She did not see the two servant ghosts from the gallery, the ones who had been discussing Darcy’s marriage prospects. Perhaps they were elsewhere in the house. Perhaps they were watching from a distance, assessing the woman he had married instead of the Bingley creature, and forming their opinions. She was not sure she wanted to know what those opinions were.
“This is where I practised my dancing as a boy,” Darcy said, and she could hear the faint amusement in his voice. “Rather badly, I am told.”
“I cannot imagine you being bad at anything you put your mind to,” Elizabeth said.
“You did not see the dancing.”
“No. But I have danced with you since, and found no fault.”
He looked pleased, in the quiet way that Darcy looked pleased, which was barely distinguishable from his habitual seriousness unless one knew what to look for. Elizabeth was learning.
By the time they reached the breakfast room, her temples had begun to ache with the effort of maintaining absolute composure. She excused herself, pleading fatigue from the journey, and Darcy seemed to accept this without question. He showed her to her rooms, kissed her hand, and withdrew, leaving her alone with the maid who was unpacking her trunks.
Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at the wall. Two ghosts watched her from the corners of the room, a housemaid from another era who clutched a duster she could no longer use, and a young man in a footman’s coat who stood by the window as though guarding it from some threat only he could perceive. Both watched her the way servants watch a new employer: carefully, and without committing to an opinion, and Elizabeth did not acknowledge either of them. Not yet. She was not ready yet, and the living maid was placidly unpacking her trunks. This had to wait until she was alone, trulyalone, because once one of Pemberley’s ghosts knew she could see them, they would all know.
She thought of Jane’s words at Netherfield. “Pemberley will have them. You know it will.” Jane had been right, as Jane so often was about the things that mattered most. Pemberley had them. Pemberley had dozens of them. And Elizabeth, who had been managing the dead since she was old enough to understand what she was seeing, felt, for the first time in her life, genuinely outmatched.
Supper that evening was a quieter affair than Elizabeth had expected, though the quality of the dishes presented told her Pemberley’s cooks were eager to impress their new mistress. Just the five of them at a table that could have seated thirty. Darcy sat at the head and Elizabeth at his right, Mrs Annesley took a seat near the middle, and Georgiana and Kitty faced each other across the table. The candles threw warm light over the silver and crystal, and for a little while Elizabeth could almost pretend that she was merely a woman at supper with her family, with no second sight and no spectral weight pressing against her consciousness.
Kitty was in fine form, drawing Georgiana out about her music and her sketching. She asked about the succession houses and the gardeners who grew pineapples, and Georgiana described them with earnest enthusiasm. Mrs Annesley watched theexchange with quiet approval, contributing occasionally, and even Darcy seemed to relax by degrees, the stiffness he wore in company loosening as the evening settled into something familial.
“Mrs Reynolds tells me you charmed the entire staff,” Darcy said, turning to Elizabeth. “She says you remembered every name.”
“Not quite every name,” Elizabeth said. “I shall need a second introduction to the under-gardeners and grooms. There appear to be rather a lot of them.”
“Pemberley has extensive grounds and stables.”
“Pemberley has extensive everything.” She smiled, and he smiled back. For a moment the warmth and quiet domesticity of it all made the stone in her chest feel almost bearable.
“Do you ride, Elizabeth?” Georgiana asked suddenly, then coloured, as though the question had escaped before she could assess whether it was appropriate.
“I do, though not well, and I am sure Pemberley’s stables will put Longbourn’s to shame. My father keeps a horse that is older than I am and has strong opinions about galloping. Or trotting, if I am truly honest. I usually found my own willing feet would carry me where I wished to go faster than Nellie’s reluctant ones.”
“Brother has the most beautiful mare,” Georgiana said, growing bolder. “Her name is Athena. She is very gentle. I am sure he would let you ride her.”
“I would be delighted,” Elizabeth said, and Darcy watched this exchange between his wife and his sister with an expression of cautious wonder, as though he had not dared expect it.
After supper, Georgiana offered to play for them. They retired to the music room, and she began a delicate sonata, her technique careful but growing more confident as she settled into the piece. The melody was clean and bright, and Elizabeth listened and felt something in her unclench.
She sat beside Darcy on the sofa. His hand found hers in the space between them where the candlelight did not quite reach. She held it, felt his fingers warm and solid around hers. He smelled of clean linen and the faint, woody scent she had begun to associate with Pemberley itself, something in the polish or the panelling or simply the accumulated smell of centuries of oak and stone. She leaned into him, just slightly, and felt his arm shift to accommodate her, and the simple ease of the gesture was so ordinary, so domestic, so blessedly normal that her throat ached with gratitude for it.
But the house breathed around her. She could feel it even now, even in this quiet, beautiful room, the presence of the dead pressing gently against her awareness. They were not hostile. They were curious. A new mistress at Pemberley, and they did not yet know what to make of her.
Kitty caught her eye across the room and raised one eyebrow, the tiniest fraction of movement. Elizabeth gave an almost imperceptible nod.
Later. She would deal with all of it later. But not tonight. Tonight she would sit beside her husband and listen to Georgiana playand watch Kitty becoming someone new in this grander world, and be, for a few more hours, simply Elizabeth Darcy, newly married, newly arrived, newly home.
The ghosts could wait.
Chapter Five
Elizabethhadbeenmistressof Pemberley for five days when she met the woman who actually ran it.
She was in her private sitting room, the small parlour adjoining the master bedroom that Darcy had said was traditionally the mistress’s own. It was a pretty room, south-facing, with a view over the rose garden, and Elizabeth had been spending her mornings there, writing letters and learning the household accounts and pretending she was not being watched.
She had been careful. She had given no sign. Five days of cautiously navigating a house packed with ghosts, of stepping around the unseen, of keeping her expression neutral when a translucent figure walked through the breakfast table or a long-dead child laughed in the corridor. Kitty had been magnificent, covering for every lapse, filling every suspicious silence, steering Darcy and Georgiana away from the rooms where Elizabeth’s composure was thinnest. The system they had built at Longbourn, refined over a lifetime of practice, was holding at Pemberley just as it had always held. It was simply working much, much harder, with far more ghosts and only Kitty to distract.
Elizabeth was writing to Jane. The letter had gone through two drafts already. The first had been a breezy account of her new surroundings, full of descriptions of the grounds, the library, and the kindness of Mrs Reynolds, and she had torn it up because it was a lie. The second had veered too far the other way, beginning with “Dearest Jane, there are more ghosts in this house than there are living servants, and I am not entirely certain which group is more demanding,” which would have been cathartic to send but unwise to commit to paper. The third attempt struck a middle ground: domestic news interspersed with the careful code the sisters had developed over years. “The house has a great deal of character” meant “the ghosts are everywhere.” “I am learning to navigate the corridors” meant “I have nearly been caught six times.” “Kitty has been invaluable” meant exactly what it said.
