“You were creeping. I have been watching. You are not bad at it, I will grant you that, but you have not yet learnt the house, and until you do, you will keep making mistakes. Yesterday you nearly acknowledged Sarah Dunn in the corridor outside the library, and Mrs Reynolds was two steps behind you.”
Elizabeth felt heat rise in her cheeks. She had nearly acknowledged the spectral housemaid from the entrance-hall lineup, who must be Sarah Dunn, and it had been a close thing indeed. Sarah had stepped directly into her path, beaming, delighted, as though she had finally found a mistress worthy of the name, and Elizabeth had opened her mouth to say good morning before she remembered that Mrs Reynolds was walking immediately behind her. She had covered by pretending to cough, which had led Mrs Reynolds to offer her a tisane,which had led to a twenty-minute conversation about the housekeeper’s mother’s remedy for congestion of the lungs.
“I need ground rules,” Elizabeth said, straightening. “If we are to share this house, you and I, there must be an agreement.”
“Agreement,” Nana repeated, as though the word tasted unpleasant.
“The master bedroom is off limits. To all ghosts. At all times. I will not negotiate on this.”
Nana’s eyebrows rose to an impressive height. “I have passed through that room freely since the day I became Mrs Darcy.”
“And you will stop. I am a newly married woman, and I will not have observers in my bedchamber, dead or alive.”
“I walked through that room while carrying your husband’s father in my arms,” Nana said. “When he was still small enough to carry. I have paced that floor and watched over that bed through fever and heartbreak and the births of four generations. You would close it to me because you are shy?”
“I would close it to you because it is mine,” Elizabeth said, her voice steady. “My room. My marriage. My private life. You may have watched over that bed for more than a hundred years, and I honour the care that represents. But I am its mistress now, and I am telling you: that room is private. That is not a request.”
A silence settled between them, electric and charged. Nana studied Elizabeth with an intensity that made the hair on her arms stand up. Elizabeth held her gaze and did not blink.Outside, a bird sang in the rose garden; inside, the fire shifted and popped.
“And if I refuse?” Nana said softly.
“I can see you,” Elizabeth said, leaning forward. “I can hear you. I have been doing this my whole life, and in that time I have managed ghosts who were angry, ghosts who were grieving, ghosts who were confused, and ghosts who were simply stubborn. I have never yet met one I could not handle. Would you like to find out whether you are the exception?”
She was bluffing. She had no idea whether she could do anything to a ghost who refused to cooperate. She had never needed to find out; most ghosts responded to firm kindness, and the rare difficult ones had been manageable through patience and persistence. But Nana did not know that, and Elizabeth had learnt long ago that confidence was its own currency, with the living and the dead alike.
Nana stared at her. Elizabeth stared back.
Then Nana laughed.
It was not a small laugh. It was a full, rich, delighted sound that filled the room and made the candles on the mantelpiece flicker, and it transformed her face from stern authority into something warm, surprised, and genuinely pleased. The lines around her eyes deepened, her small frame shook, and for a moment Elizabeth could see the girl she had been, the sixteen-year-old bride, the twenty-year-old widow who had stared down a pack of greedy cousins and told them to get out of her house.
“Well,” Nana said, settling back in her chair. “Perhaps you will do after all.”
They talked for the better part of an hour, and Elizabeth discovered two things about Dorothea Darcy. The first was that she was the most opinionated person Elizabeth had ever met, living or dead, and Elizabeth had met Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The second was that she could not be managed.
Elizabeth had spent her life managing ghosts. It was what she did; she listened, she helped, she made agreements, she eased the restless toward peace and maintained companionable relationships with those who chose to stay. She was good at it. She had managed Aunt Irene’s tartness, Sir Harold’s pomposity, Mrs Turnbull’s endless chatter. She had a system, and the system worked.
Nana dismantled the system in under twenty minutes.
It was not that she was difficult, exactly, though she was certainly that. It was that she did not operate within the normal boundaries of ghost-and-medium relations. She did not need Elizabeth’s help. She did not want Elizabeth’s guidance. She was not confused, or lost, or grieving, or in need of gentle management. She was, and had been for a hundred and thirty years, the self-appointed guardian of Pemberley. She had clearideas about how the house should be run, and she intended to share every single one of them with the new Mrs Darcy.
“The east wing has damp,” she informed Elizabeth. “It has had damp since 1763, and nobody has ever properly addressed it. I suggest you raise the matter with your husband at your earliest convenience.”
“I have been married for five days. I am not yet raising matters of structural repair.”
“Nonsense. A good wife takes an interest in the fabric of her home.”
“A good wife also allows her husband to finish his breakfast before discussing rising damp.”
“Mr Darcy, my Mr Darcy, would have welcomed such a discussion. He was very attentive to the fabric of the building.”
“Your Mr Darcy lived in the seventeenth century and presumably had fewer breakfast options to distract him.”
Nana sniffed. It was a magnificent sniff. Even Aunt Irene would have been impressed.
“Furthermore,” Nana continued, quite as though Elizabeth had not spoken, “the gilt on the mirror in the morning room is tarnished. It has been tarnished for forty years. I have been staring at it every morning since 1772 and it offends me deeply.”
“You are a ghost. You do not use the morning room.”
