“I occupy it. And the library curtains are too thin. They admit too much afternoon sun, and the spines of the older volumes are fading. My son spent a fortune on those books. One would think somebody might care enough to hang a decent pair of curtains.”
Elizabeth found herself torn between exasperation and something perilously close to affection. “Is there anything about this house that meets your approval?”
Nana considered this. “The new stoves in the kitchen are most functional. I disapproved when George ordered them installed, but I will admit they are an improvement.”
“How generous.”
“I am not given to empty praise, Mrs Darcy. If I tell you something is satisfactory, you may rely upon it absolutely.” She paused, and her voice shifted. “The rose garden, though. That is not a matter of taste. My mother-by-law planted those roses. I tended them myself, in the years after my husband died, when I had nothing but a baby and a garden and the will to keep both alive. Lady Anne loved them and nurtured them and old Gregson understood them. He knew which needed sheltering and which could bear the wind. His replacement treats them all the same, and they are dying for it.”
Elizabeth looked at her and saw, beneath the imperiousness, something she recognised. Grief. Not fresh, but deep, the kind that settled into the bones over centuries and became indistinguishable from the person who carried it. The roses were not merely roses. They were Nana’s hands in the earth, the thing that had kept her rooted when everything else was being torn away.
“I will look at the rose garden,” Elizabeth said quietly. “I cannot promise to restore it overnight, but I will look at it.”
Nana regarded her for a moment. There was the faintest shift in her expression, so small that Elizabeth might have imagined it. Then she nodded, once, as though a contract had been signed.
“Now,” Nana said briskly, reverting to command, “the household schedule. Mrs Reynolds keeps the staff well enough in hand, but there is waste. The footmen spend half the morning on tasks that could be accomplished in a quarter of the time if they were properly directed. The scullery maids gossip. The second housemaid has been walking out with the under-gardener, and while I have nothing against romance so long as they conduct themselves respectably, she has been neglecting the upstairs grates, mooning over him from the windows instead of polishing the fire-irons.”
“You cannot possibly expect me to raise the subject of the second housemaid’s romantic entanglements with Mrs Reynolds.”
“I expect you to be aware of them. A mistress who does not know the state of her own household is a mistress who will be managed by her staff rather than the other way around.”
There was not much Elizabeth could say to that, because the infuriating thing was that Nana was right. Elizabeth had spent five days learning the surface of Pemberley; Nana was offering her a view beneath it, into the workings, relationships, and small dramas that made the household run. It was invaluable information. It was also being delivered in the most irritating possible manner.
By the end of the hour, Elizabeth understood that her relationship with Nana was going to be unlike anything she had experienced. This was not like any relationship Elizabeth had previously shared with a ghost, even Aunt Irene. This was something more like a partnership, or perhaps a battle of wills, between a woman who had run Pemberley for almost eighty years of life and fifty years of death, and a woman who had been officially in charge for less than a week.
“I shall visit you each morning,” Nana announced, rising from her chair. “We will discuss the household, the staff, the menus, and any matters requiring your attention. You may ask me questions about the house and its history, and I shall answer them if I consider the questions worthy. In return, you will address the damp in the east wing and restore the rose garden to its proper standard.”
“That is not a negotiation,” Elizabeth pointed out. “That is a list of demands.”
“Yes,” Nana agreed serenely. “I find demands work better than requests. One saves a great deal of time.” She paused at the door, turned back, and regarded Elizabeth with an expression that had softened by the smallest, most grudging degree. “You have spirit, Mrs Darcy. I did not expect to like you. I reserve the right to change my mind, but for the present, you will do.”
She was gone before Elizabeth could formulate a reply, which Elizabeth suspected was entirely deliberate.
Elizabeth sat alone in her parlour, surrounded by the silence of a house that was not, and would never be, truly silent. Through the window, the rose garden spread out below her, overgrownand tangled, the damask varieties Nana had loved choked with bindweed and neglect. She could see, now that she was looking, that it had once been beautiful. She could see, too, that it could be beautiful again.
She picked up her pen and turned to a fresh sheet of paper.
“Dearest Jane,”she wrote.“I have met the most extraordinary person. She has been dead for fifty years, she has opinions about my curtains, and I believe she may be my new closest confidante after you. I do not know whether to be delighted or appalled. I suspect I shall be both, in roughly equal measure, for the foreseeable future.”
She paused, considered the letter, and added:“The house has a great deal of character. More than I anticipated. I am managing. Kitty sends her love.”
She sealed the letter, set it aside, and sat for a moment looking out at the rose garden. Then she permitted herself a single, incredulous laugh.
She had spent her whole life gently shepherding the dead. At Pemberley, it appeared, the dead intended to shepherd her.
Chapter Six
Nanaarrivedathalfpast seven the following morning, before Elizabeth had finished her chocolate.
“You are late,” Nana announced, settling into the chair by the fire as though she had been using it for decades, which, Elizabeth supposed, she had. “I have been waiting since seven.”
“I was not aware we had agreed on seven.”
“We did not agree on anything. I told you I would visit each morning. Morning begins at seven.”
“Morning begins,” Elizabeth said, “when I have had my chocolate. That is not negotiable.”
Nana regarded the cup in Elizabeth’s hand with the expression of a woman who had died before chocolate became fashionable and was not entirely convinced it deserved to be. “In my day, we rose with the sun.”
