as she recalled a similar scene from her first visit to Netherfield, only this time Caroline was not present to laud Darcy on the speed of his writing and evenness of his lines. The lady in question had not left her chamber since her afternoon headache came on, but now, according to her husband, at least slept peacefully.
“Why do you say so?” she asked. “Because no one else is presently reading?”
“Two reasons. First, I thought my partiality outdated — Mrs. Radcliffe has not published a new novel for some years. I wonder that you have not read this one before now.”
“Oh, I have. I chose it because it is an old favorite.”
Parrish picked up the volume. As he thumbed the pages, she noticed the ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. Similar in style to Caroline’s, the wedding band lacked gems, but its engraved sunburst detail marked it as a companion piece. Her chest tightened at the sight of it — a reaction, she supposed, to the strong attachment it symbolized. Double-ring wedding ceremonies were rare. The display of loyalty was especially moving in the face of such early and unexpected marital challenges.
“Elizabeth is too kind in her excuses,” Bingley called from the card table. “She rereads the book because my library lacks many alternatives. I apologize, my new sister, for not yet amending that deficiency.”
Darcy blotted his paper. “Such endeavors take time to carry out properly, Bingley. First find your family a permanent home. Then start collecting books to fill it.”
“Again the subject of an estate arises! It seems none of my friends will rest until Jane and I quit Netherfield.”
“It’s not every day a man gets to spend a fortune,” Parrish said. “Perhaps they want to experience the thrill vicariously. Or they can’t stand the thought of all that money just lying around.”
“Well, it’s in the five percents, so it’s hardly just lying around. But I do realize land would make a better investment. Now that my mother-in-law and closest friend are in collusion — an event I thought I’d never see — I’ll quickly indulge their hopes as well as my own. Jane, shall we visit Haye Park tomorrow on our way to Longbourn?”
Jane expressed delight at the prospect. Elizabeth mused that Haye Park might prove a little too close to their mother, but kept the thought to herself. Instead, she returned to the book discussion.
“You said you had two reasons for surprise at our shared enjoyment of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels. What is the other?”
“I feared my tastes unrefined. Novels are entertaining but hardly hold the intellectual weight of poetry.”
Professor Randolph took a chair beside the fire. “There is nothing wrong with reading simply for pleasure.” He leaned back and stretched out his legs.
“I agree,” said Darcy, “though Mrs. Radcliffe and her imitators do give ‘pleasure’ a curious form. Readers come to their novels
“Nonsense, all of it,” Mrs. Hurst declared. “An utter waste of time.”
Elizabeth, despite the reverence in which she held Mrs. Hurst as an authority on the meaningful employment of one’s time, forbore enquiring whether it was gothic romances in particular or reading altogether that she held in disdain. “Professor, do the tales have any merit, in your estimation? I speak not of literary merit, but credibility. Of course they are works of imagination, but…”
“But could supernatural events really occur in our world? Right here, in King George’s England?” Randolph chuckled softly. “They do every day, dear lady. But most people look right past them, seeing only what they want to see, believing only what they wish to be true. Even for those who delight in stories like Mrs. Radcliffe’s, the otherworldly must always be a foreign thing, something that happens somewhere far removed from one’s present place or time.”
“To think otherwise causes one too much discomfort?”
“Precisely. So they block their own awareness and use science to explain anything impossible to ignore. Educated people, at least. Reason has become the new god among the upper classes. Your lower classes, your unrefined societies, these are far more likely to accept the presence of the preternatural in their daily lives — to believe in miracles, or ghosts, or magic.”
Darcy stopped writing in midstroke. “Oh, come now. When one of my tenants tells me his neighbor has cursed his cattle, am I to accept this accusation as the cause of his animals dying? Is it not more likely that some disease has stricken them?”
“Whence does the disease derive? And why has it stricken only his herd and not those of other farmers?” Randolph shrugged. “It may indeed have occurred naturally. I merely point out that it’s your illiterate tenant who considers more explanations than you do.”
“But your ‘mysterious articles,’ at the museum,” Elizabeth said. “Some looked quite valuable, like they were created by or for people of great means.”
“Indeed, they were. Most of them date back to times when belief in magic was more common and embraced by wealthy and poor alike. The more recent items belonged to exceptional individuals attuned to the presence of the extraordinary in our world.”
“In other words, modern people who still believe in hexes and sorcery?” Darcy asked.
“You say that in a tone laced with ridicule. But I have seen enough evidence of such things that I cannot deny their existence. Why, just last month, an aristocratic lady of whom you have all heard, but whose identity I shall protect, pointed out to me the unusual cornerstone of her country house. Inscribed beneath the date were some Latin phrases. The lady told me that according to family legend, the mansion had been built on land that had once been a druid grove. Romans seized it, razed the trees, and erected a fortification on the site. Within a year of its completion, every occupant was dead of a mysterious fever. More soldiers came. They, too, died, and the fortress was abandoned. The elements wore it down, but in Henry the Sixth’s time a new manor was raised. Fever plagued its occupants for decades, claiming heirs one by one. The family, in danger of its lineage ending, leveled the building.
“Again, the site lay unused for many years, but eventually the land passed to a younger son who wanted to develop the property. He constructed the residence that stands there today and, with the help of a local wisewoman, inscribed and laid the cornerstone himself. At the time I spoke with the current mistress, the house seemed to have escaped the doom of its predecessors. No fever had troubled the family for five generations.
“She and her husband, however, were improving their estate and the stone was part of a wall scheduled to be removed. ‘Revise your plans,’ I urged her. ‘Don’t disturb the cornerstone. Those words are a charm — the stone protects the occupants of this house.’ She didn’t heed my advice, and within a week of its removal her eldest son took to bed with a putrid fever. The stone was quickly set back in place, and he recovered.”
“This, you call evidence?” Darcy folded his letter. “I call it coincidence. Certainly not the result of some old druid’s spell.”
“Not a spell, necessarily. While it’s possible that the druids themselves laid a curse, it also may be that the Romans incurred the wrath of higher powers to whom the grove had been consecrated.”
A prickling sensation danced across the back of Elizabeth’s neck. She couldn’t decide whether Randolph was the most insightful or most insane person she’d ever met. “It does seem odd that so many people succumbed to fever, over so many years, in the same place.”
“Not at all,” Darcy said. “People die of fever all the time. Next the professor will tell us that the Black Death was caused by someone picking flowers in a faerie glen.” He passed wax over the candle flame until it softened, and sealed his note. “With all due respect to you and your studies, Randolph, I remain unconvinced.”
Randolph half-smiled. “Most people do. ’Tis my lot in life, it seems, to stand accused of tilting at windmills.”
Parrish, who’d been following the discussion closely, cast a look of apology at his friend. “I’m afraid I have to side with Mr. Darcy. Much as I enjoy a good story, tales of spells and spirits are really just flights of fancy.” He handed Elizabeth’s book back to her.
She accepted the volume in puzzlement. Of all the people in the room, she’d expected Parrish to come to Randolph’s defense. “I thought you were a patron of the professor’s work?”
“I am. Magic so permeates life in New Orleans, from slave
