Chapter Six #2
“Lady Margaret Darcy,” Nana said, and her voice had gone quiet, stripped of its usual command.
“Sir Roderick’s wife. She planted the first roses in this garden.
Before my mother-by-law, before me. She laid out the beds and brought the damask varieties from the estate in Kent where she was born. She has been sitting here ever since.”
“She does not speak?”
“She has never spoken. Not to me, not to any ghost I have known. She sits, and she smiles, and she tends her garden in whatever way the dead tend things. She is the oldest of us, along with Sir Roderick, and the most peaceful.”
Elizabeth watched Lady Margaret for a little while.
The ghost’s smile was serene, untroubled, and directed entirely at the roses, which, even in their current state of neglect, were still beautiful in the way that old, established things are beautiful: the bones of the garden visible beneath the overgrowth, the structure sound even if the detail had been lost.
“I will restore it,” Elizabeth said, and this time it was not a concession but a decision. “Not just for you. For her.”
Nana said nothing. But she inclined her head, and the gesture carried more weight than any words she might have offered.
Breakfast that morning was a test of endurance.
Elizabeth arrived at the table having just spent an hour being introduced to the spectral population of a four-hundred-year-old estate.
She was expected to sit down, eat toast, make conversation as though nothing of consequence had occurred.
Darcy was already seated, reading a letter from his steward.
Georgiana was buttering bread with the careful concentration she applied to everything.
Mrs Annesley had the slightly glassy stare of someone who had not slept well and would rather still be in bed.
Kitty was the last to arrive, slightly breathless, her hair not quite as tidy as it ought to have been; she had been exploring the grounds before breakfast, she said, and had found the most marvellous walk along the river.
“You look well this morning,” Darcy said to Elizabeth, setting aside his letter. “The country air suits you.”
“I have always preferred the country,” Elizabeth said, accepting tea from the footman and noting, from the corner of her eye, the spectral valet hovering behind Darcy’s chair and wincing at a crease in his coat. “Though I confess Pemberley’s country air is rather grander than Hertfordshire’s.”
“Everything about Pemberley is grander than Hertfordshire,” Kitty observed cheerfully. “Even the breakfast rolls are larger. I should like to know how the cook achieves it.”
“A good kitchen and a willing baker,” Mrs Reynolds said, appearing in the doorway with the morning’s household correspondence. “Mrs Darcy, if you have a moment after breakfast, I should like to discuss the menus for the coming week.”
“Of course,” Elizabeth said. “I should also like to discuss the rose garden, if you have time. It seems to have been somewhat neglected.”
Mrs Reynolds looked surprised, then pleased. “It has, ma’am, since old Gregson passed. I have mentioned it to the new man, but he has his own ideas.”
“Then perhaps he and I should have a conversation about whose ideas ought to take precedence,” Elizabeth said mildly, and caught, from the corner of her vision, a flicker of movement by the doorway that might have been Nana, nodding.
Kitty glanced at Elizabeth across the table, quick and assessing. Elizabeth returned the look with the faintest shake of her head: I am fine. Kitty held her gaze for half a beat longer than necessary, reading something there that satisfied her, and returned to her breakfast.
It was seamless. It had always been seamless.
At Longbourn, the system had been built among the sisters over years of practice: the silent checks, the manufactured distractions, the way the other girls could sense when Elizabeth’s attention had split between the visible world and the one only she could see.
Here at Pemberley, with the stakes so much higher, the ghosts so much more numerous, and only Kitty to watch her back, the system was working harder than it ever had, but it was holding.
Georgiana caught Kitty’s eye and smiled, a shy, tentative smile, as though she were still not entirely certain she was allowed to be happy. “Shall we walk to the lake after breakfast? I should like to show you the folly up close.”
“I should like that very much,” Kitty said, and the eagerness in her voice was genuine, not performed.
She had been studying Georgiana with the same quiet attentiveness she brought to everything at Pemberley, and she was learning, rapidly, which subjects made Georgiana bloom and which made her retreat.
London was exciting but frightening. Her brother was adored but slightly terrifying.
Music was safe ground. Wickham was not, though Kitty did not yet know why.
Elizabeth would not press that; Georgiana would reveal it in her own time, or not.
Kitty navigated all of it with an instinct that Elizabeth found quietly remarkable.
She was also doing something else, something Elizabeth had not expected.
She was learning Pemberley. Not just the geography of the house, though she was learning that too, memorising corridors and staircases with a speed Elizabeth had not quite expected from this sister she was coming to realise she had always slightly underestimated.
Kitty was learning the social geography: how Mrs Reynolds ran the household, which servants could be relied upon, how Georgiana’s shyness worked and how to navigate around it.
She was studying the rhythms of the great house the way she had once studied the rhythms of Meryton, and she was adapting to them with a quickness that would have astonished anyone who still thought of her as silly Kitty Bennet, Lydia’s shadow.
After breakfast, Elizabeth walked the grounds with Darcy.
He showed her the home farm, the tenant cottages visible from the ridge, the stream where he had fished as a boy.
He spoke about his plans for the estate with the quiet passion she was learning to recognise: Darcy did not enthuse exactly, he simply became more specific, his sentences growing longer and more detailed as his interest deepened.
Elizabeth listened, asked questions, and found that she was genuinely interested.
The management of a great estate was a subject she had never had cause to study, yet it appealed to the same part of her mind that enjoyed problems, patterns, the satisfaction of things done well.
She was also, simultaneously, aware of four ghosts watching them from various points along their walk.
The spectral valet, trailing Darcy at a respectful distance.
A gardener from the previous century who was tending a flower bed that no longer existed.
One of the groom brothers from the staff lineup, considerably more solid out here in the grounds than he had been in the entrance hall, exercising a spectral horse.
And, standing on the bridge over the stream, a man in late Tudor dress who watched them pass with an expression of profound displeasure.
“That bridge,” the Tudor gentleman called after them, his voice carrying the outrage of someone who has been nursing a grievance for two hundred years, “was built in the wrong place. I said so at the time. Nobody listened then, and I do not suppose anyone will listen now.”
Elizabeth kept her face admirably still. Darcy, walking beside her, pointed out a stand of oak trees his grandfather had planted and said something about timber yields.
“I shall speak with you later,” Elizabeth murmured, under the cover of examining a hedgerow, and the Tudor gentleman looked so startled at being heard that he fell silent for what she suspected was the first time in two centuries.
The morning was beautiful, the grounds were beautiful, her husband was beautiful, though with Darcy it had always been less about the arrangement of his features than the earnestness of his attention.
He took her hand as they walked back toward the house.
She held it, and for whole stretches of time she was simply a woman walking with the man she loved through grounds that belonged to them both, the ghosts no more than a secondary awareness, a familiar hum at the edges of her perception.
But then they would pass through a doorway; a spectral servant would bow, or a translucent figure would drift across the corridor, or Nana would appear at her elbow with a reminder about the faded curtains in the drawing room.
The two worlds would collide, and Elizabeth would have to smooth her expression, turn back to Darcy, say something about the weather or the wallpaper as though she had not just been addressed by a woman who had been dead for half a century.
This was her life now. This had always been her life, but the scale of it here, in this vast, ancient, ghost-crowded house, was something she had not been prepared for.
She was managing. She would go on managing.
But the effort of it, the relentless performance of normality, was beginning to settle into her bones like a weariness she could not shake.
Kitty found her in the parlour before luncheon, sat beside her without speaking, took her hand, and held it.
“I am all right,” Elizabeth said.
“I know,” Kitty said. “I am holding your hand because I want to, not because you need me to.”
Elizabeth smiled, and felt the weariness ease, just slightly, and thought: I can do this. I have Kitty, and I have Nana, and I have a husband who loves me even if he does not yet know all of me.
She didn’t have a lot of choice, after all.