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The words were plain. What they meant upon the ground was less so.

“Which walls?” Elizabeth asked.

Darcy looked at the old survey. It showed a stone wall enclosing the court and joining the house and service buildings. A gate opened toward the east. Beyond it lay the orchard and the older track to the cottages.

“Here,” he said. “These are the walls belonging to the house in that drawing.”

He traced the enclosure with the blunt end of a pencil, without marking the paper. The bakehouse stood upon the western side. The chamber above it lay within the stone boundary, though a woman there would have had no reason to enter the Darcy family’s rooms.

“The north side is easy enough to place,” he continued. “The round stair still stands. And the gate piers remain near the orchard. You passed between them on the walk from the Hargreaveses’ cottage.”

Elizabeth bent closer. “I remember.”

“The southern wall was taken down. Its foundations run beneath the flower terrace.”

“How do you know?”

“There is a building plan from my grandfather’s time. Hammond brought that, too.”

The later drawing marked the old wall in a broken line and the proposed new work above it. The modern apartments crossed what had once been the southern half of the open court.

Elizabeth did not ask the question he saw forming. She moved the current plan nearer and found the rooms herself.

Jane’s bedchamber. The dressing room she had chosen for the nursery. The adjoining passage and its door.

All lay inside the old enclosure.

Darcy looked through the library window. He could see a portion of the flower terrace, pleasant in the October sun. There was nothing upon it to warn anybody that an old wall had stood there, and no reason a guest choosing the brightest rooms should consider ground which had been built over before she was born.

“The rooms are new,” he said, although the drawings had already answered him.

“The place is not,” Elizabeth replied.

Reynolds sat down. She had been standing beside them, helping hold the plans flat. Darcy noticed the movement because she so seldom sat before her business was finished.

“I have made those rooms ready for ladies for years,” she said.

“You did not know.”

“No, sir.”

His eyes travelled eastward along the modern plan, past the gate piers and orchard to the cottages beyond.

“The Hargreaveses are outside it.”

“Yes,” Reynolds said.

Darcy kept looking at the little mark for the cottage. Georgiana had been outside. Anna’s birth had not taken place within that enclosure, and the fever which came afterwards could not be made the work of a long-dead woman merely because he wished for something he might have fought.

His mother had borne both her children in London. He remembered her bringing Georgiana into the nursery here when his sister was still very small. A room in which a child was loved was not necessarily the room in which she had been born.

“Mrs. Bingley must leave,” he said.

Elizabeth did not reply at once.

“The village,” he continued. “There must be a house which can be made comfortable for a few weeks. Charles need not be troubled with finding it. I can—”

“I have asked them.”