Page 37 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

He looked startlingly relieved to see her. "Miss Elizabeth, I apologise for arriving without notice. I am aware it is irregular."

"It is, indeed. What is the matter?"

He dismissed the footman with a brief, well-communicated look, and the man withdrew with admirable tact, leaving them standing in the hall.

"Is Miss Mary well?"

The question was unexpected enough that she took a moment to answer, not from any want of reply but from the reflex that came from having learned to be careful with sudden questions from unexpected quarters. "She is quite well. Why do you ask?"

He met her gaze without inhibition. She had come to realise it was something he did when he intended to be direct, without the hedging that most people deployed as a courtesy. "I have come across a piece of information that may be of relevance to your family. I concluded you should be made aware of it before others are."

The word others had a foreboding element to it that she registered without yet being able to place.

"What have you come across?"

He opened his mouth to speak.

Elizabeth heard the sound of footsteps, but it faded, just like every other sound or view. All that mattered to her, as her heart beat rapidly in her chest, were the next words Mr Darcy intended to say.

Chapter Seventeen

Mary

She had wanted tea, and had not wanted to ring for it. The morning room was on the ground floor and the distance between it and her room was short enough to make the errand justified. Moreover, she had been in her room for the better part of two days and the walls had begun to look familiar to the point of producing a faint, restless pressure around her.

She was at the bottom of the staircase when she heard her name.

The voices were low, speaking in a register calibrated for the space between them rather than for an audience. She recognised Elizabeth's first. The second took a moment, and when she placed it she remained where she was not from any intention of eavesdropping but due to the pure, immobilising surprise of hearing Mr Darcy's voice in their hall.

"—mentioned to me with an intent to discredit your family," he was saying, "which I wish to be entirely clear I do not share. I came because I thought you should be informed before others are."

There was a pause and then Elizabeth said: "Please say plainly what you were told."

"Mrs Bingley heard it from Mrs Bennet, in confidence, that Miss Mary Bennet was not born to the household. She was taken in as an infant."

For a moment, the hall was quiet.

Mary stood with her hand on the bannister. She was aware that her breathing had changed, and that her body was perfectly still. There was a bunch of bright yellow daffodils on the opposite end of the stairway and she seemed to stare at them without being able to tear her gaze away.

Her first instinct was to doubt it. The instinct arrived with force, promptly, in the way of the body's immediate response before the mind has been consulted. Reflex that preceded thought. He was wrong. This was a mistake or a misunderstanding, something Mrs Bennet had said imprecisely and Mrs Bingley had misconstrued. Or it could be a detail that had been distorted in transmission and would, upon examination, align into something explicable.

The instinct lasted only for seconds.

Then a colder and considerably less welcome feeling emerged. It brought along a slow, cold recognition of information already known and simply never named.

She thought of the portrait at Longbourn. The upstairs hall, the frame that needed regilding, the dark and serious face above the unfashionable neckline that she had been told, at various points by various people, was her grandmother — Mrs Bennet's mother. She had stood before it often enough, and had felt, in the absence of any resemblance to any living person in the house, a provisional comfort in the idea that the likeness existed somewhere in the family, only further back in time than could be easily pointed to. She had accepted this explanation because it was the one available and she had no reason to look for another.

She recalled her mother's face, two nights ago, in the sitting room, saying: you have always been so different. The flat, tired delivery of it. There was no measure of cruelty, but it included some other degree of feeling that was perhaps the exhaustion of a woman who had been holding a detail back for a long time and no longer quite remembered how to withhold it so that it didn’t show.

Her thoughts turned back to the mirror above the writing desk in the library, and the face she did not consider similar to anyone else in her primary family.

All the explanations she had accepted for years because she had not, until this moment, heard the alternative stated plainly by a man with no reason to invent it.

Her vision blurred.

She turned, gingerly placed one foot in front of the other and made her way back up the stairs.

The door closed behind her.