Chapter Sixteen
Lady Catherine did not come down to breakfast the following morning. She had sent word through Mrs Jenkinson that she would take a tray in her rooms, as the night had been disturbed by unaccountable restlessness and she had a headache.
It occurred to Elizabeth then that the blue rooms bordered the east corridor, which a few of Pemberley’s older and more melancholic ghosts happened to frequent.
Ghosts who were unlikely to have much tolerance for Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s haughty ways and dislike of Pemberley’s new mistress.
Elizabeth caught Nana’s eye across the breakfast table.
Nana looked innocent, which was always a warning sign.
“I did nothing,” Nana said. “It is not my fault that Catherine chose the blue rooms.”
“You suggested the blue rooms to Mrs Reynolds,” Elizabeth murmured, under cover of accepting more chocolate from the footman.
“How could I possibly, when Mrs Reynolds cannot see or hear me?” Nana looked piously indignant.
Elizabeth let it go, because Lady Catherine’s absence had produced a transformation at the breakfast table that was worth any amount of ghostly mischief.
Anne de Bourgh was eating.
Not merely accepting toast and pushing it around her plate, as she had done the previous morning under her mother’s watchful eye, but actually eating: two slices of bread with butter and honey, a boiled egg with a thick slice of ham, a cup of tea that she drank to the bottom, then refilled.
She sat beside Georgiana, listened to Kitty’s account of the book she was reading, offered an observation of her own about the author that was so dry, so precisely aimed, that Kitty laughed aloud.
Georgiana looked at her cousin as though seeing her for the first time.
“She has Annie’s eyes,” George Darcy said.
He was standing by the window, watching his niece.
Elizabeth had grown accustomed to the angles of his face when he was angry, the rigid set of his jaw when he spoke of Wickham, the cold fury that radiated from him when his murder was discussed.
This was none of those things. He looked, for the first time since Elizabeth had known him, simply sad.
“Catherine named her for my wife,” he said.
“It was the only generous thing Catherine ever did, and she has been punishing the girl for the resemblance ever since. Annie was everything Catherine wanted to be and could not. Beautiful. Beloved. Married to a man who adored her rather than merely tolerated her. And now Annie’s namesake sits at my table, thin, pale, half the woman she might have been, because Catherine could not bear to raise a daughter who reminded her of what her sister had. ”
“The child needs feeding up,” Nana said from her station near the sideboard. “She needs sunlight, air, conversation that does not begin and end with what her mother permits. Look at her, George. She is three-and-twenty and she has never been allowed to take up the space she deserves.”
“I see it,” George said. “I have been seeing it for years.”
“Then stop looking mournful about it and let Elizabeth do something.”
Elizabeth, who could not respond to either of them without alarming the living members of the table, took a careful sip of her chocolate and said, to the room at large, “It is a beautiful morning for the time of year. Anne, would you care to walk in the gardens after breakfast? Georgiana and Kitty can show you what they have been doing with the rose garden.”
Anne looked up, and the cautious pleasure on her face was almost worse than misery. She looked like a girl who had learnt not to want things, and who was now being offered something she was not at all sure she was allowed to accept.
“I should like that,” she said. “If you are certain I will not be in the way.”
“You will not be in the way,” Georgiana said firmly. “You will be in exactly the right place.”
The four of them spent the morning in the rose garden, and by luncheon Anne de Bourgh had dirt under her fingernails for what Elizabeth suspected was the first time in her life.
Georgiana and Kitty had been working on the restoration for weeks now, guided by the portrait in the gallery and by Nana’s exacting memories of how the garden had looked in its prime.
They had cleared the worst of the bindweed, edged the beds, and begun coaxing the established roses back into order, though winter was coming and there was a limit to what could be done before spring.
They showed Anne Lady Margaret’s portrait, explained their plans, and put a pair of secateurs in her hand, and Anne, who had probably never held a gardening tool in her life, took to it with a quiet concentration that reminded Elizabeth, with a sharp pang, of what George had said about his wife.
Annie’s quality. That careful attention to living things.
Lady Margaret’s smile was wider, Elizabeth thought, and she was directing it at the girls just as much as the roses.
Well, at least one of Pemberley’s ghosts was content. Elizabeth wondered if Lady Margaret would move on, or simply fade in place, happy so long as her roses were tended and loved.
The garden was also, Elizabeth had to admit, the safest place in Pemberley for her to be while Lady Catherine was in residence.
Catherine did not garden. Catherine did not walk in the cold if she could avoid it.
Out here, among the bare rose stems, the turned earth, Elizabeth could speak to Nana without fear of being observed by anyone who might draw conclusions about her sanity.
George did not come to the garden. His restlessness kept him in the house, pacing the corridors he could not leave, and the grounds beyond the terrace seemed to hold no pull for him. But Nana came, drifting near the old sundial that marked the garden’s centre, watching the four young women work.
“She is better out here,” Nana said. “She has colour. She looks almost alive.”
“She is alive, Nana.”
“I meant that she looks as though she knows it, which is more than could be said for her yesterday.”
After luncheon, with Lady Catherine still mercifully absent, Georgiana suggested going for a ride. She had been wanting to show Kitty the view from the ridge above the south meadow. The afternoon was bright and cold; the horses needed exercise.
“Anne,” Georgiana said, turning to her cousin as though it were the most natural thing in the world, “will you come?”
Anne’s face went through several expressions in quick succession: surprise, longing, and then a shadow that was unmistakably fear. “I don’t have a riding habit with me,” she said. “Mother did not think I should ride.”
“I have three,” Georgiana said. “We are near enough in size that one of them will fit you, I am sure. And Elizabeth, you must come too.”
“I’m not much of a horsewoman,” Elizabeth said, which was true, but Kitty gave her a look that brooked no argument, and so Elizabeth went.
Darcy himself, when he heard their plans, came out to the stable and selected horses for them all.
He put Elizabeth up on a bay gelding he promised was calm and exceptionally steady, but with a turn of speed if she wished to prompt it.
As Darcy moved on to choose a mount for Anne, one of the spectral groom brothers drifted closer to the gelding’s head.
He leaned in and murmured something Elizabeth could not quite catch, and the horse’s ears pricked forward, its neck arching as though acknowledging a familiar hand.
The gelding could feel him, Elizabeth realised.
Animals, it seemed, had their own awareness of the dead.
The groom caught her eye, touched his cap respectfully.
“You’ll be safe with Jasper, ma’am. He knows to look after you. ”
She had been confident Darcy would put her up on a horse he trusted with her, but it was nice to know the spectral grooms were looking out for their new mistress as well. She wondered if the horse actually understood what the groom had whispered.
For Anne, Darcy told the grooms to bring out a gentle mare, a placid creature with soft eyes and an easy gait.
Anne mounted stiffly, as though the muscles had forgotten what to do, but her hands found their memory within the first few minutes, and by the time they reached the south meadow she was sitting tall and easy in the saddle, her face turned into the wind.
“Mother stopped allowing it when I was twelve,” Anne said.
They were riding abreast along the wide path that led toward the ridge, the October sun casting long shadows across the parkland.
“She said I was too fragile. Dr Harris agreed, though Dr Harris agrees with everything Mother says, because she pays him handsomely to confirm her opinions.”
“That is a remarkably clear-eyed observation,” Elizabeth said.
“I have had a great deal of time to make it. There is not much else to do at Rosings.” Anne’s hands were steady on the reins now, her posture improving with every stride.
She had been well taught, Elizabeth could see; the skill was buried under years of disuse, not absent.
“I used to ride with my father when I was small. He had a grey hunter called Atlas, and he would put me in front of him and we would go out before breakfast. I remember the smell of the horse and the cold air and his arm around my waist. Being entirely, perfectly happy.”
“How old were you when Sir Lewis died?”
“Six. Everything changed after that. Mother had always been, well, Mother, but Father balanced her. He could make her laugh, which nobody else has ever managed, and he could make her listen, which is harder still. After he died, there was nobody to balance anything, and she took charge of everything instead.”
They reached the ridge, stopped their horses, and looked out over the valley. Pemberley spread below them in the autumn light: the house, the grounds, the lake, the dark line of woods beyond. Anne was quiet for a long time, looking at the view.