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too.” Darcy took her hand and with his thumb traced her wedding band through the glove. “Do you think the house is ready for us yet?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “Not a bit.”
    She nestled into her husband’s side, resting her cheek against his chest. “Mr. Darcy, take me home.”

 
     
Four
     
     
Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.
    Pride and Prejudice,
Chapter 10
     
     
    T his one looks innocuous enough.” Elizabeth studied the splintered wooden beam. It was a simple, aged pine log, unremarkable but for a star carved into its center. A circle connected the star’s five points.
    “Lintel, circa 1640,” Darcy read from the display card, “taken from the doorway of a Massachusetts cottage. The beam bears a symbol known as a pentagram, evidence of familiarity with witchcraft in New England decades before the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692.”
    His voice echoed in the empty gallery. She and Darcy had come to the British Museum for the afternoon, drawn by the Towneley sculpture collection and a set of medieval manuscripts Darcy had wanted to see. After viewing the old texts, they had wandered into an exhibit titled “Curiosities from the Colonies.” This room they had all to themselves. Apparently, none of the museum’s other visitors had much interest in New World relics.
    In the back of the gallery, they’d discovered a display ofitems marked “Mysterious Articles.” The beam lay among a dozen or so objects believed to have been used for mystical purposes. She found the assortment particularly intriguing. The shaman’s drum, dreamcatcher, totem mask,
vodun
doll, and other eclectic offerings reminded her of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels—symbols of a world in which the supernatural exists alongside the mundane. The fanciful elements appealed to her imagination.
    She pointed to another item, a circlet of braided plant roots. “This was believed to ward off illness. Does one wear it, do you suppose? Sleep with it under the pillow? Hang it on the door?”
    “Does it matter?” Darcy shrugged. “Superstitious people have all sorts of ridiculous rituals to keep bad luck away. It is not as if the thing actually holds power.”
    She cocked her head and gave him a wry smile. “Are you sure?”
    “I am.”
    Her lighthearted mood ebbed. He might be certain, but she wasn’t. She considered herself a rational woman, one who valued sense above sensibility. She read gothic tales for entertainment not verisimilitude, and believed more strongly in what she could observe than what she couldn’t. Yet a part of her occasionally wondered if there wasn’t something else out there, forces just beyond conscious perception. Not enchantments, or illusions—the sorcery of Merlin or
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. But a quieter kind of magic, the power that fuels intuition and enables one to take leaps of faith to places reason cannot go.
    At her silence, Darcy’s expression grew more serious. “Come now, Elizabeth. Do not tell me you believe in fairies and hocuspocus?”
    Reluctantly, she withdrew from her reverie. “I believe warm weather spoils more milk than elves do, and you’ll never catch me whistling into the wind to keep witches away.”
    “Thank goodness.”
    “But”—she swept her arm toward the display—“does that mean none of this is real? What was it Hamlet said onstage last night? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Do you believe only in what you can see?”
    “Excepting God, yes.”
    “Perhaps I take a broader view.”
    He raised one dark brow. “Explain.”
    How to explain what she couldn’t quite articulate in her own mind? He’d enjoyed the play last night, told her it was one of his favorites—maybe she should draw an analogy from it. “Have you ever felt your late father’s presence at Pemberley?”
    “His ghost has never informed me that he was poisoned in the garden,” he replied