Chapter Fifteen
Elizabeth had rehearsed the exact words she would say twice that morning: once in the bath, once walking the length of the portrait gallery after breakfast while Edmund and Charlotte chased each other from end to end and Kitty watched her while making a thoroughly poor job of pretending to examine a painting.
The argument with Kitty had taken most of the previous evening.
“You can’t tell him about his father,” Kitty had said, flat and certain, the moment Elizabeth raised it. They were in Elizabeth’s parlour, the door locked, speaking low. “You can’t tell Darcy that his father was murdered. You promised me, Elizabeth.”
“I know. I’m not going to tell him about the murder. Just about the ghosts. About my gift, about what I am.”
“And not George.”
“And not George.” But even as she said it, the problem took shape.
“Except I have to. Kitty, I told Georgiana. She knows her father is here. The moment Darcy knows about my gift, Georgiana will know he is in on the secret, and she will talk to him about it. About their father. I can’t ask her to lie to her brother, and I can’t stop her from speaking to him.
So I either tell Darcy about George myself, or he hears it from Georgiana and knows I kept it from him deliberately. ”
Kitty stared at her. “Then you can’t tell him at all.”
“I must. Darcy knows I am hiding something, and his patience will not last forever, and I would rather tell him a partial truth than have him discover the whole of it by accident.” She paused.
“And Lydia. The money will help, but money is not enough. I need my husband beside me in this, not watching me across the breakfast table wondering what I am hiding. I need to be able to ask him for help, real help, for Lydia, without having to weigh every word for what it might reveal. I can’t do that while he thinks his wife is an ordinary woman. ”
“So you tell him about George. And when he asks why his father is still here?”
“I say... I don’t know. That some spirits are bound to the places they loved, and I don’t fully understand why some linger and others move on. It is not even entirely a lie.”
“That is a lie, Elizabeth.”
“Yes. It is the best I have.”
Kitty had not argued further. She had not agreed, exactly, but she had stopped objecting, which amounted to the same thing. What she had said, this morning, looking almost as strained as Elizabeth felt, was: “Just go. Before you lose your nerve again.”
Elizabeth had not lost her nerve. She had simply, on all the previous occasions when she might have spoken, found a reason not to.
But Jane was coming, and Jane would ask whether Elizabeth had told her husband, and Elizabeth could not face that conversation without an honest answer.
She found him in his study, as she had expected to at this hour. He was reading correspondence, but he set it aside when she came in, because he always did, and the gladness in his face made what she was about to do both easier and more terrible.
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
Darcy looked at her. His expression did not change, but his gaze sharpened.
“Will you not sit down?” he said, his tone gentle. As though perhaps he thought she might flee if he sounded formal, or stern.
She sat. She folded her hands in her lap and unfolded them again.
“There is something about me that I should have told you before we married. Something I have carried my whole life, that my family knows, and I have been trying to find the right moment to tell you, and there is no right moment, so I am choosing this one.”
Darcy had gone a little stiff, his posture rigid, almost as though awaiting a blow. She could see him preparing for something, though she could not tell what he expected. An unhappiness. Some grief she had been hiding.
He was not wrong, exactly.
“Darcy, I...”
A knock at the study door cut her off before she could begin to say it. The knock was sharp, urgent. Darcy shot Elizabeth an apologetic look before rising and going to the door.
Elizabeth twisted her hands together, made herself breathe slowly. Whoever it is will go away in a moment, she thought, and then I will say it.
But the voice at the door was Mrs Reynolds, who would never interrupt them lightly, and she sounded carefully composed but not quite calm as she said, “I beg your pardon, sir, but a carriage has just been sighted on the drive. It is Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s carriage.”
The silence lasted perhaps two seconds. It felt considerably longer.
“She has not written,” Darcy said.
“No, sir.”
Darcy turned from the door and looked at Elizabeth. Elizabeth looked at Darcy. The truth she had spent days gathering the courage to deliver sat between them, stranded.
“We will continue this conversation,” Darcy said. It was not a question.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “We will.”
But the moment had passed. They both knew it. Elizabeth stood, smoothed her dress, went to meet the carriage with her husband beside her and the words still locked behind her teeth.
Lady Catherine descended from her carriage as though conferring a favour upon the ground.
She was dressed in black bombazine, worn less for mourning than for authority, and she surveyed Pemberley’s front entrance in a single sweeping glance and an expression that clearly indicated she found the sight before her entirely inadequate.
Behind her, Anne de Bourgh was helped down by her companion, pale and thin and blinking in the October sun like a creature emerging from long captivity.
Which, in some respects, Elizabeth supposed, she was.
She had truly never expected to see Anne de Bourgh at Pemberley, so far from the safety of Rosings.
“Fitzwilliam,” Lady Catherine said. “I have come.”
“So I see,” Darcy said. His voice was perfectly civil and perfectly cold, and Elizabeth could hear the effort required to be both.
“I am not staying long. A week, perhaps two. I wish to see how the house is being kept. Anne needs the air; she has been unwell, and Mrs Jenkinson insists upon the country. I have matters to discuss with my brother Lord Matlock. And I wish,” she turned her gaze upon Elizabeth, and the force of it was considerable, “to see how you are getting on, Mrs Darcy.”
“Very well, I thank you,” Elizabeth said, and smiled, because the best defence against Lady Catherine had always been courtesy delivered with an impeccable straight face.
From somewhere behind her, she heard George Darcy say, “Oh, God. Not Catherine.”
Elizabeth did not flinch. She kept her eyes on Lady Catherine, her smile in place, and did not, by any visible sign, acknowledge the ghost of her father-in-law, who had materialised just inside the front door, staring at his sister-in-law with undisguised horror.
“She is wearing the black again,” George said.
“She has been wearing it for seventeen years. Lewis has been dead for seventeen years and she is still punishing everyone with it. He would not have wanted this. Lewis wanted to be cremated on a Viking pyre, which Catherine refused to consider, so I hardly think she is wearing it for his sake.”
Elizabeth had to bite down on the inside of her cheek to keep the laughter from erupting as she envisioned Lady Catherine’s expression upon being told that her husband had wished to be cremated on a Viking pyre. It was one of the most difficult things she had ever done. She tasted blood.
Lady Catherine swept into the entrance hall, cataloguing deficiencies. “The floors need polishing. The flowers are wrong. Why are the curtains different in the yellow drawing room? They were blue when I was last here.”
“Because they were faded,” Nana said, materialising at Elizabeth’s shoulder with a loud sniff. “They had been faded for years, and she did not notice when she last visited. On the last three occasions she visited.”
Elizabeth now had two ghosts providing commentary, and Lady Catherine had only reached the yellow drawing room.
George and Nana followed Lady Catherine, and Elizabeth trailed behind them all, receiving commentary from two directions at once.
Catherine examined the furniture, ran a finger along the mantelpiece, checked it for dust, and found none, which appeared to disappoint her.
She examined the arrangement of chairs and declared them wrong.
She looked at the pianoforte and said it needed tuning, though how she could possibly tell without playing a single note, Elizabeth could not imagine.
“She can’t play,” George confided to Elizabeth. “She never could. She has strong opinions about everyone else’s music, and she can’t manage a scale herself. Annie used to say it was Catherine’s greatest sorrow, though she never would have admitted it.”
Catherine paused before the portrait of Lady Anne that hung above the fireplace. She was quiet for a moment, and George was quiet too. Then Catherine said, “The frame wants cleaning,” and walked on.
“She cannot say she misses her,” George said. “Sixteen years, and she still cannot simply say she misses her sister.”
“The servants look well enough,” Lady Catherine continued, turning her attention to the two maids and two footmen who were lined up against the wall awaiting instruction.
“Though the footmen could use better posture. In my household, I insist upon it. Good posture is the foundation of domestic order.”
“She said exactly the same thing in 1796,” George observed. “And in 1802. And on every visit in between. I believe she considers it a philosophy.”
Georgiana, who had come down to greet her aunt, caught Elizabeth’s eye at the precise moment George delivered this.
She could not see her father; she could not hear him.
But she could read Elizabeth’s face, and whatever she found there was too much; she made a sound that was nearly a laugh, turned it into a cough, said, “Excuse me, I think I left something in the music room,” and fled.