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He supposed it was the new gown. She had described her pleasure in the clothes, and there was nothing remarkable in discovering that she had chosen to wear one of them. He nevertheless took a moment too long to rise when she entered, and Charles glanced at him before turning back to Jane.

“Mrs. Mercer has done very well,” Darcy said when Elizabeth came within speaking distance.

“Sally will be pleased to have your agreement.”

“I should be sorry to oppose her after so much labour.”

Elizabeth smiled. Caroline, already seated near Jane, observed that the long sleeves would be convenient when the weather turned.

“They are convenient now,” Elizabeth answered, and sat beside her sister.

Later, at the dinner table, Darcy unfolded his napkin. The gown became her, but it was her ease in answering Caroline which held his attention.

When she asked whether he had written to his cousin, he was glad to tell her that he had.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

ON MONDAY MORNING Elizabeth brought her father’s books downstairs, but she did not open them.

Mrs. Reynolds had found a clean sheet of paper upon which to place Elspeth’s journal. The damaged volume lay between them in the housekeeper’s little sitting room, supported upon a folded cloth so that its stiff cover need not be forced flat. They had returned to the same few readable pages. Elizabeth knew by now where a stain concealed the end of a sentence, and where the writer had crowded two words into the margin. Familiarity had not supplied the missing words.

She kept looking at the sentence in which Elspeth described her gift.

“I have been making a very foolish mistake,” she said.

Mrs. Reynolds set down her spectacles. “About which part, miss?”

“Thank you. I am glad you allow that there is a choice.”

“There have been several things to understand.”

“I have been afraid that, if the memories are hers, I must somehow be turning into her.”

She touched the clean paper beside the book. She had learnt to keep her fingers away from the old pages when thinking of something else.

“She writes that the gift came to her here. You and I have read that passage three times. Yet I have continued to wonder whether I am somehow remembering a life which belonged to me.”

“Dreams can feel very real.”

“Yes. And I wake knowing things I cannot possibly have learnt in my own life. I knew where this book was hidden. But I did not know it until I came to Pemberley.”

Outside the office somebody passed carrying a basket. Elizabeth waited until the footsteps had gone farther down the passage.

“I was at Longbourn for twenty years,” she continued. “Nothing remotely like any of this happened there. Not once. I have wished a hundred knots undone when Mama wanted her ribbons, and a hundred plants restored when I had neglected them. They remained knots and dead plants.”

Mrs. Reynolds’s expression softened, but she did not interrupt.

“I did not dream of this woman in Hertfordshire. I did not hear her words. It began here.”

Elizabeth looked down at the journal again. She had been prepared to accept so much that was frightening, and had scarcely considered the explanation which allowed her to remain herself.

“Perhaps she was no different when she first arrived. Perhaps the land gave her something, and now it has given it to me.”

“The healing spirit,” Mrs. Reynolds said quietly.

“Yes.” The words no longer sounded like something safely belonging to a story. “It found another person to receive it.”

Mrs. Reynolds sat for a moment with her hands folded upon her apron.