Page 93 of A Debt Inherited

Her eyes went to the door behind him. “Am I to thank you for advice?”

“No.”

“Then I shall not.”

He pulled the door nearly closed behind him and stood with his back to it.

“You wish to know why you are here,” he said.

“I have understood part of it.”

“That is something.”

“My father is to pay.”

“Yes.”

“And Mr Wickham is to profit.”

Kerr looked at the shuttered casement, then at the loop that held her wrists. “Wickham is seldom present where money is absent.”

“And you?”

“I want an old debt acknowledged.”

She inclined her head. “My father owes you no debt.”

“How would you know that?”

“Because he is an honest man.”

Something moved in Kerr’s jaw. “Your father,” he said, “walked away from Stamford and left my family’s name in the dirt.”

She searched his face. “I do not know what that means.”

“No. You would not.”

Her colour changed, but she did not look away.

“Ask him,” Kerr said, “if you see him again.”

Then he stepped out, set the crosspiece into its brackets, and barred her in with the uncertainty.

Chapter 36

Longbourn, July 1812

Bennet drew the estate ledger nearer, set one finger beneath Elizabeth’s last column, and stopped before he dipped his pen.

The air was wrong.

Since his family had departed for Margate, he had allowed the door to stand open. Elizabeth had come and gone without ceremony, bringing a question, a correction, or some laughing charge against his figures. The quiet had pleased him at first.

He had even imagined, with more tenderness than he would have confessed, how loudly the house would reclaim itself when his wife and daughters returned at summer’s end.

Wax, leather, old paper, and the dry scent of the Turkey carpet rose about him. Beneath it lay none of the warmer traces by which Longbourn usually announced itself: no lavender from his wife’s shawl, no starch and rose soap from the girls’ gowns, no light footstep crossing the passage before it became a voice.

The house had not fallen silent. It had emptied.