Chapter Twelve — What Margaret Hid
The music room had never seemed less musical.
Elizabeth Bennet stood upon its threshold in the pale wash of late morning light and thought that some rooms, once made instruments of cruelty, do not easily recover their first purpose.
A room designed for pleasure may retain the shape of pleasure after joy has left it: the polished pianoforte, the neatly ordered cabinets, the harp standing in its corner like a beautiful creature no one quite trusted to wake, the chairs arranged for listeners, the long windows admitting light softened by the lake.
Yet beneath all this lay memory, and memory had altered the place.
Jane had opened a volume here and found an accusation arranged for her innocent hands.
Mrs Harrow had stood here while her past was reshaped before strangers.
Lady Ashbourne had watched from this room as her careful world began to loosen.
Music still belonged to it by furniture and intention, but silence had claimed it by use.
The day was clearer than the last, though not bright.
The rain had washed the air clean without restoring confidence.
Outside, the gardens shone damply; leaves glittered; the lake lay silver in patches where the clouds broke, though its surface remained unsettled by a fitful wind.
Within the house, the storm had moved inward.
Servants kept to their duties with guarded faces.
Guests occupied themselves poorly. Mrs Lyndhurst had announced an intention to write letters and had then sat for twenty minutes with a pen in hand and no ink upon the page, which Elizabeth considered the most honest thing she had yet done.
Colonel Avery had gone to the stables and frightened two grooms into unnecessary truthfulness.
Portia Vale had taken possession of a window seat with the expression of one prepared to bite the next person who offered comfort.
Felix had been, for the last half-hour, unaccounted for.
That fact alone made the music room feel urgent.
Elizabeth was not alone. She had entered with Jane and Mrs Harrow, and the difference between this and other searches at Silvermere mattered more than she would have admitted aloud.
Darcy remained in the corridor just beyond the open door, close enough to prevent interruption, far enough to allow the women within the room some privacy from his presence.
Bingley stood nearer the far end of the passage, positioned with a casual cheerfulness that would have deceived no one who knew him well and almost everyone who did not.
He had declared, with admirable seriousness disguised as lightness, that he had always wished to study the landscape from that particular stretch of corridor, and Jane had smiled with such tenderness at the attempt that Elizabeth had been obliged to examine the music cabinet rather closely.
It was not surrender, Elizabeth reminded herself.
It was alliance. She had not ceased to be independent because Mr Darcy stood within call.
She had merely accepted that danger, when recognised, need not be faced with theatrical solitude in order to prove courage.
There was, she was beginning to discover, a form of trust which did not diminish freedom but gave it ground.
Mrs Harrow had not yet moved from the centre of the room.
She stood near the pianoforte, her hands clasped before her, her face composed with the terrible care Elizabeth had come to recognise.
The threatening note, the planted packet, the public confession, Miss Trent’s terror in the laundry passage—each had cut at her, and yet she remained upright.
Elizabeth could not decide whether to admire her endurance or grieve that endurance had been asked of her so often that it had become almost a manner.
Jane went to her quietly.
“You need not search if you cannot bear it.”
Mrs Harrow looked toward the music cabinet. “I am not certain I can bear doing nothing.”
“That is different.”
“Yes.” Celia drew a slow breath. “Margaret hid something here, perhaps. If it remains, then I have spent years grieving a silence that may never have been complete.”
“Then we shall look gently,” Jane said.
Mrs Harrow’s expression softened. “You make even searching sound like kindness.”
“I hope it may be.”
Elizabeth, who had been listening, turned toward them. “Kindness will be useful. So will method.”
Jane smiled. “Then we have both.”
“And Mr Darcy in the corridor with method enough to supply any deficiency.”
At this, from beyond the door, Darcy’s voice entered with perfect gravity. “I shall endeavour not to be excessive.”
Elizabeth looked toward the doorway and found him watching her with the faintest warmth in his eyes. “You see? Already he is moderate.”
Bingley, further down the passage, said, “I can be excessively cheerful if the investigation requires variety.”
Jane laughed softly, and the sound did something good to the room. It did not restore music. Not yet. But it loosened the silence.
They began.
The work was slower than Elizabeth had expected.
The memory Miss Trent had given them was clear in its nature but imprecise in its direction: Margaret had hidden papers in music because men did not look seriously inside women’s music.
A clever and bitter observation, certainly; but Silvermere possessed a great many volumes of songs, airs, sonatas, duets and exercises, and one could not merely shake them like fruit trees and expect truth to fall out.
Each had to be lifted, opened, examined without damage, its binding inspected, its endpapers tested gently for looseness, its spine pressed and listened to for hollow spaces.
Old leather bindings released dust and the faint, dry scent of age.
Pages rustled with a delicacy that made even Elizabeth, impatient by nature when justice stood waiting, handle them with care.
Faded ink announced titles of sentimental tenderness: “When First I Saw Thy Gentle Face,” “The Parting Hour,” “A Garland for Constancy,” “Duet for Two Voices in Spring.” It seemed grotesque that songs of love, fidelity and pastoral sighing might conceal evidence of theft, disgrace and fear.
Yet perhaps, Elizabeth thought, that was precisely the point.
Women’s lives were often expected to pass through such pretty covers.
Jane worked with particular care. She had a musician’s respect for the books themselves and a compassionate instinct for what they might hold.
Mrs Harrow, at first, touched each volume as though fearing it might accuse her.
Then gradually, as page followed page and no new blow emerged, her hands steadied.
Elizabeth watched her pause over annotations here and there—small pencil marks, crossed passages, names written faintly at the top of pages.
Once she touched a line of music and whispered, “She sang this badly and loved it.”
Jane looked up. “Margaret?”
“Yes. She had a sweet voice, but uncertain pitch. She used to laugh at herself before anyone else could.”
The memory entered the room like a living person and left almost as quickly.
They found several disturbed volumes, as before.
One had a lifted endpaper but contained nothing beyond a dead beetle and a scrap of ribbon.
Another had a spine mended clumsily long ago; a third bore the clean slit already noted, its emptiness as suggestive as any letter.
Darcy, when called in to examine it again, confirmed his earlier belief that something had been removed recently.
Bingley, from the corridor, asked whether recent might mean yesterday, and Darcy answered that he could not say.
Bingley accepted this with visible dissatisfaction and returned to guarding the passage, where his natural openness made him oddly effective.
Any person approaching would see a cheerful gentleman apparently idle and therefore harmless.
Elizabeth had come to understand how much people underestimated harmlessness when it was joined to loyalty.
Nearly an hour passed before Jane lifted a volume from the lower shelf and frowned.
“This one,” she said.
Elizabeth turned. Mrs Harrow stilled.
It was a book of duets, bound in brown leather darkened with age but strangely even along the spine.
The label was old, or had been made to look so: Duetti da Camera, in gilt letters slightly dulled.
At first glance it matched the others well enough.
Jane, however, turned it in her hands and examined the binding.
“It has been rebound,” she said.
Darcy entered at once. “May I?”
Jane handed it to him.
He studied it, then looked at her with approval so open that Jane coloured slightly. “You are right.”
Elizabeth came nearer. “How can you tell?”
“The leather is old, but the stitching is not as old as the others. See here—the thread is less discoloured. And the boards sit too neatly for the wear on the corners.”
Jane said, “It felt wrong in the hand.”
Elizabeth smiled. “Your hands are becoming as perceptive as your heart.”
Jane looked embarrassed. “Lizzy.”
Mrs Harrow had not spoken. Her eyes were fixed upon the volume.
Darcy laid it carefully upon the table near the pianoforte. “If something remains, it may be within the spine lining. But if we cut blindly, we may destroy it.”
Elizabeth looked at him. “Then do not cut blindly.”
“I had not intended to.”
“Excellent. Our partnership continues upon firm ground.”
The word partnership rested more easily between them now, though not without feeling. Darcy’s gaze flickered to hers, and for a moment the music room, the danger, even the watching grief of Mrs Harrow all seemed to withdraw slightly. Then he bent to the volume, and the world resumed.