Page 137

THE OLDEST PLAN Hammond could find showed a house Darcy scarcely recognized.

Its paper had darkened at the folds, and a corner was missing where somebody had once tried to open it too quickly. Hammond had brought it flat between two boards. Upon the lower edge a surveyor had written the year 1642, followed by a note that the outline of the earlier court had been copied from an older drawing.

Darcy put the current plan beside it.

Elizabeth leaned over the table. “That cannot be the kitchen.”

“It was.”

“It appears to occupy half the house.”

“The kitchens and bakehouse formed a separate range. Much of it was taken down when the present rooms were built.”

“Then there was more sense in the old arrangement. A person need not have walked so far to discover whether lunch was ready.”

Darcy smiled. “You would have had to cross the court in the rain.”

“That is a serious defect. I withdraw my admiration.”

Reynolds had brought the copied sheets they had selected the previous afternoon. Their amusement did not survive her placing the first beside the plan.

Alice Reed. The name appeared at the head of the account in a hand much clearer than the old writing it copied.

Darcy read it once, then again more slowly.

“She was the cook’s daughter?”

“Yes, sir. Married to Matthew Reed. My grandmother copied the relationship as well as the name.”

The account gave November 17, 1555, and named the little chamber over the bakehouse. Alice had come to her mother to be delivered. Both she and her child had died.

There was no mention of a Darcy heir.

Darcy looked toward the other book Hammond had brought. A narrow household account, its binding repaired long before Darcy was born, contained a payment for linen and the burial of Alice Reed and her infant. The entry gave no cause beyond her lying-in, and no description of the hours in the chamber.

He had hoped the two accounts would fail to agree.

“The version I heard as a boy concerned the family,” he said.

“Mrs. Neale spoke of her grandmother’s sister,” Elizabeth replied. “Mrs. Allen, the gardener’s wife. She was not a Darcy either.”

“I know. I supposed an ordinary misfortune had been added to the tale.” He looked again at Alice’s name. “It was easier to dismiss something told at an inn than an account kept by the people who attended her.”

Reynolds laid another copied entry beside Alice’s. This one named Margery Darcy, who had died in childbed in 1581. Her son had been buried with her. The household record placed her in a chamber of the old house; the account of Alice placed a woman with no Darcy connection above its kitchens.

Darcy rested his left hand upon the table, keeping his bandaged right hand out of the way.

“If the danger is to any woman brought to bed here—”

He stopped. Elizabeth was watching him, and he disliked the fear he saw in her face because he had arrived at it so much later than she had.

“We do not know that every death was caused by the same thing,” she said. “But we cannot suppose Jane safe merely because she is a Bingley.”

“No.”

Reynolds unfolded a smaller copy. Beneath a few lines concerning Elspeth’s death, Mara had added a sentence which Darcy read aloud.

“‘What she laid upon the house did not end at its doors. Alice died within the walls.’”