Chapter Seven #2
“I heard that,” Edmund said, and Charlotte laughed, a bright, tinkling sound that produced the very slightest of breezes.
Georgiana must have felt it, because she touched her cheek, her eyes widening. “Is that…?” she asked timidly.
“Charlotte is laughing at her brother,” Elizabeth said warmly. “She looks quite like you, you know, though her hair is darker. The Darcy resemblance is strong.”
Both Charlotte and Georgiana appeared delighted that Elizabeth thought they looked alike, and Georgiana seemed to relax, a little.
Nana appeared within the hour, drawn, Elizabeth suspected, by some instinct that told her something significant had shifted in the household.
She materialised in the doorway of Elizabeth’s parlour, took one look at Georgiana sitting in the chair by the fire, still a little pale in the face, and said, “Ah.”
“Georgiana knows,” Elizabeth said.
“I can see that she knows. The girl is sitting in my chair.” Nana swept into the room, radiating displeasure at the disruption to her routine. “Move.”
“Nana,” Elizabeth said. “She cannot hear you.”
“Then tell her.”
Elizabeth sighed. “Georgiana, you are sitting in Nana’s chair. She would like you to move, and unlike Edmund, I don’t think she will yield.”
Georgiana stood up so quickly she nearly knocked over the fire screen. “I am sorry, I did not, how, where should I...”
“Sit anywhere else,” Elizabeth said. “Nana will tell you if that is wrong too.”
Georgiana chose the settee, perching on the edge of it, her eyes wide and darting about the room as though she might suddenly develop the ability to see what Elizabeth saw. “She is here? Right now? In this room?”
“She is always in this room at this hour. She has a schedule.”
“I have standards,” Nana corrected. “There is a difference.”
“She says she has standards,” Elizabeth relayed, and Georgiana made a sound that was half laugh, half gasp, and pressed both hands over her mouth.
“Nana is Mrs Dorothea Darcy,” Elizabeth said, as Nana sat down and arranged her skirts. “She is your great-great-grandmother, and she lived until she was almost a hundred years old. Long enough to hold your father in her arms when he was a baby.”
Georgiana looked quite awed, and made a respectful little bow of her head towards the seat she had just vacated.
“Nana,” Elizabeth said, turning to the ghost. “This is Georgiana. Your great-great-granddaughter. Is there anything you would like to say to her?”
Nana looked at Georgiana closely. The sharpness in her face softened, not entirely, because Nana’s face was not built for softness, but in the same way it did when she watched Edmund and Charlotte run, a way that was reserved only for those born to the house of Darcy.
“Tell her that while I see the Darcy features in her, I see her mother too,” Nana said quietly.
“Annie’s colouring, Annie’s hands. She holds herself the same way, as though she is afraid of being too tall.
I have been watching this child her whole life and never been able to tell her so. ”
“Nana says you have your mother’s colouring,” Elizabeth told Georgiana gently. “And her hands.”
Georgiana’s fingers curled in her lap. Her eyes were bright. “She knew my mother?”
“Nana has known every woman who married into this family for over a hundred years. She knew your mother very well.”
Georgiana sat motionless, and then said, in a voice that was trying hard not to shake, “Is my mother here? At Pemberley?”
Nana’s expression shifted. She looked at Elizabeth, and there was something in that look, a warning, a request, that Elizabeth could not quite read. Then Nana turned back to Georgiana, though Georgiana could not see her, and spoke with a tenderness Elizabeth had not heard from her before.
“Your mother was at peace,” Nana said. “From the moment she died. She loved you and your brother with everything she had, and when she went, she went gently, without struggle, without regret. She did not linger. She did not need to. She knew her children were safe at Pemberley.”
Elizabeth repeated this, word for word, watching Georgiana’s face as each sentence landed. Tears slid down the girl’s cheeks, silent and unwiped, and she did not try to stop them.
“She was the best of them,” Nana added, more quietly. “The best woman who ever married into this family. I include myself in that judgement, and I do not say it lightly.”
Elizabeth relayed this too, and Georgiana let out a breath that sounded as though she had been holding it for sixteen years.
“And my father?” Georgiana asked. “Is he...”
Elizabeth was watching Nana’s face and saw something close over it as Georgiana asked the question, a door shutting behind the eyes.
It happened in less than a heartbeat, and if Elizabeth had not been watching closely she would have missed it.
But she was watching, and she did not miss it, and what she saw was not grief, or at least not only grief.
It was something guarded, something deliberate.
“Your father,” Nana said, her voice now brisk again, clipped, restored to its usual authority, “is a subject for another day. I have told you about your mother because you asked and because you deserve to know. But I will not discuss the whole family in a single afternoon; there are a great many Darcys.”
It was a masterful deflection. The tone said: I am an old woman and I decide the pace of these conversations.
The words said: not now. Georgiana, who had just been given the most extraordinary gift of her young life, accepted this without question.
Of course Nana would not rush. Of course there would be more to learn.
But Elizabeth had seen the door close. She had seen the fraction of a second when Nana’s composure had cracked, and something urgent and unresolved had looked out through the gap before being firmly shut away.
George Darcy was not a comfortable subject.
George Darcy was not a subject Nana wished to discuss at all, and the reasons for that avoidance were not the reasons she had given.
Elizabeth said nothing. She filed it away, the way she had learnt to file things away over a lifetime of listening to the dead, and turned her attention back to Georgiana, who was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and smiling.
“Thank you,” Georgiana whispered. “Thank you, Elizabeth.”
“Do not thank me. Thank Nana. She is the one who remembers.”
“I always remember,” Nana said. “It is both my gift and my burden. Rather like yours, Mrs Darcy.”
Kitty appeared at the parlour door at half past four, slightly flushed from her fitting and trailing a faint smell of new wool. She took one step into the room, looked at Georgiana’s tear-streaked face, looked at Elizabeth’s careful expression, and stopped.
“What happened?”
“Georgiana knows,” Elizabeth said.
The colour left Kitty’s face. She looked at Georgiana, then back at Elizabeth, and her mouth compressed into a thin line. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and turned the key.
“How?” The word was clipped.
“She came through from the music room while I was in the gallery. I was speaking to Edmund and Charlotte. She heard me.”
Kitty closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she crossed the room, but she did not sit beside Georgiana. She stood in front of her, and her expression was one Elizabeth had never seen on her younger sister’s face: fierce, frightened, and absolutely serious.
“Georgiana,” Kitty said. “Do you understand what you have learnt today?”
Georgiana nodded, her eyes wide.
“No,” Kitty said. “I do not think you do. Not yet.” She knelt so that she was level with Georgiana on the settee, and took both her hands.
“If anyone discovers what Elizabeth can do, anyone at all, she could be destroyed. Not embarrassed. Not whispered about. Destroyed. They would call her mad. They would have her locked away in an asylum, Georgiana. Your brother’s name would be disgraced, his judgement questioned, his marriage made a subject of public ridicule.
And Elizabeth would lose everything. Her freedom. Her husband. Her life as she knows it.”
“I would never tell anyone,” Georgiana whispered.
“You must swear it. Not just to Elizabeth. To me. Because I have spent my whole life protecting this secret, and I need to know that you understand what it costs.”
“I swear it,” Georgiana said, and her voice was small but steady.
“Your brother cannot know.” Kitty’s grip on Georgiana’s hands tightened. “I know that is hard to hear. He is your brother and you love him and you do not like keeping things from him. But he cannot know. Not now. Perhaps not ever.”
“Kitty,” Elizabeth said quietly.
“No, Lizzy. She needs to hear this.” Kitty did not look away from Georgiana.
“Men do not understand things like this. Even good men. Even the best of them. He would think she was ill. He would try to help, and his help would be the very thing that destroyed her. He would bring in doctors. He would tell his uncle, who is an earl and has the power to act on it. He would do it out of love, and it would ruin her, and I will not let that happen.”
Georgiana looked stricken, but she did not pull away. “You truly believe he would not accept it?”
“I believe the risk is too great to find out. We have kept this secret for twenty years. Jane knows. Papa knows. Mama knows, though she pretends she does not, because that is how Mama manages things she cannot control. Mary knows. Even Lydia knows, though Papa had to threaten her into silence. Every one of us has kept it, because the alternative is unthinkable.” Kitty’s voice softened, but only slightly.
“Some families have a cousin who drinks. We have Elizabeth. We love her, and we protect her, and we do not talk about it to anyone outside the family. You are the first person outside the Bennets to ever learn of it.”
The weight of that settled over the room.
“I will tell you how we manage it,” Kitty continued, releasing Georgiana’s hands and sitting back on her heels.
“If she goes still at dinner, I knock over a glass. If she starts to look at something nobody else can see, I ask a loud question about the weather. If she needs to leave a room, I invent a reason. I have been doing it since I was old enough to understand what was happening, and I am very good at it. You will need to learn to do the same.”
“She is good at it,” Elizabeth confirmed. “Better than Jane, in some ways. Jane’s instinct is to comfort. Kitty’s instinct is to distract, which is more useful in company.”
“Papa is the worst,” Kitty said, and a ghost of her usual warmth crept back.
“He forgets himself and makes remarks. He once told Mr Collins that Elizabeth had a particular talent for conversing with the unseen, and Mr Collins took it as a compliment to her prayer life and talked about it for half an hour.”
Georgiana’s mouth fell open. Then she laughed, a shaky, startled sound, and Kitty allowed herself a small smile.
The room was quiet for a moment. Nana, in her chair, was watching Kitty with an expression Elizabeth had not seen on her face before. It looked remarkably like respect.
Georgiana straightened, and for a moment Elizabeth saw the steel that ran through the Darcy line, the same steel she had seen in Darcy himself when he was certain of his course.
“I will not let anyone hurt you,” Georgiana said, with a ferocity that took Elizabeth by surprise.
“You are my sister now. Your secrets are mine. And I will not tell my brother. I promise.”
Kitty studied her for a moment, then nodded. “Good.”
“Well,” Nana observed from her chair, in a tone of grudging satisfaction. “The girl has spine after all.”
Elizabeth did not relay this, but she smiled. Kitty caught the smile, raised an eyebrow; Elizabeth shook her head. The old language of glances that the Bennet sisters had spoken since childhood expanded, just slightly, to make room for one more.
Later, after Georgiana had gone to dress for dinner and Nana had drifted away to inspect something she considered substandard, Elizabeth sat alone in her parlour and felt the quiet settle around her like cooling water.
She had been happy. That was the unsettling thing.
In these past days at Pemberley, learning the house, meeting its ghosts, finding her footing with Nana, she had begun to believe she could do this.
That the secret could be carried here as it had been carried at Longbourn, with care and cleverness and the right people watching her back.
She had begun, without quite realising it, to relax.
Kitty’s face, white and fierce in front of Georgiana, had cured her of that.
They would call her mad. They would have her locked away.
Kitty had not been exaggerating. Kitty, who knew better than anyone how close Elizabeth had come over the years; the near-misses, the moments where a wrong word or a stray glance might have unravelled everything.
Kitty was afraid because Kitty understood exactly what was at stake, and hearing that fear spoken aloud, in this house, had stripped away the gentle illusion Elizabeth had been building for herself: that Pemberley might be different. That she might, here, be safe.
She was not safe. She had never been safe. She had simply been lucky, and luck was not a strategy, and the more people who knew her secret, the thinner the luck stretched.
Elizabeth pressed her hands flat on the desk and breathed, and the stone in her chest, which had lightened over these first weeks at Pemberley, settled back into its familiar weight.