Chapter Four
Elizabeth recognised the feeling before she recognised the road.
It had been the same on her previous visit, that summer afternoon with the Gardiners when she had come to Pemberley as a tourist and tried not to think too hard about the man who owned it until he appeared before her, much to her consternation.
The house had pressed against her awareness then, a low, insistent hum at the edges of her gift, denser than anything she had felt before.
She had attributed it at the time to the age of the place, to the sheer weight of centuries soaked into its stones.
Now, as the carriages turned onto the approach road and the parkland opened up around them, she felt it again. The same hum, the same pressure. Only this time there would be no leaving.
“We are close,” Darcy said, and there was something in his voice she had come to recognise: pride, tempered by anxiety. She had heard it the day he asked if he could introduce Georgiana to her, and not understood it then. Despite her anxiety, she smiled to hear it now.
“I can tell,” Elizabeth said in answer to his remark, and meant it in a way he could not possibly understand.
The parkland was rolling and vast, the oaks beginning to turn bronze. Deer grazed in clusters on the slopes, lifting their heads as the carriages passed, and in the second carriage Kitty leaned out of the window and said, “Oh!” in a voice that managed to be both awed and slightly terrified.
Then the trees thinned, and there it was.
Elizabeth had seen Pemberley before. She had stood on this very approach and felt the first stirring of something she had not yet been ready to name, a sense that this place and the man who owned it were altogether more than she had allowed herself to imagine.
But that had been a different Elizabeth, a visitor passing through, free to admire and move on.
The woman in the carriage now was mistress of the vast estate before her, and the weight of that, layered over the pressure of the house’s presence, settled over her like a coat, a heavy one that was too warm for the weather, slightly suffocating.
“Well?” Darcy said.
“It is,” Elizabeth replied, choosing her words carefully, “exactly as beautiful as I remembered. And considerably more terrifying.”
He looked startled. “Terrifying?”
“I am about to become responsible for it. That is, I think, allowed to be terrifying.”
His expression softened. “You are not alone in it. Mrs Reynolds has managed the household for many years and will continue to do so. All that is required of you is to be yourself.”
“That,” Elizabeth said, “is what concerns me.”
He did not understand her meaning, of course.
He thought she was nervous about the household, the staff, the social expectations.
And she was. But beneath that was the thing she could not say: that the hum had become a roar, that the spectral presence she had merely brushed against on her tourist visit was now pressing against her from every direction, and that she was going to have to walk into that house and pretend she felt nothing at all, lest her husband think she had gone insane.
She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. Steady. She simply needed time, and care, and Kitty watching her back.
The carriages swept up the drive and stopped before the great front doors. Darcy stepped down first and handed Elizabeth out, and his hand was warm and steady around hers. She held onto it a moment longer than strictly necessary.
Mrs Reynolds had the staff assembled in the entrance hall, arranged in two neat lines stretching from the door to the foot of the staircase.
It was a display of considerable formality: footmen in their best livery, housemaids in white caps, kitchen staff in neat dark dresses and clean white aprons, the butler standing at rigid attention, the gardeners and grooms at the far end, slightly less rigid but all wearing boots shiny with fresh polish.
Every face turned toward Elizabeth as she stepped through the door, and Mrs Reynolds, standing at the head of the line, smiled with a warmth that seemed quite genuine.
“Welcome home, Mrs Darcy,” she said. Here was a woman who had known Darcy since he was a child, who had served his father and his mother and this household for decades.
Her investment in this moment was written plainly on her face, and Elizabeth, who had been bracing herself for judgement, found kindness instead.
“Thank you, Mrs Reynolds,” she said, and meant it.
The introductions began. Mrs Reynolds walked her down the line, naming each servant, their role, how long they had been at Pemberley.
Elizabeth did her best to fix each face and name in her memory, smiling, saying something personal where she could.
She complimented a housemaid on the neatness of her cap, asked a youthful-looking footman how long he had been in service, told the cook she had heard wonderful things about the kitchen from Georgiana.
The problem was that not everyone in the line was alive.
She spotted the first one six servants in: a housemaid in an older style of uniform, her cap fashioned differently from the others’, standing between two living girls and looking at Elizabeth with frank curiosity.
Elizabeth’s gaze passed over her without pause, without the smallest flicker of recognition.
She could not afford to do otherwise. Not now.
Further along, a footman in a powdered white wig whose livery belonged to a previous generation, perhaps forty years past. He stood at parade rest with the correctness of long habit.
A parlour maid whose cap was faded in a way that a living eye would not have noticed.
A second housemaid whose feet did not quite touch the floor.
Elizabeth had to concentrate, hard, not to acknowledge their bows and curtseys as she did those of their living fellows.
There were two grooms, so alike they had to be brothers, and not so long dead from the cut of their jackets.
Faded, here inside the house. She suspected they would be stronger out in the stables, but they, like every other servant of Pemberley, would not miss greeting their new mistress, whether she acknowledged them or not.
At the end of the line, near the stairs, an elderly man in the clothes of a butler from a previous age.
He held himself as though he still carried the entire weight of the household on his shoulders and had no intention of setting it down simply because he was dead.
His eyes followed Elizabeth down the line, missing nothing, and she felt his scrutiny like a physical weight.
Her composure wobbled under that spectral regard, just slightly, a tightening of her jaw that she could not quite suppress.
Seven. She had counted seven ghosts in the line, standing among the living as though they had never left their posts, and she had acknowledged none of them, but this one… she suspected this one knew she had seen them.
Kitty was at her side. Elizabeth did not know when her sister had moved there, only that she was suddenly present, asking Mrs Reynolds about the kitchens, saying something warm about the height and grandeur of the hall.
The commotion was gentle, intentional, and it gave Elizabeth the space of a few heartbeats to close her eyes and breathe.
She opened her eyes and smiled at Mrs Reynolds, who was explaining the arrangements for tea, and allowed herself to be led further into the house.
The great hall of Pemberley was grander than any room Elizabeth had stood in.
The ceiling rose above them, painted and gilded, the plasterwork so intricate it seemed to contain entire dramas in miniature.
The staircase swept upward in a curve of polished oak, and the walls held portraits of Darcys going back centuries: stern-faced men and elegant women and children with Darcy’s own dark eyes, all looking down from their gilded frames with expressions that suggested they were reserving judgement on the new Mrs Darcy until she had proved herself.
Some of them, she suspected, were not confined to their frames.
Darcy appeared at her side, having finished speaking with his steward. “Shall I show you the house? Or would you prefer to rest first?”
“Show me,” Elizabeth said, because rest was impossible and she needed to know the shape of what she was dealing with.
He took her through the principal rooms, and she tried to attend to what he was saying while simultaneously cataloguing the spectral inhabitants of each.
The yellow drawing room, with its lovely gold furnishings and windows overlooking the lake, held an elderly gentleman dozing in a chair beside the window, his wig from an earlier period, his fingers steepled on his waistcoat. He did not stir as they passed.
The music room made Georgiana smile. It held nothing otherworldly that Elizabeth could sense, which came as a relief so sharp she nearly sighed aloud.
The library was another matter. The books rose from floor to ceiling; the air smelled of leather and time.
In the chair by the fire sat a woman in an old-fashioned dress, reading.
When Elizabeth entered, the woman looked up, assumed she had not been seen, and returned to her book with the quiet resignation of one very accustomed to invisibility.
“The library was my father’s favourite room,” Darcy said, walking ahead of her, oblivious. “He spent most of his evenings here. I think you will like it.”