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“How lovely.” Elizabeth glanced at the shop window as though something in the display had caught her attention, even as her stomach dropped. Who else could she mean other than Caroline Bingley? “The haberdasher has improved greatly this year, I think. Are you shopping for something particular?”

The girl relaxed incrementally. “A bit of lace, miss. I have been saving for it, and had some good fortune.” To Elizabeth’s profound relief, she did not seem to realise how much this simple statement could betray — at least, to someone who had heard the conversation she had been having a moment before, and who had been looking for explanations for a certain mystery.

“How nice,” Elizabeth said. She let the pause stretch out, inviting continuation.

“A little extra work. For one of the household.” Another pause, in which some vestige of discretion appeared to be conducting a rearguard action. “Nothing much.”

“Extra work is always welcome,” Elizabeth said. “Though I imagine the household keeps you busy enough.”

“It does, usually.” The girl’s friend had drifted toward the shop door, losing interest in the conversation, and without her audience, the housemaid’s tone shifted toward the confidential. “It was a particular job, like. Not usual work.”

Elizabeth looked at her with mild interest, doing her best to suggest that she felt nothing beyond idle curiosity. “How mysterious.”

The girl looked at her and then spoke abruptly, as though the confession had weighed heavily on her and she had been waiting for someone to tell. “Just locking a door when I was told. Nothing wrong in it, I thought, only now I wonder sometimes.” The last part arrived as though it had been waiting some time for the chance to come out. The girl wrung her hands together. “It was not what was meant, was it? The whole thing.”

Elizabeth had to concentrate very hard on not letting her emotions spill out onto her face.

“Meant by whom?” she asked gently.

But her luck had run out. The maid had the alarmed look of someone who has realised they have said more than they planned. “I shouldn’t say, miss. I only meant it was a bit of nonsense and no harm done. Beg pardon for mentioning it.”

She looked toward her friend at the shop door and made a small move in that direction.

“Of course,” Elizabeth said. She let her go. There was nothing more to be extracted without pressure, and pressure would likely silence the girl entirely. Besides, she had enough.

She stood on the pavement and watched the girl disappear into the draper’s with her friend, and allowed herself to feel the gravity of what she had uncovered. It was considerable.

Mary waited at the corner with two books from the circulating library and a complaint about the limited selection of improving literature. Elizabeth joined her, agreed about the library, and walked home with the ribbon in her basket and the morning’s intelligence arranged in her mind. It was an answer to the question she had been asking, but an answer she did not quite know what to do with.

A door locked when she was told. By one of the Netherfield housemaids. Paid by her mistress. Someone who had been very put out that Elizabeth Bennet and not someone else had been on the other side of the door when it opened.

Her mistress.

Elizabeth turned the word over deliberately, refusing to be hasty. Used as the maid had, the term ‘mistress’ was not exclusive. If the girl was a lady’s maid, she might equally be employed by Mrs Hurst. If a housemaid, ‘mistress’ might have referred to Mrs Nicholls, though Mrs Nicholls did not pay her wages and held no grudge against Elizabeth that she could conceive of. It might, theoretically, have referred to any woman with authority in the household.

But it did not. Elizabeth was certain of it. There was only one woman at Netherfield with that precise combination of motive, access, and history of precise social calculation.

Elizabeth stopped walking and pressed a fist to her stomach.

Mary, two steps ahead, turned around. “Are you all right?”

“Perfectly,” Elizabeth said. “I thought of something I had forgotten.”

She had not forgotten anything. She had simply needed a moment for the full picture of it to assemble itself, which it now did with merciless clarity.

Caroline Bingley had arranged it; there could no longer be any doubt. The note to Mr Darcy about his sister, the bribed maid, and the locked door. How frustrated Miss Bingley must have been when she stood in the corridor only a little too late and saw the door was locked on the wrong person!

But Elizabeth’s sympathy for her could only go so far. Both her plan and her indifference to its results were nothing short of wicked. The consequences had fallen on Elizabeth when the plan had been for herself. And as for Mr Darcy, who had been caught in a trap gone only a little awry, Miss Bingley did not really seem to care at all.

Elizabeth walked the rest of the way home, carrying her basket and the far greater burden of a terrible discovery. She spoke now and then to Mary, but said nothing of any substance.

∞∞∞

The weight of the knowledge settled over the afternoon, implacable and unmoveable.

Elizabeth sat in the parlour with her embroidery and made very little progress. Making a slight excuse to her mother and sisters, she went upstairs. Finally alone, Elizabeth sat in her room, staring into space and thinking.

After six weeks of suspicion and circling, and the scratch on the lock plate that proved deliberation without proving agency, she now had something concrete. Not the sort of proof that would satisfy a court, but the sort that satisfied her: a housemaid, a key, a payment, and a mistress who had been very put out at the outcome. Assembled alongside everything else she had accumulated, it was sufficient. It was, by any reasonable standard, a case.