Chapter Eight
From her parlour window, Elizabeth could see the rose garden, and in it, two girls on their knees in the October mud, careless of their gowns.
Georgiana had taken to the restoration project with an enthusiasm that bordered on ferocity.
She had commandeered a pair of old gloves from the garden shed, tied back her hair with a ribbon that was already coming loose, and was pulling bindweed from the base of a damask rose as though it had personally offended her.
Kitty worked beside her, less methodical but equally determined, her bonnet abandoned on the stone bench where Lady Margaret sat smiling at roses that were, for the first time in years, being freed from the weeds that choked them.
It had been Nana’s idea, or rather Nana’s command, which amounted to the same thing.
She had taken Elizabeth, Georgiana, and Kitty to the long gallery two mornings ago and pointed at the portrait of Lady Margaret Darcy.
It was a fine painting, Elizabethan in style, formal and richly coloured, and behind the seated figure the artist had rendered the rose garden in careful detail: the beds laid out in a geometric pattern, the climbing roses trained along the south wall, the stone bench positioned beneath what appeared to be an especially magnificent specimen of old damask climbing a wrought-iron arch.
“That,” Nana had said, “is how it should look. That is how it looked when Margaret planted it, and when my mother-by-law tended it, and when I kept it after her. The current state of affairs is a disgrace.”
Elizabeth had relayed this to Georgiana, who had studied the portrait with the intensity she usually reserved for difficult pieces of music, and said, with quiet certainty, “My mother loved the rose garden. Mrs Reynolds told me once that she spent whole mornings there.” She had looked at Elizabeth. “May I help?”
She had not needed to ask twice.
Now Elizabeth watched them from the window, Kitty laughing at something Georgiana had said, Georgiana brushing dirt from her cheek with the back of her wrist, Lady Margaret observing the proceedings from her bench serenely approving.
The ghost had not spoken; she never did.
But the smile had changed since the girls had begun their work, becoming something warmer, less distant, as though the living hands in her garden had reached some part of her that centuries of silence had not touched.
It was a good morning. A peaceful morning.
The kind of morning Elizabeth had begun to believe Pemberley might offer more often, now that Georgiana knew, now that the household had settled into a rhythm that accommodated both the living and the dead without either colliding too violently with the other.
Darcy had ridden out early to visit a tenant, Mrs Annesley was writing letters in the morning room, and Nana had not yet arrived for her daily inspection, which meant Elizabeth had the rare luxury of a quiet hour to herself.
She was reviewing the household accounts, or trying to.
Mrs Reynolds had left them on her desk the previous evening with a tactful note suggesting that the new mistress might wish to familiarise herself with the quarterly expenditures, and Elizabeth was discovering that Pemberley’s quarterly expenditures were significantly larger than Longbourn’s annual ones, which required a certain adjustment of perspective.
She had just identified what appeared to be an alarmingly large sum allocated to candles when she heard the door open behind her and saw, from the corner of her eye, a tall figure entering in a dark-blue riding coat.
“You are back early,” she said. “I thought you meant to ride to the Hendersons’ farm and would not return before noon. I am glad of it, though; I have a question about the candle budget which I suspect Mrs Reynolds would rather I put to you than to her.”
The silence that answered her was wrong.
She knew it was wrong before she looked up.
It was the quality of it, the weight. Darcy’s silences had texture; they were warm, considered, the quiet of a man choosing his words before he spoke them.
This silence was something else. It was dense, charged, and it pressed against her awareness the way no living person’s presence ever had.
Elizabeth turned her head to look properly.
The man standing in the doorway of her parlour was not her husband.
He looked like her husband. That was the shock of it, the thing that made her breath catch and her hands go still on the ledger.
He was tall, dark-haired, with the same strong jaw and the same grave set to his mouth.
He stood the way Darcy stood, straight-backed and formal, his weight settled, his chin level.
He was dressed in the fashion of perhaps fifteen years ago, well-cut, expensive, the kind of clothes a man of considerable fortune would wear without thinking about them.
The coat was much like the one Darcy wore regularly; the same colour, though the cut was slightly different.
He could have been Darcy. At first glance, in poor light, he was Darcy.
But he was not Darcy, and Elizabeth reeled with shock, because he was a ghost, and he was wrong.
He was too solid. That was the only way she could describe it.
Every ghost she had ever known carried some mark of their nature: a faint translucence, a softness at the edges, a quality of light that was not quite right.
Even Nana, who was among the most vivid ghosts Elizabeth had encountered, had a shimmer to her, a reminder that she existed between states.
This man had none of that. He was dense with presence, heavy with it, as though the force that kept him here had compressed him into something almost more real than the living.
The air around him felt tight, and the candle on Elizabeth’s desk guttered and flattened as though pressed by an invisible hand.
And the door; the door had been closed and now it was open.
This ghost had more control over matter than any Elizabeth had ever encountered.
He was also, she realised as her vision adjusted and the first shock faded, older than Darcy.
The lines around his eyes were deeper, the hair touched with grey at the temples.
There was a heaviness about his face that went beyond age, a rawness, as though something had been stripped from him that ought to have been there and the absence of it had left the bone too close to the surface.
His eyes were the worst. They were Darcy’s eyes, the same dark brown, the same intelligence, but where Darcy’s held reserve, this man’s held fury. Controlled, contained, banked like coals beneath ash, but fury nonetheless, and grief so deep it had become indistinguishable from rage.
Elizabeth’s hand tightened on the edge of the desk.
“You are George Darcy,” she said, as certain of it as she had ever been of anything in her life.
The ghost did not move. He stood in the doorway and looked at her, and the look was so like Darcy’s most penetrating gaze that Elizabeth could hardly breathe.
“You can see me.” His voice was Darcy’s voice made rougher, the vowels the same but the control thinner, as though the effort of keeping his tone level was costing him something considerable.
“They said you could. The servants, the children. Even my great-grandmother told me, though she also told me to wait, and I have been waiting, and I find I cannot wait any longer.”
Nana. Of course. Nana had been deflecting about George Darcy for a reason, and the reason was standing in her doorway, radiating a grief so powerful it was making the candle smoke.
“She means well,” George Darcy said, and the flicker of tenderness that crossed his face was so like Darcy’s expression when he spoke of Georgiana that Elizabeth’s throat constricted.
“She has always meant well. She has been trying to manage me as she manages everything else, and I have let her, because she carried me in her arms when I was small and I have never been able to refuse her anything. But this cannot be managed. What I have to tell you cannot wait for her schedule or her approval or her sense of the proper order of things.”
He stepped into the room, and the temperature dropped.
Not the gentle chill of Pemberley’s older ghosts, the faint coolness that brushed past when Sarah Dunn walked through a wall or the children ran through the gallery.
This was a visceral cold, sharp and sudden, the kind that made Elizabeth’s fingers ache and her breath mist in the air despite the crackling fire.
“Sit down, please,” Elizabeth said, because she had been managing ghosts since she was old enough to speak to them, and the first thing she had ever learnt was that a seated ghost was calmer than a standing one. “There is a chair. Will you use it?”
His expression shifted. He looked at her. For an instant the rage and the grief receded, and she saw the man he must have been: courteous, careful, a little formal. A good man. A man much like his son.
He sat. The chair did not creak under his weight, because he had no weight, but the upholstery compressed slightly, which Elizabeth had never seen a ghost do before. His solidity was extraordinary.
“I am Elizabeth,” she said. “Your son’s wife.”
“I know who you are. I have been watching you since you arrived.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter, though no less intent. “You are not what I expected. He did well. Better than I deserved, given what I failed to teach him about the world.”
“Mr Darcy...”
“George. My son is Mr Darcy now, and I would not take it from him.” He leaned forward, and the air between them tightened.
“Mrs Darcy. Elizabeth. I need you to listen to me very carefully, because what I am about to tell you will change everything you think you know about this family, and about a man you believe you already understand.”