Chapter Twenty-Three
The day before the ball, Elizabeth walked through Pemberley and found it ready. Or rather, the living half of Pemberley was ready. The dead half was in uproar.
The ballroom gleamed. The chandeliers had been cleaned until every crystal threw light.
The chairs were arranged along the walls in neat rows, upholstered in pale gold silk that Nana had chosen forty years ago and that had so little wear they still looked almost new.
The musicians’ gallery had been swept and dusted, the music stands set out, the candles in their sconces trimmed and ready.
The refreshment tables were placed at the far end, draped in white linen, bare now but waiting.
And on the ballroom floor, lined up alongside the living maids, Sarah Dunn was on her hands and knees, scrubbing away at floorboards she could not actually touch.
Her cloth passed through the wood without friction, but her form was perfect, her elbows pumping, her face set in the grim concentration of a woman who had polished these floors throughout her life and was not about to stop simply because she was dead.
“She has been at it since dawn,” Nana said, falling into step beside Elizabeth as she crossed the ballroom.
“I told her it was unnecessary. She informed me that a ball at Pemberley required properly polished floors and she did not trust the new girls to get into the corners. She is not wrong about the corners.”
“The new girls have been here for fifteen years, Nana,” Elizabeth said, speaking under her breath.
She had learned that Nana could hear her perfectly well at this volume, and it enabled Elizabeth to talk to her in public with nobody noticing.
Most of the servants kept their gazes below her face, so they did not see her lips moving.
“As I said. New.”
Nana walked beside her, inspecting. Not pacing, not restless; walking, the way she had walked these rooms when she was alive.
She seemed particularly solid today, almost as solid as George Darcy appeared, and Elizabeth thought of what George had said about Pemberley’s reputation for entertaining having been created during Nana’s tenure.
Did Nana seem so solid because she was interested in what was happening?
Nana ran a critical eye over the flower arrangements, the candle placements, the supper tables, and Elizabeth braced herself.
“The lilies should be closer to the entrance,” Nana said. “Guests should smell them as they arrive. It sets the tone.”
“I will tell Mrs Reynolds.”
“The roses are wrong. They are too dark for the room. We used pale roses, cream and blush, because they catch the candlelight. Dark roses absorb it. The room will look heavy.”
“I believe the force-houses have already been stripped of blooms. We are too late to change them, I fear.”
Nana sniffed, but did not attempt to argue the point. “And the curtains want tying back more firmly on the left. The right side is correct. The left is too far forward and it obscures the view of the lake, which is the whole point of the west windows.”
Elizabeth forced herself not to snap that she had already spent far too much time tweaking the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned curtains. She adjusted the curtain herself. Nana watched, nodded, said nothing, which was approval.
Beyond the ballroom, the rest of the household was similarly engaged.
Elizabeth passed through the entrance hall on her way to check the card room and found Mr Graves, the Georgian butler, stationed at the foot of the staircase in full livery, looking more harried than she had ever seen him.
He was directing a procession of faint shades Elizabeth could barely make out: wispy figures in servants’ dress from half a dozen different eras, filing through the hall and into the yellow drawing room and out again as though rehearsing a route.
The shapes were so transparent she could see the wallpaper through them, but Graves was treating them as though they were solid footmen who required drilling.
“What on earth is he doing?” Elizabeth murmured to Nana, as they passed.
“He is marshalling the household for the ball,” Nana said, as though this were perfectly obvious.
“He did the same before every entertainment when he was alive, and he has not seen fit to retire from the practice. He has been at it since four o’clock this morning.
Mrs Alcott is doing the same in the kitchens, I believe, though they are not speaking to each other at present because they disagree about whether the silver should be brought up before or after the candles are lit. ”
“They are not speaking to each other? They share a servants’ hall.”
“They have divided it with an invisible line. It is very dramatic. I have told them both to stop being ridiculous, but they take no notice of me, which is extremely vexing, because I am Mrs Darcy and my authority ought to be respected.”
“I am Mrs Darcy,” Elizabeth pointed out, and Nana shot her a glare, as though to say, do not remind me.
In the yellow drawing room, Sir Roderick Darcy still dozed in his chair, as he had for as long as any of Pemberley’s ghosts could remember. He was still there, still apparently asleep, his wigged head tilted to one side. Elizabeth moved past him quietly.
“Do you think the ball will disturb him?” she asked Nana, once they were safely in the corridor.
Nana’s face pinched. “I sincerely hope not. Sir Roderick has not stirred in my memory, and if the noise of three hundred people dancing and an orchestra playing until two in the morning does not wake him, we shall count ourselves fortunate. He was, by all accounts, a man of exceptionally foul temper. I have managed this house for a hundred and thirty years without Sir Roderick’s input, and I intend to continue. ”
“What would happen if he did wake?”
“I do not know, and I do not wish to find out. Walk quietly past the yellow drawing room tomorrow evening and tell your guests to do the same.”
“I am not going to tell three hundred guests to tiptoe past the yellow drawing room, Nana. It is being opened for their convenience and comfort.”
“Then we must hope Sir Roderick sleeps through it. He has slept through everything else, including the time one of the chimneys caught fire in 1763, which was quite the commotion.” Nana tutted and shook her head.
“My fault, really. I was quite old then, had let a few things slip. The newest Mrs Darcy was very young, and Pemberley was ill-served by its housekeeper. The chimneys were overdue for sweeping.”
They stood together in the centre of the ballroom.
The room was empty of living people now, the maids having finished their work, though Sarah Dunn was still working on the stairs that led up to the musicians’ gallery with spectral determination.
The space hummed with the anticipation of what it would become: three hundred people, music, dancing, candlelight.
The first ball Elizabeth would host as Mrs Darcy.
The first ball Pemberley had seen in over twenty years.
“You are ready,” Nana said.
“I am terrified,” Elizabeth admitted.
“That is the same thing. I was terrified before every ball. Forty-three of them, in this room. I counted them. Each one I thought would be the one where Pemberley failed, where the food was wrong or the music poor or the guests unhappy, and each one was better than the last. Yours will be no different.”
“Forty-three balls,” Elizabeth marvelled.
“Forty-three. The last was in 1785, for Fitzwilliam’s christening.
George wanted a small gathering. Annie told him that a Darcy heir deserved a proper celebration, and he gave in, because George always gave in when she insisted.
Annie wore her blue silk and George could not take his eyes off her.
” Nana paused, and her voice softened in a way Elizabeth rarely heard.
“It was the last time this room was truly alive. After Annie died, George could not bear it. He closed the ballroom and never opened it again.”
Elizabeth realised that Nana was counting all the balls she had seen at Pemberley, even after her death.
She did not ask how many of those forty-three had been during Nana’s lifetime.
She had slowly become aware that Nana was not always clear on what events had happened during her life, or after her death, the story about the chimney fire excepted.
They stood together a moment longer, and Elizabeth looked around the room that Nana had loved and tended for longer than anyone alive could remember.
She was not Lady Anne. She was not Nana.
She was only Elizabeth Bennet from Longbourn, but she would do Pemberley justice, or she would die trying, which Nana would probably consider acceptable.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. “For all of it. For teaching me this house.”
Nana looked at her. For a moment the sharpness left her face entirely. What remained was simply an old woman who loved Pemberley more than anything but the descendants who lived in it; who had found, at last, someone worthy of carrying her legacy forward.
“You were always going to be good at this,” Nana said. “I knew it the moment you walked through the front door and did not exaggerate how impressed you were. You were impressed, but you did not perform it. That is the difference between a visitor and a mistress.”
Elizabeth smiled. “I thought you disapproved of me.”
“I did. Disapproval and approval are not mutually exclusive. I disapproved of your deplorably casual manners and approved of your character. Your manners are slowly improving under my tutelage, which is my favourite state of affairs.”
Elizabeth found Darcy in the long gallery, late in the afternoon.