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“Have we stayed too long, Lizzy?”

“No. Mr. Darcy has said nothing of the kind.”

“Then what troubles you?”

At the inn Elizabeth had said she would not tell Jane. Then it had seemed an idle cruelty to trouble her with a story. Now she was asking her sister to leave without giving her the reason. She could not expect Jane to judge the proposal while concealing what had prompted it.

Elizabeth could not tell her sister that she had loosened a knot by speaking to it. She could not lay the journal upon Jane’s lap and ask whether she would now consent to leave the room she had made comfortable. Jane would be frightened for Elizabeth before she was frightened for herself.

“I have thought of the stories we heard at the inn,” she admitted. “About women who did not recover after their confinements here.”

Charles’s face cleared with understanding. “Oh, Lizzy.”

He said it kindly, which made the answer harder to bear.

“You were there,” she reminded him.

“I was. And I heard an innkeeper who had discovered something more interesting to offer us than the weather.”

“They were not all invented.”

“No,” Jane said gently. “Women have died here. Women have died at home, too. We do not think Longbourn accursed because we know a family who has suffered.”

Elizabeth took the chair beside her. She had no answer she could honestly offer. She did not know the extent of the danger, whether it attached to the house, or what Elspeth’s gift had to do with it. She only knew that dismissing every impossible thing was no longer a comfort available to her.

Jane laid a hand over hers.

“I am not afraid of this room. I know where everything is. Mrs. Reynolds knows what we shall need, and the midwife has already seen me here. I would much rather have you all about me than begin again in rooms where I must ask permission to move a chair.”

“Jane shall choose where she is comfortable,” Charles said. “If she wished to go, I would find a house. But I cannot think a tale told beside an inn fire a good reason to turn her out of this one.”

“I did not mean to turn her out.”

“I know you did not.” He sat upon the end of the sofa. “You wish to take care of her. So do I. We are rather fortunate that she is willing to put up with both of us.”

Jane smiled and squeezed Elizabeth’s fingers.

Elizabeth could persist only by explaining what she was concealing, and even then she had no certain explanation to give. Her sister’s wishes were plain. Fear did not give Elizabeth the right to overrule them.

“Then I shall say no more about lodgings,” she said.

“Thank you,” Jane replied. “But you may tell me when you are anxious. You need not turn it into a proposal for removing the whole household.”

Elizabeth bent and kissed her cheek. “I shall endeavour to be less expensive in my concern.”

Charles laughed, and Jane asked for the book Elizabeth had brought upstairs.

They read together until the light began to fail. Elizabeth read aloud; Charles sat beside his wife and disputed a passage condemning idleness, with an indignation which made Jane laugh. For a little while Elizabeth forgot that she had come upstairs afraid.

When she left them, she went back to Mrs. Reynolds’s office.

“I asked Jane about leaving,” she said when they were alone. “She wishes to remain. Charles thinks very little of the old stories.”

“I should have been surprised if he thought otherwise.”

“So should I, if I had not hoped it might be easier.”

Mrs. Reynolds waited.