, a safe field, flat and beautiful and simple.
Twelve steps from the bank, the ground vanished.
Her right foot went through first — a lurch, a sick tilt of the whole world — and she grabbed for something, anything, her arms flinging wide, fingers raking across the ice shelf as it split apart beneath her in a long wet shriek of breaking surface.
Nothing to hold. Nothing solid. The ice tearing open in every direction and her body dropping through the centre of it.
She screamed. The sound ripped out of her before she knew it was coming, raw and high in the frozen air, cut short by the water — the water that swallowed her to the thighs in a single gulp, so cold her lungs seized, so cold her vision whited out, so cold that for one blind instant she was nowhere, she was nothing, she was a body with no name in black water and she could not breathe, she could not breathe, she could not —
Her left foot hit stone. Her right foot found nothing — the bottom dropping away beneath it into dark she could not see. The unequal footing wrenched her sideways. Her left leg, the one that had found the stone, took her full weight at an angle the bone was not built to bear.
The sound came up through her own body. Not through the air — through her bones.
A wet, wrong sound, like a green branch bent past its limit, and then a second sound beneath it, sharper, a thing tearing that should not tear, and her leg stopped being a leg.
It became a place. A screaming place below her left knee that was sending up signals her mind could not sort into anything except wrong, wrong, wrong —
She went down. Sideways into the water, her shoulder and head slamming the ice shelf, the shelf cracking but holding, her mouth open against the frozen surface, sounds coming out of her that she did not recognise — guttural, torn, not words, not screams, something more animal than either.
Her left leg was beneath her at an angle that made her stomach lurch toward her throat.
She could not look at it. She could not look at it.
The water around it was warm where the water everywhere else was killing-cold, warm in a way that was wrong, warm with something that was coming from her, and the warmth spread in the black water like ink.
The pain was a living thing. It had a pulse.
It had teeth. It was chewing through her from the knee up, eating its way through muscle and nerve with a patience that mocked the frantic hammering of her heart, and every time she moved — every fractional adjustment of her hip, her weight, the angle of the ruined leg — it bit down harder and the world went to bright white nothing and came back dimmer than before.
The nausea rolled up from her stomach in a hot wave, and she retched against the ice, bile and nothing, her body trying to turn itself inside out while the leg screamed and the cold pressed in from every direction and she could not — she could not stay here.
The water was to her hip. The cold was in her bones.
If she did not move, she would die here, and the mere would freeze over the evidence, and no one would find her until the spring thaw, and Jane would never know what happened, and —
Move. Move now.
She braced her right hand on the ice shelf. Pushed. Her body came up an inch, two inches, the left leg dragging behind her like something that no longer belonged to her — something broken and heavy and broadcasting a white-hot shriek with every inch of progress.