Chapter Twenty-Five
Darcy was silent, looking at her, for what felt like forever.
Elizabeth sat in her chair and let him look.
She had no more words. She had spent them all, every one, and what was left was just her: red-eyed, shaking, her hands gripping the chair arms, her face wet.
From below, the faint sounds of the household preparing for the ball continued, indifferent to the fact that the world had just changed.
“You see ghosts,” Darcy said at last. His voice was very level.
“Yes.”
“You have seen them your whole life.”
“Yes.”
“My father is in this house.”
“Yes.”
He stood up. He crossed the room, not to the door, but to the window.
He stood there with his back to her, looking out at the November grey.
Elizabeth watched his shoulders, tried to read what was happening from the set of them.
She could not. She gripped the chair arms harder. Her nails dug into the upholstery.
“Aunt Catherine’s observations,” Darcy said, still facing the window. “The conversations with empty rooms. The gallery at midnight. Stepping around something in the ballroom that she could not see.”
“Sarah Dunn,” Elizabeth said. “A former housemaid. She was scrubbing the floor. She has been dead for years, but she still does her job because she was a fiercely conscientious maid, and it was the maids’ job to scrub the ballroom floor.
I stepped around her because I have always thought it rude to walk through ghosts, and I did not think about how it would look to anyone watching. ”
Darcy turned around. His expression was not that of a man who thought his wife was mad. He looked like a man who was rebuilding his understanding of the world, piece by piece, and finding that the new structure held.
“I believe you,” he said.
Elizabeth’s hands unclenched. Her whole body unclenched, all at once, as though a fist that had been closed around her since childhood had simply opened.
She bent forward in the chair, pressed her face into her hands, wept.
Not the frightened tears of the confession but the sheer, overwhelming relief of a woman who has carried a secret for twenty years and set it down at last. Her shoulders shook.
She could not stop, and she did not try.
Darcy crossed the room in three strides, knelt beside her chair, put his arms around her.
She turned into him, pressed her face against his shoulder.
He held her while she cried. He did not speak.
He held her, his hand on the back of her head, his chin resting against her temple, and he let her cry until she was done.
It took a long time; Elizabeth could not have said how long.
When she finally pulled back, his waistcoat was soaked through, though he did not seem to care.
“I am sorry,” she said. “For not telling you sooner. For telling Georgiana before I told you. For all the lies, Darcy, the half-truths, the things I led you to believe I had discovered through cleverness when really I had been told them by a dead woman standing beside me in a room you thought was empty.”
“You were afraid,” Darcy said. He was still kneeling beside her chair. He had not let go of her hands.
“I have been afraid my whole life. Nobody else in my family can see what I see, though they all know. My mother has always dealt with it by pretending it does not exist. My father protected me in his own way, by making sure nobody outside the family ever suspected. None of my sisters can see them, but they have spent their whole lives covering for me, learning to read the signs so they can distract people when my attention slips. I have been alone with this, Darcy. Completely alone. The rule, the only rule, has always been: do not tell, do not show, do not let anyone outside the family know, because the world will call you mad and the law will let them lock you away for it. Your aunt has just walked into your study and proved that the fear is justified.”
“My aunt is a vindictive woman who has been looking for a weapon to use against you since the day she realised I intended to marry you. She would have seized on anything. If it had not been this, it would have been something else.”
“But it was this. The observations she made were accurate, Darcy. Every one of them. I do talk to empty rooms. I do walk the gallery at midnight. I do step around people who are not there.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“I am exactly what she described. The difference between her interpretation and the truth is a matter of faith, and I would not have blamed you if you had chosen hers.”
“I chose you,” Darcy said. “I chose you before I heard a word of explanation. I would have chosen you if you had told me nothing at all.”
Elizabeth looked at him, kneeling before her with his warm hands wrapped around her shaking ones, his waistcoat ruined, and she thought: I will remember this for the rest of my life. This room, this moment, this man on his knees choosing me when he knows what I am, all of what I am.
“But Georgiana knew?” Darcy said. It was not an accusation, but the hurt was there, and Elizabeth knew it was justified.
“She walked in on me talking to Edmund and Charlotte. The ghost children who play in the long gallery, distant ancestors of yours. She was so quiet I did not hear her. She saw me speaking to what she thought was empty air. She asked me, and I couldn’t lie to her.
I tried. I could not.” Elizabeth pressed her thumbs against his knuckles.
“I should have told you first. I should have told you before we married. I meant to, more than once. There was an afternoon in your study when I started to. Lady Catherine’s carriage pulled up the drive and interrupted me.
After that I could never find the moment, or the courage.
Every day that passed made it harder, because every day was another day I had not trusted you. ”
“You are trusting me now.”
“I am, and if you want to ask me anything, anything at all, I will answer. No more lies. No more half-truths. Whatever you want to know.”
Darcy was quiet for a few moments longer. Then he sat back down in the chair opposite her and said, “Tell me about my father.”
Elizabeth went to the bookcase and pressed the catch, and the panel swung open into the passage. Nana was waiting on the other side. She looked at Elizabeth, looked past her at Darcy, and for once in her considerable existence said nothing at all.
“Is George near?” Elizabeth asked. “Will he come?”
“He is in the gallery,” Nana said. “He has been pacing since this morning. He is worse than usual. Unsettled, like the house, but I still cannot tell you what is causing it.”
“Please ask him to come here. Tell him, Darcy knows. Tell him everything.”
Nana left. Elizabeth closed the panel and turned back to Darcy, who was watching her with as much shock on his face as she had ever seen from him.
He had just watched his wife open a secret door and speak to the empty passage behind it.
His face said he was still catching up to what he had insisted he did believe.
“Nana,” Elizabeth said. “She was in the passage. She is going to find your father.”
“You speak to them as though they are in the room.”
“They are in the room. They are usually in the room. That is rather the difficulty.”
Darcy almost smiled. Elizabeth loved him for it: for the fact that in the middle of learning his father had been murdered and his wife could see the dead, he could still almost smile at something she said.
They waited. Elizabeth sat. Darcy did not.
He got up again, stood by the fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back.
He looked as though he was waiting for an audience he could not see and did not know how to greet.
Elizabeth understood. How did you prepare to hear your dead father speak through your wife’s voice?
There was no etiquette for this. Even Lady Matlock, who had etiquette for everything, could not have helped.
George came through the wall.
He came fast, not drifting, not pacing, but moving with a directness Elizabeth had never seen from him. He came through the wall beside the fireplace and stopped. He was standing three feet from his son. His son could not see him. The expression on George Darcy’s face broke Elizabeth’s heart.
“He is here,” Elizabeth said. “He came through the wall beside you. He is standing very close to you, Darcy. On your left.”
Darcy turned his head to the left. He could not see his father. He looked at the empty air where George stood, and George looked at his son’s face, and neither of them could bridge the gap.
“Tell him,” George said. His voice was rough.
“Tell him I am here. I can see him. I...” He stopped.
Started again. “Tell him I am proud of him. Tell him I have watched him carry this family for six years. He has done it better than I ever did. I am sorry. For Wickham. For not listening. For every time I chose that boy over my own son. I was wrong, and I knew it before I died, and I have not been able to say it until now.”
Elizabeth repeated his words, exactly, changing nothing.
She had learned from Nana that precision mattered: a ghost’s words were their own, and she was the conduit, not the editor.
She spoke George’s sentences in George’s cadence.
Darcy stood and listened, his jaw clenching tighter with every phrase, his eyes growing brighter.
He did not look away from the spot where his father stood.
When Elizabeth finished, the room was quiet.
“He knew,” Darcy said, at last. “Before he died. He knew about Wickham.”
“As Mr Wilson told us, he came to your father and told him what Wickham had done to Sally. Your father believed it at once, without question. He said the scales fell from his eyes. He saw what you had been trying to tell him for years, and he summoned Wickham home and confronted him.”
“And Wickham killed him for it.”