Page 144

“Mara—”

Her fingers moved again. Nicholas could not tell whether she sought to open the knot or merely free her hand from it. Smoke covered her face. She coughed, bent against the binding, and could not finish what she had begun to say.

Mara wrenched herself free. An officer caught her before she reached the fire.

Nicholas stood where his wife could last have seen him, with his empty hand still clenched as though it held Mara’s sleeve.

Darcy woke upon his back, trying to release a hold he no longer had.

His bandaged hand struck the coverlet. Pain brought him fully into his own room. The fire had fallen low; the plan of the old house lay upon the desk where he had left it.

He sat up. There was no smoke. He could breathe.

For a little while he could do nothing but prove that to himself.

Then he got out of bed and lit the candle. His right hand shook too badly to serve him. He took the pencil in his left and wrote slowly, leaving space between the awkward lines.

The locked room. The statement Nicholas had signed. The common above the road. The words about the walls.

He wrote what the dream had shown him, not what a document had proved. Even that distinction offered little comfort. He remembered the wish to make Elspeth obedient, the certainty that somebody else would bear responsibility for what followed. While he slept, that certainty had felt like his own.

At the window he stopped. Below, nothing stirred upon the terrace. Somewhere within the house Elizabeth slept. He wanted to wake her, hear her voice, discover her free to be impatient with him.

He remained where he was. His fright did not entitle him to summon her for his comfort.

In the morning he asked Reynolds to take a note to Miss Bennet, requesting a private conversation when it suited her. Elizabeth came to the housekeeper’s sitting room before breakfast.

“You have dreamed again,” she said when she saw him.

He gave her the sheet.

She read without interruption. At the account of the fire her hand stopped moving down the page. Reynolds drew a chair nearer, and Elizabeth sat.

“I did not see her thoughts,” Darcy said. “Only what Nicholas saw. And what he believed excused him.”

“You were asleep.”

“I know.”

She looked up. “Do you?”

He could not answer as readily a second time.

Elizabeth laid the sheet upon the desk. “Then we shall begin with what we can establish. Mrs. Reynolds has Mara’s account. You have written yours before reading it. Let us see where they agree.”

She did not promise that the papers would disprove his dream. He was grateful that she had not tried.

Reynolds brought out the box. Darcy stayed beside them while she lifted the copied pages from it, and listened when Elizabeth asked her to begin.

Chapter Thirty-five

MARA HAD WRITTEN Elspeth’s name so many times that the copied page looked, at first, like a letter to her.

Elizabeth sat beside Mrs. Reynolds’s desk, with Darcy’s account of his dream upon one side and the copied pages upon the other. He stood behind the empty chair, waiting while she read.

Saturday morning light fell across the paper. Beyond the door somebody asked where a parcel of linen should be taken, and Sally answered without calling for the housekeeper. The ordinary exchange seemed very far away from what lay beneath Elizabeth’s eyes.

Mara named the common above the road. She had heard the condemnation read, had tried to reach her mistress, and had been held back by Nicholas. She recorded Elspeth accusing him of giving her words to the men who questioned her.