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She had not meant to say any more. Yet the housekeeper had asked about something tied before Elizabeth mentioned the thread, and that single question defeated every comfortable explanation she had prepared.

“There has been something else,” Elizabeth said.

She told Mrs. Reynolds about Jane’s workbag. She described where each hand had been, the loop caught through the ivory ring, and the end of the ribbon drawing backward through the knot. When she reached the attempts to repeat it, she was conscious of sounding like a child defending an improbable account of broken china.

“I am not asking you to believe me,” she concluded.

Mrs. Reynolds laid the scrap upon the desk with great care.

“No, miss. You are not.”

“Do you?”

“I believe you mean what you say.”

That was less than Elizabeth wanted and more than she had expected.

The housekeeper looked toward the open door. “I have something I should like you to see. If you are willing to wait until this afternoon, I can bring it when Mrs. Bingley rests.”

Elizabeth agreed. Mrs. Reynolds took away the curtain cord, and the room resumed its ordinary appearance, though Elizabeth found it impossible to complete the hem upon her lap.

At lunch, Charles described the plan of a house called Alderbrook. Jane asked about the rooms nearest the nursery. Caroline wished to know the height of the drawing-room windows. Mr. Darcy inquired whether a surveyor had been consulted, and Elizabeth, asked for her opinion, confessed that she had not heard the question.

“Then you may safely agree with me,” Caroline said. “I was saying that the windows must be properly proportioned.”

“I am relieved you have not recommended having them all stopped up.”

Jane laughed. Mr. Darcy looked at Elizabeth for a moment before returning to Charles’s plan. She was grateful that he did not ask why she had been inattentive. Her obligation to behave pleasantly beneath his roof had become difficult enough without adding an explanation of what his housekeeper meant to bring her.

Mrs. Reynolds came shortly after three. She carried a flat wooden box, which she set upon the cleared writing table, and asked whether she might close the door.

Elizabeth nodded.

“My grandmother gave these to my mother. They came to me when my mother died.”

The box contained a folded cloth, a little notebook with a worn cover, several loose papers, and a second book which looked much newer. Mrs. Reynolds spread the cloth before lifting the older notebook upon it.

“The oldest things do not bear much handling. Grandmother copied what she could read into this other book. Some pages were already too faint when she had them.”

Elizabeth bent nearer. The original writing was cramped and strange to her, its lines crowded together where the writer had evidently discovered more to say than the page would conveniently hold. A corner had broken away. She kept her hands upon her lap.

“Whose book was it?”

“Mara’s. My grandmother said she was one of our people, a very long time ago. The names of the daughters were kept with the family papers.”

“Mara?”

“I was nearly called after her. My mother preferred something less likely to require an explanation.”

Elizabeth smiled, but the smile faded when Mrs. Reynolds opened the newer book at a folded strip of paper. Beneath an account of linen supplied for a birth, three words stood in a hand Elizabeth could read without difficulty.

Loose the binding.

Beside them was a drawing of a hand holding a loop of thread.

For a moment Elizabeth could think only of how ordinary her own scrap looked beside this one. She had written the same words hastily, standing at her desk. Mrs. Reynolds’s grandmother had copied them carefully into a book. The difference ought to have made them less alarming. It did not.

“May I?” she asked.