Chapter Three #2
“Dozens,” Elizabeth said, sinking onto the bed.
“Everywhere. Most of them are just passing through, I think, but there are a few who are stuck, and they can see me, and that child...” She pressed her fingers to her temples.
“There is a little girl, Kitty. She cannot be more than eight. She is alone and she is frightened and she does not understand why nobody will speak to her.”
Kitty sat beside her and took her hand, the same way Jane would have done.
Kitty could not see the dead. She never had.
But she had spent a lifetime learning the signs: the sudden stillness, the eyes tracking something invisible, the way Elizabeth’s breathing changed when the spectral world pressed too close, and she was here, now, taking the role Jane normally would.
Elizabeth was unutterably grateful not to be alone in this moment.
“Can you help her?” Kitty asked.
“I do not know. I can try. But it will take time, and Darcy will notice if I disappear.”
“Leave Darcy to me,” Kitty said firmly. “I can ask him any number of questions about Pemberley. Tell me when you need to slip away, and I will manage it.”
Elizabeth looked at her younger sister, this girl who had spent years being dismissed as silly, as Lydia’s shadow, as the Bennet nobody noticed, and saw instead the person she was becoming away from Lydia’s influence: steady, sharp, fiercely loyal.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.
Kitty squeezed her hand. “Go and wash your face. You look as though you have seen a ghost.” She paused. “Which I suppose you have. Several dozen of them.”
Supper was a lively affair, Kitty orchestrating the conversation with a deftness that would have impressed a seasoned hostess.
She asked Georgiana about the lake at Pemberley, whether one could row on it, whether there were fish, what the grounds looked like in autumn.
Georgiana, delighted to have someone so interested, talked more freely than Elizabeth had ever heard her, describing the walks, the woods, the kitchen garden, and the succession houses where the gardeners grew pineapples, actual pineapples, which made Kitty gasp so theatrically that even Darcy laughed.
“You must teach Lizzy all about it,” Kitty said, beaming at Georgiana. “She will want to understand every inch of the place, and you know it better than anyone.”
“I should like that very much,” Georgiana said softly, and there was a wistfulness in her voice that Elizabeth recognised.
Georgiana had spent too much of her life in drawing rooms with chaperones.
Kindly though Mrs Annesley was, the prospect of having a sister near her own age, of having company that was not supervision, was plainly something she had been longing for.
Elizabeth excused herself shortly after the meal, claiming a headache from the journey.
Darcy looked concerned but did not press; Kitty immediately began asking him about the estate’s tenant farms, and by the time Elizabeth slipped out of the private dining room, Darcy was deep in an explanation of crop rotation and Kitty was nodding along as though fascinated.
The corridor was quieter now, most of the living guests having retired or settled in the taproom. The spectral ones remained. Elizabeth moved through them carefully, murmuring greetings to those who seemed aware of her, offering small kindnesses where she could.
Near the kitchen stairs, a stout woman in a travelling pelisse was berating the wall with considerable force.
“The chicken,” she announced to no one in particular, “was not cooked through. I said so at the time. I said, ‘Mr Featherstone, that chicken is pink,’ and he said, ‘Nonsense, my dear, it is merely moist,’ and I said, ‘There is a meaningful distinction between moist and raw, Mr Featherstone,’ and was I listened to? I was not. And now look.” She gestured at herself with magnificent indignation.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together, murmured her condolences, and moved on.
The soldier on the stairs turned out to be a deserter from the war who had died of fever on his way home.
He was young, not much older than Kitty.
He sat with his elbows on his knees, his head hanging.
He did not want help. He wanted someone to know his name.
She asked for it, and he told her: William Carver, of Sunderland.
She repeated it back to him, and watched something in his face ease.
He did not speak again, but he lifted his head, and his eyes followed her as she passed, and she thought perhaps that was enough.
The Tudor woman was searching for her son. Elizabeth sat with her for a time, listening, but the woman’s son had been dead for three hundred years, and there was nothing Elizabeth could do to ease that particular ache except to say she was sorry, and she said it, and meant it.
But it was the little girl who pulled at her most urgently.
She was sitting in the corner of the servants’ passage, her arms wrapped around her knees, her chin resting on them. Her dress was from perhaps fifty years ago, practical wool, worn at the cuffs. She had red-gold hair and, when she looked up at Elizabeth, eyes the colour of April skies.
“I can see you,” Elizabeth said gently, kneeling beside her. The floorboards were cold even through her skirts. “I can hear you. Can you tell me your name?”
“Nell,” the girl whispered. “I’m Nell Whitmore. I was waiting for my da. He went out and he never came back.”
Elizabeth settled down beside her, there in the cold corner of a servants’ passage in a coaching inn on the Great North Road. “Tell me about your father,” she said.
Nell’s story came in fragments, pieced together from a child’s understanding of events and a ghost’s confused sense of time.
Her father was a drover, had been a drover, had brought cattle south along the Great North Road.
She had travelled with him sometimes, when her mother was ill.
They had stopped at the Red Hart on this particular day, and her father had said he would go and put their horse to the cart.
He had left Nell with her travelling cloak and her doll and told her to mind the innkeeper’s wife.
“She was kind,” Nell said. “She gave me bread and milk. But then she forgot about me. There was so much happening. People shouting. I went to the stable to find Da.”
“What happened then?” Elizabeth asked, though she had begun to suspect.
“There was a cart. I did not see it. I was looking for Da. And then...” Nell’s voice faded.
“I was lying on the ground and the lady was crying, and Da came running, and he picked me up, and he said, ‘Nell, Nell, wake up, stay with me,’ but I could not. And then everything was strange and confused and I was all alone.”
Elizabeth wanted to hold Nell, but that was beyond her gift. She could only sit and listen.
“I thought he would come back,” Nell whispered.
“He said he would come back. He said he would never leave me alone. But then so many people came, and they moved the carts, and the horses were gone, and I did not know where I was anymore. People came and went, and I saw them but they could not see me, and I have been waiting, and waiting, and he never came back.”
“Oh, Nell,” Elizabeth said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You can see me,” Nell said, and there was wonder in her voice now, and something like hope. “You are real. You are alive and you can see me.”
“I can see you,” Elizabeth confirmed. “And I hear you. And you are not alone.”
They sat like that for a long time. Nell talked, and Elizabeth listened, and she did something she rarely did: she made a promise.
She would remember Nell Whitmore’s name.
She would know that Nell had been loved, and wanted, and that she had mattered.
It was a small thing, perhaps not even real comfort in any sense that endured.
But Nell looked up at her with something like peace in her expression, and she said, quietly, “Thank you.”
By the time Elizabeth climbed the stairs, her head truly was aching and her legs were heavy and she wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep for days.
But she had just clambered into bed and laid her head on the cool pillow when Darcy came in, trying to be quiet until he saw her eyes were open.
The worry on his face was almost worse than the ghosts as he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her.
“Your headache,” he said. “Is it very bad?”
“It is better now,” she lied, and reached for him.
She moved carefully, deliberately, settling herself into his arms as though she were a much more fragile thing than she actually was.
He enclosed her without complaint, his lips pressing against her hair.
He smelled of leather and candle wax and the particular scent that was simply Darcy.
“Three more days,” he murmured. “And then you will be home.”
Home. Pemberley. A house that had stood for centuries, that had seen births, deaths, wars, and plagues, that had been home to generation upon generation of the family she had married into.
She had glimpsed only two ghosts on her previous brief visits, but she had not been looking. She had been careful not to look.
She would not have that luxury now.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, pressed her face against his shoulder, and said nothing. She tried not to think about what waited at the end of the road.