Chapter Three
The travelling party assembled in the Netherfield courtyard shortly after ten: Elizabeth, Darcy, Georgiana, and Kitty, with two carriages, a wagon of trunks, Darcy’s valet, Elizabeth’s new lady’s maid, and a general air of nervous excitement that seemed to affect everyone except Darcy, who appeared to regard the organisation of a two-day journey northward as a matter requiring the same quiet authority he applied to everything else.
Kitty was trying not to bounce. She had been given a new travelling dress for the occasion, a sensible blue wool that Mrs Bennet had pronounced “not nearly fine enough” and Elizabeth had pronounced “exactly right,” and Kitty understood that her world was about to become considerably larger than Meryton, and her excitement was overflowing.
Georgiana, beside her in the second carriage, was already chattering about Pemberley’s music room and which pieces they might learn together, and Kitty’s face was bright with the particular pleasure of being wanted.
Mrs Annesley, Georgiana’s companion, had already withdrawn a book from her bag and appeared perfectly content to let the girls be.
Elizabeth watched them from the window of the first carriage and was grateful.
“They will be good for each other,” Darcy said, following her gaze.
He sat opposite her, long legs arranged carefully to avoid crushing her skirts, and there was something almost shy in the way he looked at her this morning, as though the intimacy of the previous night had made him more uncertain of her rather than less.
“Georgiana has not had much experience of easy company.”
“I think so too,” Elizabeth agreed. “Kitty needs someone who will not treat her as Lydia’s shadow, and Georgiana needs someone who will drag her away from the pianoforte and make her laugh.”
“Georgiana laughs,” Darcy protested mildly.
“Georgiana smiles politely and occasionally permits herself a small chuckle. Kitty will have her in stitches by this evening.”
“You will ruin her,” he said, but he was smiling.
“I will improve her. There is a difference.”
His mouth twitched. “You may be right.”
“I am frequently right. You will discover this in time.”
“Oh, I already know it,” he said, and the warmth in his voice made her want to lean across and kiss him, propriety and the carriage window and the coachman’s proximity notwithstanding. She settled instead for reaching across and squeezing his hand. He did not let go.
The carriages pulled away. Elizabeth turned for one last look at Netherfield, its red brick warm in the morning sun, and Jane, standing of the steps with Bingley beside her, raising her hand in farewell.
Elizabeth raised hers in return, and held it there until the house disappeared behind the trees.
The first day’s journey was long but not unpleasant. The roads were dry, the weather held, and the countryside unfolded in gentle waves of green and gold. Darcy read for a time, then set his book aside.
“Tell me about your mother,” he said.
Elizabeth blinked. “My mother?”
“I realise I have never asked you anything about her beyond the bare facts. I had instead been rather fixated on noting the errors in her conduct.” He shifted slightly, an uncomfortable movement. “That was ungenerous of me.”
“It was accurate,” Elizabeth said. “My mother is vain and foolish and has driven half the county to distraction. But she is also generous to a fault with those she loves. She simply does not think particularly hard before she speaks.”
“And yet you turned out sensible, as did Jane.”
She shrugged. “I read. Everything. My father’s library is not large, but I have been through it twice. Father encouraged it, not discouraging me from any book that drew my interest.”
He listened while she talked, asking questions, drawing her out about the afternoons spent in her father’s study, the conversations that had shaped her mind, the loneliness of being clever in a family that did not particularly value it.
He absorbed it all without judgement, and by the time the carriage slowed for a posting inn near Northampton, she had begun to believe that she might, eventually, be able to confide in him the much larger secret of her gift.
Every mile northward was a mile closer to a house she knew, with the certainty of long experience, would be full of them.
She had glimpsed two on her previous visits, both in the gallery, and had been careful to give no sign of noticing.
They had not seemed to see her then; she had caught them unaware, transparent against the gallery windows, discussing the various prospects for Darcy’s marriage.
“He will marry that Bingley woman,” one of them had said, a man in old-fashioned clothes. Elizabeth had been careful not to look too closely, but she had suspected they were both of the servant class, given the quality and cut of their clothes.
“God help him,” the other had replied. She was a middle-aged woman, dressed in the starkly plain clothes of a Puritan, and her tone had been withering. “That creature has the brain of a sparrow and the heart of a vulture. She would bleed him dry and smile while doing it.”
Elizabeth had made a small sound of amusement before she could stop herself, but had managed to cover it with a cough when the ghosts turned in her direction.
She had slipped away quickly, her heart pounding.
She had not thought much about it afterwards, dismissing it as a stray incident, a moment of carelessness.
But she would not be a visitor now; she was Mrs Darcy, Pemberley’s new mistress.
She would live there, eat there, sleep there.
She could not avoid an entire household of the dead for long.
The thought produced a sensation rather like standing at the edge of a high cliff and being told to admire the view.
They reached the coaching inn at dusk, a sprawling, half-timbered establishment called the Red Hart that had been serving travellers on the Great North Road since the reign of Henry the Eighth, according to the sign above the door.
The courtyard was crowded with coaches in various states of loading and unloading.
The air smelled of horses, turned earth, and wood smoke from the kitchen.
Darcy had arranged rooms in advance, the best suite and adjoining chambers for Mrs Annesley, Georgiana and Kitty.
The landlord was all bows and deference, recognising quality when he saw it, and the rooms, when they reached them, were tolerably clean and warm, with fresh linen and a fire already burning.
Elizabeth could find no fault with any of it.
Except that the inn was, as she had feared, absolutely teeming with ghosts.
Not the settled kind, like Longbourn’s or Netherfield’s.
Coaching inns attracted a different sort altogether: transient spirits, confused and disoriented, people who had died far from home and had no anchor to hold them.
They drifted through the corridors, clustered in the taproom, sat in corners looking lost. The sheer density of them hit Elizabeth like a wall of cold water the moment she stepped through the door.
She froze. It was an old reflex, as automatic as breathing; when the dead pressed in, she held herself quiet and let the wave of awareness wash over her before she decided how to respond.
There was a woman in Tudor dress standing by the desk, looking anxiously at the door, waiting for someone who would never walk through it.
A man in a soldier’s coat who kept walking from one end of the corridor to the other as though searching for something.
A serving girl no older than sixteen, her face streaked with tears.
Dozens of others, fading in and out of Elizabeth’s awareness like clouds passing across the sun.
Most of them were harmless. Confused travellers, people who had been caught in the current of a place where hundreds had come and gone for centuries. They did not need her help. They were simply there, and they would go on being there long after she left.
But they could see her. Some of them were already turning toward her, sensing the thing that made her different, the quality she had never been able to name that drew the dead to her like moths to candlelight.
The Tudor woman was watching her from the end of the corridor.
A child, no more than eight, tugged at her skirt as she passed and said, “Can you see me? Can you really see me?”
Elizabeth’s step faltered. Darcy, beside her, glanced down immediately.
“Are you well? You look pale.”
“Merely tired from the journey,” she said, and smiled, and hated herself for it.
Kitty appeared at her elbow. She slipped her arm through Elizabeth’s, an easy, sisterly gesture, and said brightly, “Come, let us find our rooms; I want to show Georgiana the embroidery pattern Mama gave me before we left. Mr Darcy, would you be so kind as to have our trunks sent up? My travelling case in particular; I shall want to freshen up before supper.”
It was beautifully done. In the space of a few sentences, Kitty had given Darcy a task that would occupy him for several minutes, and created a reason for Elizabeth to leave the crowded corridor full of spectral strangers.
All without a flicker of anything but cheerful, slightly scatterbrained enthusiasm.
Upstairs, she was equally deft, urging Georgiana and Mrs Annesley to take a few moments and use the wash-water first; she would just help Elizabeth with her outer clothing.
The moment they were alone, the door closed behind them, Kitty’s expression changed.
“How bad?” she asked quietly.