Chapter Five #2
Elizabeth felt heat rise in her cheeks. She had nearly acknowledged the spectral housemaid from the entrance-hall lineup, who must be Sarah Dunn, and it had been a close thing indeed.
Sarah had stepped directly into her path, beaming, delighted, as though she had finally found a mistress worthy of the name, and Elizabeth had opened her mouth to say good morning before she remembered that Mrs Reynolds was walking immediately behind her.
She had covered by pretending to cough, which had led Mrs Reynolds to offer her a tisane, which had led to a twenty-minute conversation about the housekeeper’s mother’s remedy for congestion of the lungs.
“I need ground rules,” Elizabeth said, straightening. “If we are to share this house, you and I, there must be an agreement.”
“Agreement,” Nana repeated, as though the word tasted unpleasant.
“The master bedroom is off limits. To all ghosts. At all times. I will not negotiate on this.”
Nana’s eyebrows rose to an impressive height. “I have passed through that room freely since the day I became Mrs Darcy.”
“And you will stop. I am a newly married woman, and I will not have observers in my bedchamber, dead or alive.”
“I walked through that room while carrying your husband’s father in my arms,” Nana said. “When he was still small enough to carry. I have paced that floor and watched over that bed through fever and heartbreak and the births of four generations. You would close it to me because you are shy?”
“I would close it to you because it is mine,” Elizabeth said, her voice steady.
“My room. My marriage. My private life. You may have watched over that bed for more than a hundred years, and I honour the care that represents. But I am its mistress now, and I am telling you: that room is private. That is not a request.”
A silence settled between them, electric and charged. Nana studied Elizabeth with an intensity that made the hair on her arms stand up. Elizabeth held her gaze and did not blink. Outside, a bird sang in the rose garden; inside, the fire shifted and popped.
“And if I refuse?” Nana said softly.
“I can see you,” Elizabeth said, leaning forward.
“I can hear you. I have been doing this my whole life, and in that time I have managed ghosts who were angry, ghosts who were grieving, ghosts who were confused, and ghosts who were simply stubborn. I have never yet met one I could not handle. Would you like to find out whether you are the exception?”
She was bluffing. She had no idea whether she could do anything to a ghost who refused to cooperate.
She had never needed to find out; most ghosts responded to firm kindness, and the rare difficult ones had been manageable through patience and persistence.
But Nana did not know that, and Elizabeth had learnt long ago that confidence was its own currency, with the living and the dead alike.
Nana stared at her. Elizabeth stared back.
Then Nana laughed.
It was not a small laugh. It was a full, rich, delighted sound that filled the room and made the candles on the mantelpiece flicker, and it transformed her face from stern authority into something warm, surprised, and genuinely pleased.
The lines around her eyes deepened, her small frame shook, and for a moment Elizabeth could see the girl she had been, the sixteen-year-old bride, the twenty-year-old widow who had stared down a pack of greedy cousins and told them to get out of her house.
“Well,” Nana said, settling back in her chair. “Perhaps you will do after all.”
They talked for the better part of an hour, and Elizabeth discovered two things about Dorothea Darcy. The first was that she was the most opinionated person Elizabeth had ever met, living or dead, and Elizabeth had met Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The second was that she could not be managed.
Elizabeth had spent her life managing ghosts.
It was what she did; she listened, she helped, she made agreements, she eased the restless toward peace and maintained companionable relationships with those who chose to stay.
She was good at it. She had managed Aunt Irene’s tartness, Sir Harold’s pomposity, Mrs Turnbull’s endless chatter.
She had a system, and the system worked.
Nana dismantled the system in under twenty minutes.
It was not that she was difficult, exactly, though she was certainly that.
It was that she did not operate within the normal boundaries of ghost-and-medium relations.
She did not need Elizabeth’s help. She did not want Elizabeth’s guidance.
She was not confused, or lost, or grieving, or in need of gentle management.
She was, and had been for a hundred and thirty years, the self-appointed guardian of Pemberley.
She had clear ideas about how the house should be run, and she intended to share every single one of them with the new Mrs Darcy.
“The east wing has damp,” she informed Elizabeth. “It has had damp since 1763, and nobody has ever properly addressed it. I suggest you raise the matter with your husband at your earliest convenience.”
“I have been married for five days. I am not yet raising matters of structural repair.”
“Nonsense. A good wife takes an interest in the fabric of her home.”
“A good wife also allows her husband to finish his breakfast before discussing rising damp.”
“Mr Darcy, my Mr Darcy, would have welcomed such a discussion. He was very attentive to the fabric of the building.”
“Your Mr Darcy lived in the seventeenth century and presumably had fewer breakfast options to distract him.”
Nana sniffed. It was a magnificent sniff. Even Aunt Irene would have been impressed.
“Furthermore,” Nana continued, quite as though Elizabeth had not spoken, “the gilt on the mirror in the morning room is tarnished. It has been tarnished for forty years. I have been staring at it every morning since 1772 and it offends me deeply.”
“You are a ghost. You do not use the morning room.”
“I occupy it. And the library curtains are too thin. They admit too much afternoon sun, and the spines of the older volumes are fading. My son spent a fortune on those books. One would think somebody might care enough to hang a decent pair of curtains.”
Elizabeth found herself torn between exasperation and something perilously close to affection. “Is there anything about this house that meets your approval?”
Nana considered this. “The new stoves in the kitchen are most functional. I disapproved when George ordered them installed, but I will admit they are an improvement.”
“How generous.”
“I am not given to empty praise, Mrs Darcy. If I tell you something is satisfactory, you may rely upon it absolutely.” She paused, and her voice shifted.
“The rose garden, though. That is not a matter of taste. My mother-by-law planted those roses. I tended them myself, in the years after my husband died, when I had nothing but a baby and a garden and the will to keep both alive. Lady Anne loved them and nurtured them and old Gregson understood them. He knew which needed sheltering and which could bear the wind. His replacement treats them all the same, and they are dying for it.”
Elizabeth looked at her and saw, beneath the imperiousness, something she recognised.
Grief. Not fresh, but deep, the kind that settled into the bones over centuries and became indistinguishable from the person who carried it.
The roses were not merely roses. They were Nana’s hands in the earth, the thing that had kept her rooted when everything else was being torn away.
“I will look at the rose garden,” Elizabeth said quietly. “I cannot promise to restore it overnight, but I will look at it.”
Nana regarded her for a moment. There was the faintest shift in her expression, so small that Elizabeth might have imagined it. Then she nodded, once, as though a contract had been signed.
“Now,” Nana said briskly, reverting to command, “the household schedule. Mrs Reynolds keeps the staff well enough in hand, but there is waste. The footmen spend half the morning on tasks that could be accomplished in a quarter of the time if they were properly directed. The scullery maids gossip. The second housemaid has been walking out with the under-gardener, and while I have nothing against romance so long as they conduct themselves respectably, she has been neglecting the upstairs grates, mooning over him from the windows instead of polishing the fire-irons.”
“You cannot possibly expect me to raise the subject of the second housemaid’s romantic entanglements with Mrs Reynolds.”
“I expect you to be aware of them. A mistress who does not know the state of her own household is a mistress who will be managed by her staff rather than the other way around.”
There was not much Elizabeth could say to that, because the infuriating thing was that Nana was right.
Elizabeth had spent five days learning the surface of Pemberley; Nana was offering her a view beneath it, into the workings, relationships, and small dramas that made the household run.
It was invaluable information. It was also being delivered in the most irritating possible manner.
By the end of the hour, Elizabeth understood that her relationship with Nana was going to be unlike anything she had experienced.
This was not like any relationship Elizabeth had previously shared with a ghost, even Aunt Irene.
This was something more like a partnership, or perhaps a battle of wills, between a woman who had run Pemberley for almost eighty years of life and fifty years of death, and a woman who had been officially in charge for less than a week.
“I shall visit you each morning,” Nana announced, rising from her chair.
“We will discuss the household, the staff, the menus, and any matters requiring your attention. You may ask me questions about the house and its history, and I shall answer them if I consider the questions worthy. In return, you will address the damp in the east wing and restore the rose garden to its proper standard.”
“That is not a negotiation,” Elizabeth pointed out. “That is a list of demands.”
“Yes,” Nana agreed serenely. “I find demands work better than requests. One saves a great deal of time.” She paused at the door, turned back, and regarded Elizabeth with an expression that had softened by the smallest, most grudging degree.
“You have spirit, Mrs Darcy. I did not expect to like you. I reserve the right to change my mind, but for the present, you will do.”
She was gone before Elizabeth could formulate a reply, which Elizabeth suspected was entirely deliberate.
Elizabeth sat alone in her parlour, surrounded by the silence of a house that was not, and would never be, truly silent.
Through the window, the rose garden spread out below her, overgrown and tangled, the damask varieties Nana had loved choked with bindweed and neglect.
She could see, now that she was looking, that it had once been beautiful.
She could see, too, that it could be beautiful again.
She picked up her pen and turned to a fresh sheet of paper.
“Dearest Jane,” she wrote. “I have met the most extraordinary person. She has been dead for fifty years, she has opinions about my curtains, and I believe she may be my new closest confidante after you. I do not know whether to be delighted or appalled. I suspect I shall be both, in roughly equal measure, for the foreseeable future.”
She paused, considered the letter, and added: “The house has a great deal of character. More than I anticipated. I am managing. Kitty sends her love.”
She sealed the letter, set it aside, and sat for a moment looking out at the rose garden. Then she permitted herself a single, incredulous laugh.
She had spent her whole life gently shepherding the dead. At Pemberley, it appeared, the dead intended to shepherd her.