Chapter Five
Elizabeth had been mistress of Pemberley for five days when she met the woman who actually ran it.
She was in her private sitting room, the small parlour adjoining the master bedroom that Darcy had said was traditionally the mistress’s own.
It was a pretty room, south-facing, with a view over the rose garden, and Elizabeth had been spending her mornings there, writing letters and learning the household accounts and pretending she was not being watched.
She had been careful. She had given no sign.
Five days of cautiously navigating a house packed with ghosts, of stepping around the unseen, of keeping her expression neutral when a translucent figure walked through the breakfast table or a long-dead child laughed in the corridor.
Kitty had been magnificent, covering for every lapse, filling every suspicious silence, steering Darcy and Georgiana away from the rooms where Elizabeth’s composure was thinnest. The system they had built at Longbourn, refined over a lifetime of practice, was holding at Pemberley just as it had always held.
It was simply working much, much harder, with far more ghosts and only Kitty to distract.
Elizabeth was writing to Jane. The letter had gone through two drafts already.
The first had been a breezy account of her new surroundings, full of descriptions of the grounds, the library, and the kindness of Mrs Reynolds, and she had torn it up because it was a lie.
The second had veered too far the other way, beginning with “Dearest Jane, there are more ghosts in this house than there are living servants, and I am not entirely certain which group is more demanding,” which would have been cathartic to send but unwise to commit to paper.
The third attempt struck a middle ground: domestic news interspersed with the careful code the sisters had developed over years.
“The house has a great deal of character” meant “the ghosts are everywhere.” “I am learning to navigate the corridors” meant “I have nearly been caught six times.” “Kitty has been invaluable” meant exactly what it said.
She was composing a particularly careful sentence about the ghostly servants in the staff lineup, disguised as an observation about the interesting variety of uniforms worn at Pemberley over the years, when she became aware that someone was standing in the doorway watching her.
She looked up, expecting a housemaid or possibly Georgiana, and found instead a woman she had never seen before, alive or dead.
The ghost was old, or had been old when she died.
Small, but straight-backed in a way that added inches to her bearing.
She was immaculately dressed in the fashion of a century and a half ago; grey silk, cut simply but unmistakably expensive, with sleeves that fell in the style of the Restoration and a stomacher that had been out of fashion since before Elizabeth’s grandmother was born.
Her white hair was pinned beneath a lace cap of considerable quality, the lace itself so fine that Elizabeth could see through it to the translucent scalp beneath.
Her hands, small and dark-spotted with age, were folded at her waist. Her face was a map of determination: sharp cheekbones, a firm mouth, a chin that looked as though it had been set in that position some time in the previous century and had not budged since.
But it was her eyes that held Elizabeth. Dark, shrewd, and absolutely unblinking, they surveyed Elizabeth the way a general might survey a new recruit: thoroughly, critically, and without any particular expectation of being impressed.
She also looked entirely unsurprised that Elizabeth was looking directly at her.
Elizabeth set down her pen.
“Well,” the ghost said. “So you are the one he married.”
Her voice was sharp and clear and carried the unmistakable authority of a woman who had been giving orders for a long time and saw no reason to stop simply because she was dead.
Her gaze moved over Elizabeth’s face, her posture, her dress, her writing desk, the half-finished letter, and appeared to find all of it wanting.
“I am,” Elizabeth said. “And you are?”
“I,” the ghost said, drawing herself up to her full height, which was not considerable but somehow felt as though it ought to be, “am Dorothea Darcy. I was mistress of this house for seventy-seven years, which is rather longer than anyone else managed, and I have been looking after it since, which has been considerably longer still. The servants call me Nana. You may call me Mrs Darcy, until I decide whether you deserve better.”
Elizabeth blinked. “I am Mrs Darcy.”
“Yes. I am aware. I have been Mrs Darcy since 1684. You are something of a latecomer.” A brief paused, and then a grudging “I suppose you had best call me Nana. To avoid confusion.”
They regarded each other across the room.
Elizabeth had spent her whole life dealing with ghosts of every temperament, from the shy to the confused to the gently melancholic.
She had managed the imperious Aunt Irene, the bickering Pemburys, the bewildered dead of coaching inns.
She had never met anyone quite like this.
“You married young,” Elizabeth observed, recalling Mrs Reynolds’ recital of the lineage of Darcys as they walked in the portrait gallery.
Dorothea Darcy had been a pretty young bride, with a distinct resemblance to Georgiana, her great-great-grand-daughter, if Elizabeth was correct.
Elizabeth would not have recognised that young girl in this woman, save for those shrewd dark eyes.
“I married at sixteen. I was widowed at twenty, with a son not yet walking. My husband’s cousins descended like crows on a carcass, certain a girl of twenty could not hold an estate of this size.
They were incorrect.” Nana’s chin lifted.
“I held Pemberley for my son, raised him to hold it after me, and when he married a perfectly adequate woman from a family I did not approve of, I held my tongue, which was the greatest sacrifice I have made in either life. I have been here ever since, because somebody must ensure that the standards I set are maintained, and frankly the women who married into this family after me have been, on the whole, disappointing.”
“On the whole,” Elizabeth repeated.
“Anne was acceptable. Fitzwilliam’s mother.
She had no backbone to speak of, but she had taste, and she loved the boy, and she died too young for me to discover her deficiencies.
Her predecessor was a disaster. Moved the blue Delft collection into the wrong room and refused to listen when I tried to tell her. ”
“Refused, or could not hear you?”
“Oh, refused. I was still alive then. Nobody living in this house has been able to see or hear me since the day I died. Until, apparently, you.” Nana’s eyes narrowed. “Which raises a number of questions I intend to have answered.”
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, almost relieved to finally be able to tell someone the truth.
“I can see the dead. I have been able to do so since I was a very young child. It is a gift, or a burden, depending on the day, and I have carried it my whole life. My family knows, but my husband does not. I would prefer to keep it that way, for the time being.”
“Why?”
The question was blunt, and Elizabeth respected it. “Because I have been married for less than a week, and I suspect that telling a man that his new wife sees ghosts is not the best foundation for domestic harmony.”
“Sensible, I suppose. Though I cannot approve of deception between married persons. My husband and I had no secrets.”
“You were married for four years.”
“Quality, Mrs Darcy, not quantity.” She swept into the room and settled herself in the chair by the fire, arranging her skirts around her as though the laws of physics still applied to her. “Now. I have been watching you since you arrived, and I have a number of observations.”
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”
“The menus are adequate but uninspired. Mrs Reynolds does well enough with the staff, but she permits the footmen too much liberty with the silver polish; I can see the streaks from here. The rose garden has been allowed to go to ruin since old Gregson died, and his replacement has no feeling for the damask varieties. The drawing room curtains are disgracefully faded. And you,” she fixed Elizabeth with a look that would have pinned a lesser woman to the wall, “have been stepping around my ghosts like a woman crossing a muddy field in new slippers.”
Elizabeth was not about to be intimidated by a ghost. “Your ghosts?”
“They are residents of my house. That makes them my responsibility. I have been managing them for fifty years, and I can tell you that the servants are perfectly well-behaved as long as they are not interfered with, the children in the gallery are harmless, and the gentleman in the yellow drawing room has been asleep since before I was even born and is unlikely to stir. You need not creep about as though you expect them to leap out at you.”
“I was not creeping.”
“You were creeping. I have been watching. You are not bad at it, I will grant you that, but you have not yet learnt the house, and until you do, you will keep making mistakes. Yesterday you nearly acknowledged Sarah Dunn in the corridor outside the library, and Mrs Reynolds was two steps behind you.”