Page 119
“I cannot tell you that, miss. I should be pretending if I said I could.”
Elizabeth nodded. She preferred that answer to an assurance supplied merely because she wanted one.
“Elspeth loved him,” she said, looking at the closed box. “She wrote that she could not make herself cease.”
“Yes, miss.”
“And I dreamed of wanting him near me before we found what she had written.”
Mrs. Reynolds waited. Elizabeth could not bring herself to ask whether affection might be inherited as helplessly as fear.
Elizabeth drew her books against her. “I had better return to Jane.”
She left before Mrs. Reynolds could ask anything more.
Her relief about Elspeth had not quieted the uneasiness she felt about Mr. Darcy. Yesterday she had spent half an hour laughing with him in the library and wished she could stay.
Was that pleasure hers?
Elizabeth stopped at the foot of the principal stairs. She wished she could laugh at the question.
A footman passed her on the stairs carrying a small table toward Jane’s apartments. Elizabeth followed, grateful for an occupation which required neither dreams nor an examination of her heart.
Jane was seated beside the window, with Charles attempting to decide where the table should stand. He put it upon her right, found that her workbasket would no longer fit, and moved it to the left.
“Now you will have to reach across your work,” Elizabeth observed.
“I have already been told that,” Charles said. “Do not suppose this is the first arrangement.”
“It is the third,” Jane said, smiling.
“Then I have arrived just in time to recommend the first.”
Charles looked at his wife. “I told you we ought to have waited for her. Lizzy can disapprove of a thing before we have moved it.”
Elizabeth set her books upon the mantel and helped Jane put the workbasket upon the table’s lower shelf. The footman moved the table back to the right. Jane placed her cup upon it and declared herself satisfied, which Charles received with more relief than the matter deserved.
When the servant had left, Elizabeth looked through the open door into the room chosen for the nursery. The fireguard stood against one wall, awaiting use. Two folded lengths of curtain lay upon a chair.
They were staying. Of course they were staying; she had known it for weeks. But every small comfort made the decision more complete, and the stories from the inn returned to her with a force which a table and a workbasket ought not to have possessed.
“Charles,” she said, “are there comfortable lodgings in the village?”
He straightened from adjusting the table’s uneven foot. “For whom?”
“For all of us. Or for you and Jane, with room for me close by.”
Jane turned toward her.
Elizabeth wished she had chosen a better beginning. “I wondered whether you had considered it while Alderbrook is being repaired.”
“We considered almost every house within reach before Darcy made us understand that he meant his invitation,” Charles said. “There are rooms to be had, certainly. We should be hard pressed to find this much space, and I doubt the kitchen would please Jane’s maid.”
“My maid is not the person to be considered first,” Jane said.
“No. But she would be the person attempting to obtain hot water from a stranger’s kitchen while I ran about getting in everybody’s way. Here Reynolds can send me out of the room with authority.”
Elizabeth smiled because he expected her to. Jane watched her more closely.
