Chapter Nine
Elizabeth did not sleep well that night.
She lay beside Darcy in the darkness of the master bedroom, the one room in Pemberley where no ghost was permitted to enter. She stared at the canopy above their bed, turning the word murder over in her mind until it lost all shape, became merely a sound, ugly, blunt, impossible to let go of.
Darcy slept the way he did everything, with quiet self-containment, his breathing steady, one arm flung across the pillow between them.
In sleep, the careful reserve that governed his waking hours dissolved, and his face became younger, softer, more like the boy he must have been before grief and responsibility had set his features into their habitual gravity.
Elizabeth watched him and thought about his father, sitting in her parlour, wearing the same face with anguish scored into it, and she pressed her knuckles against her mouth to keep from making a sound.
She could not tell him. Not yet, not like this, not with nothing but a ghost’s testimony and her own impossible gift as evidence.
Darcy was a man who dealt in facts, in ledgers and stewards’ reports and the tangible weight of responsibility.
If she spoke to him now and said, “Your father was murdered by Wickham, and I know this because his ghost told me,” the best outcome would be bewilderment. The worst did not bear thinking about.
And beneath that, coiled like a snake at the bottom of a well, was the other thing. The thing she had not told George Darcy.
Wickham was Lydia’s husband. Wickham was family. Everything Elizabeth did from this moment forward would be a choice between justice for the dead and safety for the living. She could not yet see a path that offered both.
She slept eventually, fitfully, and dreamt of brandy glasses, smiling men, an old woman screaming warnings that nobody could hear.
Morning brought grey skies and a thin, persistent drizzle that turned the grounds to mud and kept the household indoors.
Elizabeth came down to breakfast later than usual, having taken longer than she liked over her hair and dress, though the truth was that she had been standing at her bedroom window watching the rain and trying to arrange her face into something that would not alarm her husband.
She had not entirely succeeded.
Darcy looked up when she entered the breakfast room, and his gaze lingered on her face a beat longer than it might have done on an ordinary morning.
He did not say anything immediately; that was his way, to observe before he spoke, to gather his evidence before reaching a conclusion.
Elizabeth sat, accepted chocolate, and applied herself to a piece of toast she did not want with a concentration it did not deserve.
“You did not sleep well,” he said. It was not a question, rather an observation, carefully neutral. She thought he did not wish to press, but he had clearly noticed.
“It was rather windy last night,” Elizabeth said.
There had been wind, which made it technically true and therefore worse than a lie, because it was not the wind that had kept her awake.
“I am not yet accustomed to the sounds of the house at night. At Longbourn one knew every creak and groan; here, there are rather more of them.”
Kitty, who had attempted a walk before breakfast only to be defeated by the weather, was already seated beside Georgiana, slightly windswept, buttering a roll with the air of a girl who had earned her breakfast the hard way.
“The west wing is the worst,” Georgiana offered from across the table, where she was eating an egg with conspicuous slowness, her attention plainly more on the conversation than on her breakfast. “The timbers shift in the wind. When I was small, I used to think it was, well.” She caught Elizabeth’s eye, and colour rose in her cheeks.
There was a small thud beneath the table.
“Mice,” Georgiana finished, with the desperate conviction of a girl who has just discovered she is a dreadful liar.
“Large mice. In the walls.” She returned to her egg with an intensity it had done nothing to deserve.
Ghosts. Georgiana had been about to say she used to think it was ghosts, and had remembered, a fraction too late, that she was now in possession of a secret that made such casual remarks rather more loaded than they had been a week ago. Elizabeth did not dare look at Kitty.
“Is there an indoor occupation that does not involve needlework?” Kitty said, with admirable lightness and no sign whatsoever that her foot had just made contact with Georgiana’s shin. “I have never been able to set a straight stitch, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.”
“The library,” Darcy said. “You are welcome to anything on the shelves.”
“Georgiana and I might play,” Kitty suggested, turning to Georgiana with an eagerness that was only partly manufactured. “You promised to teach me that piece by Clementi, though I warn you, I am a dreadful student.”
Georgiana brightened. “You are not dreadful. You only think you are because your previous teacher was not very good.”
“My previous teacher was Mary, who plays as though the pianoforte has personally offended her and must be punished for it.”
Even Darcy smiled at that, and the moment passed, and Elizabeth felt a rush of gratitude toward both girls so fierce it bordered on pain.
They were covering for her, each in their own way, Kitty from long practice and Georgiana from new, fervent loyalty; trusted with something precious, and determined to guard it.
But Darcy was watching. Elizabeth could feel his attention even when she was not looking at him, that quiet, steady attention of his. He knew something was wrong. He was waiting for her to tell him what.
After breakfast, he found her in the corridor outside the morning room. Mrs Annesley had taken Georgiana and Kitty to the music room. The house was momentarily, blessedly quiet of both the living and the dead.
“Elizabeth.”
She turned. He was standing close, close enough that she could see the small crease between his brows that appeared when he was concerned, and his eyes were searching her face with an intensity that made her want to tell him everything and made it absolutely impossible to do so, both at once.
“You have been quiet this morning,” he said. “Not yourself. If something is troubling you, I hope you know that you may tell me.”
“I am adjusting,” Elizabeth said, and heard how thin the words sounded, how inadequate.
“There is a great deal to learn, and I, it is simply that the household accounts are more, and the rose garden requires, and I...” She trailed off, hearing herself stumble, watching his expression shift from concern to something more guarded, more careful.
He knew she was holding something back. He could hear it in the spaces between her words, in the sentences she started and could not finish.
She could see him choosing not to press.
The restraint was costing him something, and that cost was worse than any accusation would have been.
“I am well,” she said, more firmly. “Truly. I simply need time.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, and raised her hand to his lips, and the gentleness of the gesture tore at her heart.
“I shall be in my study if you need me,” he said, and left her standing in the corridor. Elizabeth pressed her back against the wall, closed her eyes, and thought: I cannot do this for very long.
The concealment she had practised all her life, the careful hiding of her gift, had always been a burden she carried lightly because the alternative was unthinkable.
But this was different. This was not hiding what she could see; this was hiding what she knew.
What she knew was this: her husband’s father had been murdered.
The murderer was her own brother-in-law.
The man standing in the corridor offering her his love and his trust deserved the truth, and could not have it.
Not yet. Not until she had something more than a dead man’s fury and her own impossible testimony.
She needed to talk to someone who was not a ghost about what she knew, which meant she needed Kitty.
The drizzle had not let up by midday, but Elizabeth found she did not care.
She needed to be outside, away from the house and its listening walls and its otherworldly residents who might drift through a closed door at any moment.
She needed to speak aloud the weight of what she had learned yesterday, and she needed to speak it to the one person who could hear it without flinching.
“Walk with me,” she said to Kitty, appearing in the music room doorway with her pelisse already buttoned and her bonnet in her hand.
Kitty took one look at her face, set down the sheet music, and stood. “I will fetch my cloak.”
They went out through the side door, the one that led past the rose garden and down toward the lime walk.
The rain was fine and grey, more mist than shower, the kind that soaked through fabric slowly, thoroughly, turning the paths to soft mud.
The grounds were deserted; no gardeners, no grooms, nobody to overhear them except the spectral gardener who was pruning a hedge that no longer existed.
He paused as they passed, squinted at the lime walk, and muttered, “Too close to the trunk.
I said so in ‘sixty-three,” before returning to his phantom shrubbery.
Kitty walked beside her in silence for several minutes, waiting. She had always known when to wait. It was one of her greatest qualities, this patience that people who thought they knew Kitty Bennet would never have credited her with.
“George Darcy came to see me yesterday,” Elizabeth said. “Darcy’s father. He is a ghost. The most solid ghost I have ever encountered.”
Kitty nodded. Her face was calm, attentive.
“He told me he was murdered,” Elizabeth said. “Poisoned. Here in his own house, six years ago.”