Chapter Ten #2
“I mean it. I watched your face in there. You were thinking about it. You were thinking: if only Darcy knew what Mrs Reynolds feels, if only I could explain it to him, he would understand.” Kitty caught her arm and stopped her in the corridor.
“He would not understand. He would think you had gone mad, or that you were cruel, raking over his father’s death for some reason he could not fathom. ”
“Mrs Reynolds feels it too, Kitty. She has felt it for six years. I am not the only one who knows something is wrong.”
“Mrs Reynolds feels uneasy in old rooms. That is a long way from ‘your father’s ghost told my wife he was poisoned.’” Kitty’s grip on her arm was tight.
“Promise me. Promise me you will not tell him until we have real evidence. Something that does not begin and end with you seeing things nobody else can see.”
Elizabeth looked at her sister’s face, fierce and frightened. She thought of Darcy, patient, genuinely concerned, waiting for a truth she could not give him.
“I promise,” she said.
Nana was waiting in the parlour when Elizabeth returned.
She was in her chair, naturally, her small frame rigid with contained impatience. She had something to say and had been waiting to say it for longer than she considered acceptable. Elizabeth checked that the corridor was empty of the living, closed the door, and sat.
“You spoke to Mrs Reynolds,” Nana said.
“I did. She told me a great deal. More, I think, than she intended to.”
“Good. She is a sensible woman. I have been working on her for years.”
Elizabeth looked at Nana sharply. “Working on her?”
“She feels things,” Nana said, with the matter-of-fact air of someone describing a useful household tool rather than a human being.
“She always has. Not seeing, not hearing, nothing so definite as that. But she is aware of us, in her way. When I stand near her, she shivers. When I am displeased about something, she becomes uneasy until it is put right. I learnt early on that I could direct her attention to things that needed fixing, matters the living staff had overlooked. A cold draught near a neglected window. An unsettled feeling in a room where the furniture had been wrongly placed. She does not know why she notices these things. She believes it is instinct, or experience, or simply the accumulated wisdom of twenty years in an old house.”
“You have been using her.”
“I have been guiding her,” Nana corrected crisply.
A hundred and fifty years of getting what she wanted without anyone realising she was doing it had given her a fine sense of the distinction.
“There is a difference. I have never made her do anything she would not have done herself, given sufficient information. I have merely ensured she had the information, delivered in the only way available to me. A chill in the right corridor. An unease near a stain that needed scrubbing. I once stood beside the curtains in the blue bedroom for three consecutive mornings until she felt so uncomfortable she sent for the seamstress.” A flicker of satisfaction crossed Nana’s face.
“They were rehung within the week. A persistent discomfort in the room where my great-grandson was poisoned, which she has felt every day for six years, because I have stood in that room every day for six years and made certain she would feel it.”
Elizabeth absorbed this. It was manipulative, and it was also, in its way, extraordinary: a ghost who could not speak to the living, who could not write or touch or move objects with anything like the force George Darcy commanded, finding a way to communicate through the only channel available to her, the sensitivity of a woman who did not even know she was listening.
“You kept the memory alive,” Elizabeth said. “You made sure Mrs Reynolds never quite forgot that something was wrong.”
“Someone had to. Nobody else could hear me.” Nana’s voice was steady, but something flickered behind her eyes, the same guarded look Elizabeth had seen when George Darcy’s name was first raised with Georgiana.
“I could not solve it. I could not tell anyone the truth. But I could keep the wound from closing over, so that when someone finally came who could hear me, the evidence would not have been entirely buried.”
There was a silence. Then Nana said, more quietly, “I owe you an apology.”
Elizabeth nearly dropped her teacup. She had not expected to hear those words from Nana in this lifetime, or any other.
“George should not have come to you the way he did. I told him to wait. I wanted to prepare you, to give you time to settle into the house, to build trust between us, before all of that was laid on you. He is impatient. He was always impatient, even as a child, and death has not improved him in that regard.” She paused, and her mouth compressed.
“But he is also right that it could not wait forever. I have been holding him back since you first arrived, and his patience was at its end. If I had not let him come to you soon, he would have done something reckless, and a reckless ghost of his particular strength is not something this household needs.”
“What would he have done?”
“Shown himself to Fitzwilliam. Moved furniture. Broken something valuable.” Nana’s tone suggested that the damage to Pemberley’s furnishings concerned her at least as much as the damage to Fitzwilliam’s composure.
“He has the power for it, as you have seen; he opened your door, he compressed the chair. He is the most solid ghost at Pemberley. His rage feeds that solidity, and I have spent six years making sure he directs it inward rather than outward, because the alternative would have terrified this household and possibly damaged the house itself.”
Elizabeth thought of the candle guttering, the temperature dropping, the misted breath in a room with a fire burning. “You have been managing him.”
“I have been managing everything,” Nana said, and for a moment the weariness in her voice was so vast, so old, that Elizabeth felt the weight of it like something physical.
“For almost a hundred and thirty years, I have been managing this house, everyone in it, living and dead. I am tired, Mrs Darcy. I am very tired. And now you are here, and you can hear me, and I do not have to do it alone.”
She stopped, as though surprised by what she had said, and drew herself up, and the sharpness returned to her face like a visor snapping shut.
“That is not an invitation to sentimentality,” she added crisply.
“I expect you to be practical about this. George requires justice. Mrs Reynolds has given you a beginning. What you do with it is your concern, but I suggest you do it quickly, before my grandson loses what remains of his patience and does something we will all regret.”
“Understood,” Elizabeth said.
“Good. Now. The drawing room curtains. I have been meaning to speak to you about them, and I will not be put off any longer.”
Elizabeth, who had just been given an apology, a confession, and an ultimatum by a woman who had been dead for half a century, found that she was grateful for the curtains. The curtains were manageable. The curtains she could do something about.
She found Darcy in the library that afternoon.
He was standing by the window, a book open in his hands, though Elizabeth suspected he had not been reading.
He turned when she entered, and his expression was the one she had come to dread: attentive, careful, watchful.
He was studying her the way he might study a difficult passage of Latin, looking for the meaning beneath the words.
“I have been talking to Mrs Reynolds,” Elizabeth said, sitting in the chair by the fire and picking up the book she had left there the previous day, a poor attempt at normality. “About the house, the family. She has been very helpful.”
“She is fond of you,” Darcy said. “She told me so yesterday. She said you remind her of my mother.”
The words should have been a gift. They felt like a knife. “That is a great compliment,” Elizabeth managed.
Darcy closed his book and came to sit across from her.
The distance between them, the distance Elizabeth had put there with her secrets and her silences, felt as solid as the table that separated them.
The ghostly governess, Miss Pardoe, glanced up at him, registered that domestic tension was afoot, and returned to her book with the deliberate focus of a woman who had survived decades in other people’s households by knowing precisely when not to involve herself.
“Elizabeth,” he said. “You have been different these last two days. You smile, but it does not reach your eyes. You are present at meals but your thoughts are elsewhere. You and Kitty whisper together and grow quiet when I approach.” He paused, and what followed was not an accusation but something worse: an appeal.
“I do not ask you to tell me everything. I know there are things a wife keeps to herself, adjustments that must be made, and I have no wish to crowd you. But I need to know that you are not unhappy. That you are not regretting...”
“I am not regretting anything,” Elizabeth said, and this, at least, was the truth, complete and unqualified. “I do not regret marrying you. I could not regret it. You must not think that.”
“Then what is it?”
She looked at him across the table, at this man she loved, who was offering her an opening she could not walk through, and felt the impossibility of her position with a sharpness that took her breath.
She could not tell him about his father.
She could not tell him about Wickham. She could not tell him about any of it, because the moment she did, one of two things would happen: he would believe her, act, and the consequences would be catastrophic.
Or he would not believe her, and the marriage she was desperately trying to protect would crack along lines she could never repair.
“I am learning,” she said. “About the house, about the family, about all the things a new wife must understand. And some of what I am learning is, it is a great deal to take in. The history of this place, the people who have lived here, the weight of it all. I am not unhappy. I am simply, adjusting.”
It was the same word she had used the day before, a vastly inadequate one, and they both knew it.
Darcy sighed, audibly, but he did not seem exasperated or angry. Just weary. “When you are ready to tell me what it is that is troubling you, I will be here.”
He rose, crossed to her chair, and kissed the top of her head, and left the library. Elizabeth sat listening to his footsteps retreat down the corridor. She pressed her hands over her face. She did not cry, because crying would not help and Mrs Reynolds might come in.
She sat there for a long time. The fire shifted and settled. Miss Pardoe turned a page of her eternal book and did not look up.
Eventually Elizabeth took her hands from her face, straightened her back, and reached for the notebook she had begun keeping, the one disguised as household observations. She wrote:
Mrs R confirms: late Mr GD well before death. W present in the house, unexpected visit, summoned? Mr GD unsettled in days prior. Physician attributed death to heart. Mrs R has always felt something was wrong. House itself unsettled since. Mrs R sensitive; more so than she knows.
She looked at what she had written. Circumstantial. All of it circumstantial. A sudden death, a house guest, a housekeeper’s unease. Nothing a magistrate would consider for a moment.
But it was a beginning. Tomorrow she would ask more questions, gently, carefully, wearing the mask of a bride who simply wanted to understand the family she had joined.
Kitty would be beside her, watching, covering.
Between them they would somehow build a case out of whispers, memories, the unshakeable testimony of a dead man who could not rest.
Through the library window, the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds for the first time that day.
The grounds of Pemberley spread out in their autumn beauty.
Elizabeth looked at them, thought of Darcy’s face as he had left the room, patient, hurt, trusting, and added one more line to her notebook:
I must find a way. I must find it soon.
She closed the notebook and put it in the drawer of her writing desk, beneath the household accounts, where nobody would think to look.