Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jane and Lady Matlock had handled the seating crisis between them by the time the supper room opened.
Elizabeth saw the discreet consultation, the swift creation of two new place cards, the rearrangement of existing ones.
The result: Wickham and Lydia were seated at the far end of the table, well away from family, bracketed by a local squire’s wife on one side and a cheerful, slightly deaf colonel on the other.
It was expertly done. Nobody who did not know would have guessed that the places had been created from nothing.
Wickham followed the crowd to supper from the card room, and the candles were finally burning steadily for the first time in an hour.
George Darcy followed him, but at a greater distance now.
Nana had been at him, Elizabeth suspected.
She had seen Nana speaking urgently to George just before supper, and whatever she had said appeared to have had some effect, because George was no longer immediately behind Wickham’s shoulder.
He stood at the far end of the supper room instead, watching, his face rigid, his hands clenched at his sides.
He had tried to harm Wickham, to throttle him or stop his heart from the inside.
He had failed; ghosts could not touch the living.
The failure had left him more furious than ever.
Elizabeth sat beside Darcy and ate nothing and smiled at everyone who spoke to her.
Lydia chattered happily to the squire’s wife, who was too polite to excuse herself.
She ate enormously and drank three glasses of wine.
She complimented the food, the music, the house, the chalk pattern on the ballroom floor.
At one point, between the fish and the meat, she leaned across the table toward Kitty and said, in the carrying voice that was so much like their mother’s, “Kitty! Is it not the most wonderful ball? You must come and sit with me after supper, I have so much to tell you about Newcastle, you would not believe the officers...”
Kitty looked at Lydia. Her expression was neutral, polite as she said, “I cannot, Lydia. I am engaged to dance the next set.”
“Oh, but after that! We have hardly spoken, Kitty, and I have missed you dreadfully, and there is so much...”
“I have promised all of my sets this evening, I am afraid. I shall have little time to sit and gossip.” Kitty’s voice was pleasant, firm.
She turned back to her conversation with the gentleman beside her.
Lydia’s face fell for just a moment before the bubble closed over her again; she turned back to the squire’s wife with renewed enthusiasm.
Elizabeth watched it happen. Kitty, who had spent her whole childhood in Lydia’s orbit, who had been Lydia’s shadow and Lydia’s echo, had removed herself with quiet, deliberate finality.
It was not cruelty. Kitty would not be cruel to Lydia.
But she would not be pulled back in, either, and Lydia, for one brief instant, looked forlorn before she remembered that she was Mrs Wickham at a ball and there was no reason in the world to be forlorn.
Elizabeth looked at her youngest sister and thought: She is only sixteen. She is married to a murderer, and she does not know. Whatever happens tonight, I must get her out of this house before she learns it in the worst possible way.
“Jane,” Elizabeth said, leaning toward her sister. “After supper, could I ask you to please take Lydia somewhere quiet? Keep her with you.”
Jane did not ask why. She nodded.
After supper, the dancing resumed. The musicians struck up a country dance.
Guests returned to the ballroom in high spirits, the claret and the conversation having done their work.
Elizabeth stood with Darcy at the edge of the floor and watched the sets form, and for a few minutes the ball looked like what it was supposed to be: a celebration, a triumph, three hundred people enjoying the hospitality of Pemberley’s new mistress.
Then Wickham came back.
He had been drinking steadily since his arrival, and the claret had done what it does to men who believe themselves charming: it had made him more so, in his own estimation, and less so in everyone else’s.
He walked through the ballroom loose-limbed, arrogant, as though Pemberley were his own.
He stopped to admire the portraits. He paused at the refreshment table to take another glass.
Elizabeth followed him. She did not decide to follow him; her feet moved of their own accord, drawn by a dread she could not name, a certainty that wherever Wickham went in this house tonight, she needed to be near.
Darcy was beside her. He had not left her side since Wickham and Lydia walked through the terrace doors. He could not feel what she felt, could not see what she saw, but he could read her face, and her face was telling him that something was terribly, dreadfully wrong.
George Darcy was three steps behind Wickham.
He had not left Wickham’s side either. The cold moved with them, a pocket of chill air that trailed Wickham through the warm room.
Guests stepped aside without knowing why, drawing their shawls tighter, blaming the draughts.
The candles bent and guttered as George passed.
Wickham reached the staircase to the musicians’ gallery.
It was a narrow wooden stair, steep, curving upward to the balcony where the orchestra played.
He stopped at the foot of it and looked up, and Elizabeth saw him smile, the easy, proprietary smile of a man remembering a happy childhood.
He had played on these stairs as a boy, she realised.
He had run up and down them when George Darcy was alive, the ballroom open, Wickham the favoured godson with the run of the house.
He put his foot on the first step.
“Wickham,” Elizabeth said. “Please do not go up there.”
He turned. The charming smile was still in place, but his eyes were flat, the way Lydia had described them in her letter. Dead eyes in a handsome face. “Mrs Darcy. Merely admiring the view. One can see the whole ballroom from the gallery. I used to sit up there as a boy and watch the guests below.”
Behind Wickham, George Darcy’s face was white with fury.
“The gallery is for the musicians,” Elizabeth said. “It is not open to guests.”
“Surely an exception can be made for an old friend of the family.” He turned back to the stairs, climbed, glass in hand.
Elizabeth could not stop him without making a scene; she could not make a scene with three hundred people watching, wondering why the mistress of Pemberley was chasing George Wickham up a staircase.
Graves was at the foot of the stairs. He had been there all evening, rigid, fists clenched. As Wickham climbed past him, Graves looked at Elizabeth, and his face held a question she did not know how to answer.
Wickham reached the top. He stood at the railing of the musicians’ gallery, looking out over the ballroom, his glass raised, his red coat bright against the dark wood.
The musicians had paused between sets. The gallery was empty except for Wickham and the music stands and the guttering candles in their sconces.
He looked down at the crowd below and spread his arms, as though embracing the room, as though Pemberley itself had been waiting for him to return.
“Magnificent,” he said, to nobody. To everybody. “Truly magnificent. Old Mr Darcy would have loved this.”
Elizabeth gripped Darcy’s arm. George was at the foot of the stairs, looking up at Wickham.
Nana was beside Elizabeth. Every ghost in the ballroom had gone still.
Sarah Dunn, Miss Pardoe, Graves, Mrs Alcott, the wispy shades in the gallery above.
All of them watching Wickham lean against the railing of the musicians’ gallery with his glass of claret and his charming smile.
Then Sir Roderick came through the wall.
He came roaring. There was no other word for it. Only one living soul in that room could hear it, but Elizabeth heard it in her bones, in her teeth, in the soles of her feet, and she flinched so hard that Darcy turned to her in alarm.
“Elizabeth? What is it?”
She could not answer. She was staring at the south wall of the ballroom, where Sir Roderick Darcy was emerging.
He was enormous. Not tall, not physically large, but enormous in the way that George was solid and Nana was vivid: a presence that filled the space it occupied and pushed everything else aside.
His face was a mask of absolute, ungovernable rage, his mouth wide open and the roar that emerged from it was so loud Elizabeth could hear nothing else.
He had been asleep for as long as any ghost at Pemberley could remember. He was awake now.
He crossed the ballroom floor in strides that covered impossible distances.
The candles did not gutter this time. They went out.
Every candle on the south end of the ballroom, twenty or thirty of them, extinguished at once.
Guests gasped. Someone dropped a glass. The musicians’ gallery candles blew out too, plunging the upper level into shadow.
Living guests stumbled aside without knowing why, clutching at their partners, their drinks, their composure.
The cold hit like a wall. Elizabeth’s teeth chattered. Darcy gripped her hand.
Sir Roderick did not look at Elizabeth. He did not look at Darcy.
He did not look at Nana or George or Graves or any of the ghosts who pressed themselves against the walls as he passed.
He looked only upward, at the musicians’ gallery, at the man who stood at the railing in his red coat with his glass of claret and his dead eyes and his charming smile.
He went up the stairs. The wooden steps creaked under a weight that should not have been there. A living guest standing near the staircase looked down at the steps, frowning; the wood was groaning, yet nobody was on them.