Chapter Eight #3
Elizabeth thought of Darcy. Of the way he carried himself, that careful, guarded reserve that she had once mistaken for pride and now understood as something far more painful.
Of the guilt he wore so quietly that most people never saw it at all.
She thought of what it would mean to him to hear his father’s words, and what it would cost to explain how she had come by them, and the distance between those two things yawned like a chasm she could not yet see the bottom of.
“I will help you,” she said. “I do not yet know how, but I will help you.”
She meant it. She also knew, with a clarity that was almost painful, that she had no idea what helping would look like.
Every ghost she had ever tended had needed something she could give: acknowledgement, kindness, a willing ear, the gentle encouragement to let go.
George Darcy did not need any of those things.
He needed justice, and justice meant evidence, and evidence meant proving a murder that had been designed to look natural, committed six years ago by a man who was now embedded in her own family.
She could not go to a magistrate with a ghost’s testimony.
She could not tell Darcy without revealing her gift.
She could not act against Wickham without destroying Lydia, disgracing the Bennets, and handing Lady Catherine the ammunition to have her committed as a madwoman.
The walls of the trap closed around her as she sat there, and she could see no door.
George Darcy closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the fury was still there, and the grief, and the unshakeable purpose that had kept him tethered to this house for six years. But there was something else now. It looked, tentatively, like hope.
“Thank you,” he said. “That is more than anyone has given me since the night I died.”
Nana swept in at that moment, took one look at George Darcy sitting in the chair opposite Elizabeth, and said, in a voice that chilled the room even further, “I told you to wait.”
“I have waited long enough, Nana.”
“You have waited six years. Another week would not have killed you.” She paused, heard what she had said, and added, with magnificent dignity, “Again.”
Elizabeth, who had just been told that her sister’s husband was a murderer, felt an entirely inappropriate urge to laugh, and bit the inside of her cheek, hard.
Nana and George Darcy regarded each other the way they always did: as two people who loved each other deeply and disagreed about everything.
Nana was half his height and had been dead since he was a toddler, but she had been winning arguments since before the Glorious Revolution, and she was not about to stop now.
“You have upset her,” Nana said, with a sharp glance at Elizabeth.
“I have told her the truth. If the truth is upsetting, that is not my doing.”
“It is entirely your doing. You could have let me prepare her. I had a plan.”
“Your plan involved six more weeks of household introductions and a gradual escalation of hints. I do not have six weeks’ worth of patience left in me, and I never did.”
“You never had any patience at all. You were an impatient child and you are an impatient ghost, and I told your father the same thing when you were two years old.”
“My father agreed with you. He agreed with everyone. It was his chief failing.”
“His chief failing,” Nana said, drawing herself up, “was dying before I could finish teaching him sense. A failing you have inherited.”
They were, Elizabeth realised, arguing exactly the way Darcy and Lady Catherine argued: with absolute conviction on both sides and no possibility of resolution.
The resemblance was so striking, and so absurd given that both participants were dead, that the urge to laugh returned with redoubled force.
She did not laugh. She sat at her desk in the cold room with the dead candle, the forgotten ledger. She looked at these two ghosts, great-grandmother and great-grandson, bound by love, loss, a fury that had nowhere to go, and she thought: I am not equal to this.
She had managed Longbourn’s ghosts since childhood, navigated Netherfield’s with grace, handled a chaotic coaching inn full of confused spirits with nothing but composure and common sense.
She had met Nana and held her own. She had been doing this her entire life, and she had always, always been enough.
This was different. This was murder, and family, and a web of secrets so tangled that pulling any single thread would unravel everything.
She was one-and-twenty years old. She had been married for less than a month.
A dead man was asking her to bring his killer to justice; his killer was her youngest sister’s husband, and she could not tell anyone, because every truth she might speak would detonate in a different direction.
She could not yet see which explosion would be the least destructive.
George Darcy and Nana were still arguing. Elizabeth let them. She sat with her hands flat on the desk and stared at the window where, an hour ago, she had watched two girls pulling weeds in the sunshine, and she let herself feel, just for a moment, the full weight of what had landed on her.
Then she straightened her shoulders, because she was Elizabeth Bennet: a woman who had stared down Lady Catherine de Bourgh and won, who had told Nana to stay out of her bedroom and meant it, who had carried a secret her whole life without once letting it break her.
She was afraid, and she was overwhelmed, and she did not have the faintest idea what to do next.
But she would find one. She didn’t see that she had any other choice.