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“Then Charles must not repair the visitors’ rooms first.”

“Lizzy.”

“I offer advice which costs him nothing.”

Jane shook her head, but smiled as she folded the letter. Her sewing lay beside the chair. She had begun a small cap and wished for Elizabeth’s opinion upon the edging.

For half an hour Elizabeth considered nothing older or stranger than the difficulty of making both sides alike. Jane complained that the child must not inherit Charles’s impatience, since she would then have no time to finish anything for it. Elizabeth said that if it inherited Jane’s disposition it would apologize for growing before its clothes were ready.

The pleasure of making her sister laugh was familiar. She held to it when her thoughts attempted to return to the book.

They could read it after lunch. It had waited long enough to endure one more morning.

Mrs. Reynolds returned after lunch with her wooden box. Elizabeth drew the second chair to the desk, where the journal lay covered upon its towel. The housekeeper opened the box beside it. Elizabeth made room for its contents, keeping the two sets of papers apart so that a loose leaf should not be returned to the wrong place.

The copied account named Agnes Fletcher. The journal’s entry named Agnes, too, and referred to her husband coming through the rain. Elspeth’s words were less orderly than Mara’s list of cloths and candles. She had recorded a woman’s fear of being sent away and her own relief when the child cried.

Elizabeth copied a few lines onto fresh paper, leaving spaces wherever she could not be certain of a word. Mrs. Reynolds read the passage from her grandmother’s copy beside it.

“It is the same woman,” Elizabeth said.

“I believe so.”

“And the same birth.”

“Yes.”

Mara dated the birth to May, several months before the quarrel in Elspeth’s September entry. Agnes and her child had lived. The journal added the warmth Elspeth felt passing through her hand, something Mara could observe only in its effects. Elizabeth copied that difference beside the name.

Several pages later, where the leaves parted without resistance, they found an entry upon the gift itself.

Elizabeth read it once silently. Then she began aloud, pausing over the words until the sense became clear.

“‘The gift came to me here. I call it the healing spirit of Pember Lee, for I have no better name.’”

Mrs. Reynolds leaned nearer.

There was more, but a dark stain swallowed part of the next line. Below it Elizabeth could distinguish a reference to the old chamber, to women brought there for privacy, and to warmth in Elspeth’s hands.

The warmth was not sufficient by itself. That much they could read. Elspeth wrote of attending to the person she meant to help and of losing what she sought when she became angry at being interrupted.

“Does she say who taught her?” Mrs. Reynolds asked.

Elizabeth examined the next line. “No. Or not where we can read it.”

She copied the clear sentences and stopped before she could supply words merely because they would make the account easier to understand.

A healing spirit. The words belonged upon her paper as something Elspeth believed. She would not yet write them as an explanation of herself.

They went on.

They found Hewet’s name upon a loose sheet in Mara’s hand. She had recorded his arrival and the questions he asked about her mistress’s thread. Beside the entry stood a later note: He carried away my master’s writing.

Elizabeth read it twice.

“A statement, perhaps,” she said. “Something Nicholas wrote for him.”

“We do not know what it said.”