Chapter Twenty-Six #2
He did not hear her. Or he heard her and did not care.
Wickham, oblivious, smiled his charming smile and looked around the ballroom as though it were his own. “Darcy! What a magnificent evening. Pemberley has never looked finer. Your father would have been so proud.”
The words landed like a slap. Darcy’s arm turned to stone under Elizabeth’s hand.
“Such a good man, old Mr Darcy,” Wickham continued, shaking hands with a local gentleman. “Practically a father to me. I spent some of the happiest days of my life in this house.”
George Darcy was directly behind Wickham.
Elizabeth could see his face over Wickham’s shoulder.
She gripped Darcy’s arm harder because the expression on George’s face was one she never wanted to see again.
Wickham kept talking, kept smiling, kept praising the dead man he had murdered.
Elizabeth’s nausea surged so violently she nearly bent double.
Jane appeared at her side. Elizabeth did not know where Jane had come from, but she was there, her hand on Elizabeth’s elbow, her eyes asking the question she could not ask aloud.
Kitty was watching from across the dance floor, her face tight.
Georgiana was nearby, staring at Elizabeth with an expression of pure alarm.
Darcy had not moved. He was looking at Wickham with an expression Elizabeth recognised, because she had seen it on his father’s face: cold, focused fury, held in check by will alone.
He was calculating. Elizabeth could see him doing it: weighing the options, measuring the consequences, deciding whether to throw Wickham out bodily in front of three hundred guests or to wait and deal with him after.
“Not here,” Elizabeth said, pressing his arm. “Not in front of everyone.”
Darcy looked down at her. His jaw unclenched by a fraction. He nodded.
Wickham, meanwhile, had taken a glass of champagne from a passing footman and was making his way through the room as though he were the guest of honour.
Lydia trailed behind him, chattering to anyone who would listen about the regiment and Newcastle and a cottage on the estate where they had been staying with an old friend of Wickham’s, and Elizabeth thought: he planned this.
He planned to arrive through the terrace doors after the receiving line, so that Darcy could not turn him away at the front door.
He came in the back way because he knew he was not welcome and he came anyway, because Wickham always did exactly as he pleased and counted on charm to smooth over the consequences.
“Lizzy,” Jane said, very quietly. “What is happening?”
Jane was not asking about Wickham. She knew, already, that Wickham being here was not a good thing.
She was talking about what everyone in the room who did not know Wickham was not what he appeared to be could sense.
The candles were still guttering. The cold had not receded.
Guests were commenting on it now, fanning themselves less and pulling shawls tighter, and the musicians had started the second set but the music sounded thin, the notes not carrying as they should, as though the air itself had thickened.
Every ghost in Pemberley was watching Wickham.
Elizabeth could feel it. Sarah Dunn had pressed herself against the wall, her excitement gone, her face white.
Graves stood at the foot of the musicians’ gallery staircase, rigid, his hands clenched at his sides.
Mrs Alcott had retreated to the far corner.
Miss Pardoe had fled back to her library, clutching her book like a shield.
The ghost children were gone from the gallery railing.
George Darcy followed Wickham through the room, step for step, never more than three feet behind him. The hatred radiating from him bent the candle flames, chilled the air, made Elizabeth’s teeth ache.
“Trouble,” Elizabeth said quietly to Jane. “I’ll try to resolve it.”
Jane did not question. She nodded, turned away, called to Bingley cheerfully, trying to break the tension everyone could feel.
“George,” Elizabeth said again, under cover of accepting a glass of wine from a footman. “George, please. Let me find another way.”
He did not answer. He did not look at her. He looked only at Wickham.
Nana was beside her, small hands clenched into fists.
“I can’t hold this,” Nana said. “I have been holding it since yesterday, Elizabeth. I have been holding the house, the household, managing George, trying to understand what was wrong. Now I know what was wrong, because that man is here, the man who killed George, standing in this ballroom drinking champagne and smiling. The house knew. Pemberley knew before any of us. The murderer is in the house and every ghost in Pemberley can feel it and I can’t hold this much longer. ”
“You have to,” Elizabeth said. “Nana, please. Not here. Not with three hundred people watching.”
“I am trying,” Nana said, and for the second time in Elizabeth’s experience, she looked afraid. “But it is not only me, Elizabeth. It is the house. The house is angry. There are ghosts in this house older than me who do not take orders from anyone.”
Of all people, it was Caroline Bingley who caused the tension to break.
She had been watching the evening curdle from her position by the pianoforte. She had been outshone by Elizabeth and ignored by Darcy. The ball was a triumph; none of the triumph was hers. Wickham and Lydia had walked in uninvited, loud, vulgar, impossible to ignore. Caroline saw an opening.
“How extraordinary,” Caroline said, to Louisa Hurst, in a voice pitched to carry. “I had not realised the invitation extended to every connection of the Bennet family, however disreputable. One might as well have invited the militia regiment.”
Several heads turned, and a few conversations close by quieted. Louisa looked uncomfortable. Caroline did not care. She was angry and humiliated and she wanted someone to bleed, and the Bennet connection to Wickham was the easiest wound available.
“I suppose when one’s sister marries a man of no fortune and no character, one must expect him to appear at inconvenient moments,” Caroline continued, speaking even more loudly as the silence around her spread.
“It is the natural consequence of an imprudent alliance. Mrs Darcy must be mortified, though of course she is too well-bred to show it.” The compliment was a knife wrapped in silk, and everyone within earshot knew it.
Nana looked at Caroline Bingley with an expression of such incandescent fury that the candles on the nearest candelabra guttered and went out, all six of them at once, and a footman nearly dropped his tray.
The footman did not drop his tray. But the tray tilted, just slightly, just enough, and a large glass of red wine slid from its surface and poured, in a single spectacular cascade, down the front of Caroline Bingley’s cream silk dress.
Caroline screamed.
It was a magnificent scream, high and piercing.
It cut through the music, the conversation, the oppressive cold, drew every eye in the ballroom.
Louisa Hurst leapt to her feet. A nearby matron produced a handkerchief.
Two footmen converged. Caroline stood in Pemberley’s ballroom with claret running down her bodice and staining the chalk pattern beneath her feet, and for one glorious, terrible moment, every person in the room was looking at Caroline Bingley and not at the guttering candles or the unnatural cold or the man who had murdered the last master of Pemberley.
Nana, beside Elizabeth, folded her arms.
“She deserved that,” Nana said.
Elizabeth could not disagree. It had been a reprieve, a momentary respite of the tension, though it was already fading.
Louisa was bundling Caroline toward the door, the footmen were mopping the floor, the guests were turning back to the dancing.
But the cold was still there, George Darcy was still following Wickham, the candles still guttering.
Elizabeth knew it was only a matter of time.
Elizabeth looked at Darcy. Darcy looked at her. They both knew, though Darcy could not feel what she was feeling, he knew he was not the most furious person in this room at Wickham’s presence. Whatever was building in this house, Caroline’s scream had bought them minutes, not a solution.
The musicians played on. The guests danced. Pemberley blazed with fury as much as candlelight.