Chapter Two
The wedding breakfast at Netherfield was a grander affair than Elizabeth had expected, though she supposed she ought to have anticipated it.
Bingley had thrown himself into the preparations as enthusiastically as he did everything, thoroughly encouraged by Mrs Bennet.
The result was a dining room transformed: hothouse flowers in towering arrangements, silver, crystal and china which would not have disgraced a palace, enough food to sustain a small army through a siege.
Elizabeth sat beside Darcy at the head of the table, acutely aware of the ring on her finger and the strange new weight of her married name every time someone used it.
Mrs Darcy. She caught Jane’s eye across the table and saw her own bewildered happiness reflected back.
Jane, seated beside Bingley, looked as though she had been gently placed inside a dream and was in no particular hurry to wake from it.
Bingley kept touching her hand as though to reassure himself she was really there, and Jane kept letting him.
“You are very quiet,” Darcy murmured, leaning toward her under cover of the general conversation.
“I am absorbing,” Elizabeth replied. “There is a great deal to absorb.”
“Is it too much?”
She looked at him. He was watching her the way he had at the altar, as though she was the only person in the room. Something in her chest, the familiar stone, shifted and settled. “No,” she said. “It is exactly enough.”
His mouth curved; not the guarded half-smile she had grown accustomed to, but something softer. He lifted his glass to her, slightly, and she lifted hers in return.
From the far end of the table, Caroline Bingley’s voice rose above the chatter, bright and brittle as spun glass. “Such a charming little ceremony! So quaint. One does admire the simplicity of a country church, does one not, Louisa?”
Mrs Hurst murmured something vaguely affirmative.
“I do hope,” Caroline continued, her gaze skating toward Elizabeth, “that you will not find the transition to grander surroundings too overwhelming, Mrs Darcy. Pemberley is, after all, quite a different prospect from Hertfordshire.”
“I am sure I shall manage,” Elizabeth said pleasantly. “Though I thank you for your concern, Miss Bingley. It must be a great comfort to Mr Bingley, having a sister so attentive to the domestic anxieties of others.”
Caroline’s smile thinned. Lady Matlock, from further down the table, caught Elizabeth’s eye and gave her a look of undisguised approval. Elizabeth smiled into her wineglass.
The breakfast stretched on through toasts, speeches, and Mrs Bennet’s increasingly tearful predictions about grandchildren.
Mr Bennet endured it all from behind his wine glass, offering the occasional dry remark that Elizabeth was pleased to note seemed to find an appreciative audience in Lord Matlock.
Colonel Fitzwilliam told a story about Darcy as a boy that made Georgiana giggle and Darcy look as though he wished the floor would open beneath his chair.
Kitty laughed so hard she spilled her lemonade, and Mary said something earnest about the sanctity of marriage that everyone politely pretended to find interesting.
It was, Elizabeth thought, a good wedding breakfast. She looked around, absorbing it all carefully, the way one presses a flower between the pages of a book, to be taken out and looked at later when one was in need of something lovely as a distraction.
The house grew quiet by degrees. The guests departed in a stream of carriages and well-wishes; the Bennets were among the last to leave, Mrs Bennet alternating between sobs and raptures until Mr Bennet steered her firmly toward the door.
Mary shook her hand solemnly. Her father kissed her forehead and did not trust himself to speak.
Jane and Bingley had vanished upstairs some time ago.
Caroline had retired to her room, claiming a headache brought on by the champagne; Elizabeth suspected the headache owed more to the sight of her brother married to a Bennet than to anything in a bottle.
The Matlocks and Colonel Fitzwilliam had discreetly retired, and Georgiana had disappeared with Kitty, who would accompany them to Pemberley on the morrow.
Kitty and Georgiana appeared to be becoming fast friends already, to Elizabeth’s relief.
Elizabeth stood in the corridor outside the room she would share with Darcy tonight, their first night as husband and wife, and tried to steady the rapid beating of her heart. He was inside, she knew, waiting for her. She should go in. She wanted to go in.
But first, she had a promise to keep.
She slipped down the back stairs, shoes in hand.
A lifetime of navigating around the unseen had taught her how to move through dark corridors without a sound.
The house was different at night; the daytime bustle stripped away to reveal its bones.
Old floorboards. Cold stone. The particular hush of a building that had stood for two hundred years and carried the memory of them in every wall.
The library was where they gathered. It had been their favourite room since Elizabeth’s first visit, when she had come to nurse Jane through her fever and had found, to her unsurprised resignation, that Netherfield came with ghosts of its own.
Most of them were only shades, wisps barely seen even by her, but some of them were more permanent.
Solid enough to make out their features, and retaining enough personality and will to hold a conversation with her.
There were four of them. Sir Harold Pembury, a portly Jacobean gentleman who had built the original house and considered all subsequent alterations a personal affront.
His wife, Lady Cecily, who disagreed with him about everything on principle and had been doing so for two hundred years with no sign of tiring.
Old Margaret, a housekeeper from the last century who kept trying to dust surfaces she could no longer touch.
And a young footman called Daniel who had died of consumption in the servants’ quarters just a decade past and had the gentle, slightly bewildered air of someone who kept forgetting he was dead.
They were waiting for her. Sir Harold stood by the fire, Lady Cecily sat in her accustomed chair, Old Margaret hovered near the bookshelves, and Daniel perched on the window seat, his thin face brightening as Elizabeth came in.
“There she is,” Sir Harold declared. “The bride. Allow me to offer my congratulations, madam, though I confess I had hoped you might settle here permanently. Your presence has been most enlivening.”
“You are too kind, Sir Harold,” Elizabeth said, settling into the chair opposite Lady Cecily. “But I fear Netherfield must do without me. I have come to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye!” Old Margaret’s hand flew to her chest. “Oh, but you will visit, surely? Because your sister is here?”
“Of course I shall visit. But I wanted to speak to you all before I left, because Jane will be mistress of this house, and Jane cannot see you, and I need you to promise me something.”
Four spectral faces regarded her solemnly.
“You must look after her,” Elizabeth said. “She is the best person I know, and she will take care of this house and everyone in it, living or otherwise. She knows you are here, even if she cannot see you. In return, I need you to behave.”
She let her gaze rest meaningfully on Sir Harold. “That means no slamming doors when you disapprove of the dinner menu.”
Sir Harold looked affronted. “That was once.”
“It was ten times in a single night, and Cook nearly gave notice.”
“The woman served boiled mutton on a Thursday. I have standards.”
“And I need you to leave the other residents alone,” Elizabeth continued firmly. “All of them. Even the ones who deserve otherwise.”
A delicate silence fell. Lady Cecily studied her fingernails, or the memory of them.
“You are referring,” she said, “to Miss Bingley.”
“I am referring to Miss Bingley.”
The memory was still vivid. The Netherfield ball, all those months ago, when Elizabeth had been trying to enjoy the evening and manage a building full of agitated ghosts simultaneously.
Caroline had been holding court near the fireplace, making pointed remarks about the Bennet family’s lack of connections, and Sir Harold had grown so incensed on Elizabeth’s behalf that he had attempted to knock Caroline’s wine glass out of her hand.
He could not, of course, physically touch it, but the concentrated force of spectral outrage had created a draught strong enough to make the candles flicker and Caroline’s carefully arranged curls come undone on one side.
That had been merely the opening salvo. Lady Cecily, not to be outdone by her husband in anything, had proceeded to whisper directly into Caroline’s ear every time the woman paused for breath, which had the effect of making Caroline twitch, look over her shoulder, and eventually complain loudly that there was a draught in the ballroom, which had led Bingley to order the windows checked and the fire stoked, which had led to the room becoming unbearably hot, which had led to Mrs Bennet fanning herself so vigorously she knocked Mrs Long’s turban askew.
Elizabeth had spent the better part of the evening conducting a whispered negotiation with four increasingly creative ghosts while attempting to dance with Mr Collins, who was oblivious, and Mr Darcy, who was not.
She still did not know how she had managed to hold a civil conversation with Mr Darcy while Sir Harold stood directly behind him making disparaging remarks about the stiffness of his dancing.
“Miss Bingley will reside here much of the time,” Elizabeth said now. “She is Mr Bingley’s sister, and Jane will wish to keep peace in the family. You will leave her alone.”
“She is a thoroughly disagreeable woman,” Sir Harold pronounced.