“In your day, there was no chocolate. I consider this an argument in favour of modernity.”
Something that might have been amusement flickered across Nana’s face, quickly suppressed. “Very well. Half past eight. But not a moment later.” She produced, from somewhere about her person, what appeared to be a list of considerable length.
Elizabeth blinked. Had Nana created that list by sheer force of will? She truly was an extraordinary ghost.
“Now. The east wing,” Nana began.
“We discussed the east wing yesterday.”
“We discussed it inadequately. The damp has spread since last winter, and there is a crack in the plaster above the second-floor passage that would not have been tolerated in my time. I have also observed that the new gardener has been pruning the lime walk incorrectly. He cuts too close to the trunk. The trees will suffer for it within five years.”
Elizabeth set down her cup. “Nana, just how long is that list? I cannot reorganise the entire estate before luncheon.”
“I am not asking you to reorganise the entire estate. I am asking you to pay attention. There is a difference.” She fixed Elizabeth with those dark, shrewd eyes. “Now. Shall I introduce you to the others, or do you intend to keep creeping about as though you are afraid of your own household?”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to protest that she was not creeping, recalled that she had lost this argument yesterday, and closed it again. “What do you mean, introduce me?” she said instead.
“You have been avoiding them. The servants, the older residents, everyone who has tried to catch your eye. They know you can see them, Mrs Darcy. Word travels fast among the dead. Sarah Dunn was never able to keep a confidence in her life, much less her death.”
So much for discretion. Elizabeth thought of all the careful avoidance, the controlled expressions, the five days of pretending she saw nothing, and felt a surge of something between frustration and relief. “If they already know, then I suppose there is no point in pretending otherwise.”
“None whatsoever. Come.” Nana rose from her chair. “I shall take you on a tour. The proper tour, not the one your husband gave you, which was entirely inadequate.”
Nana conducted the tour of Pemberley’s dead with the same brisk authority she applied to everything else. She swept through the corridors with Elizabeth trailing behind, and the ghostlyresidents of the house presented themselves with a formality that suggested Nana had given them advance warning and they had better be on their best behaviour.
The servants came first. Sarah Dunn, the housemaid from the entrance-hall lineup, was so delighted to be formally acknowledged that she curtsied four times in rapid succession and had to be told by Nana to compose herself. She had been dead for twelve years, had been in service at Pemberley for twenty before that, and had, she informed Elizabeth earnestly, never once allowed a cobweb to remain in any corner under her jurisdiction.
“She was a competent maid,” Nana allowed. “Her successor is not.”
“My successor,” Sarah said, looking wounded, “does not dust behind the clock on the second-floor landing. I have been watching.”
There were others. A cook from the previous century who haunted the kitchen and agreed with Nana about the stoves being an improvement, but disapproved of the current cook’s use of nutmeg. A valet who had served Darcy’s grandfather and remarked with an expression of pained concern about the way the current Mr Darcy’s coats were pressed.
Elizabeth greeted each of them, learned their names, asked how long they had been at Pemberley. It was the same work she had always done, the patient, practical business of acknowledging the dead. At Longbourn it had been a handful. At Netherfield, four. Here, the servants alone numbered over a dozen, and that was before Nana led her beyond the service quarters.
The most entertaining introduction was to the butler and the housekeeper, who occupied opposite ends of the servants’ hall and had been bickering for as long as anyone could remember. Mr Graves, the butler from the entrance-hall lineup, was Georgian; Mrs Alcott, the housekeeper, had died during the reign of Queen Anne. They had never met in life, being separated by several decades, but in death they had developed the combative intimacy of an old married couple, disagreeing about everything from the correct temperature for serving claret to the appropriate method of storing linen.
“The claret should be brought up two hours before dinner,” Mr Graves informed Elizabeth, with the air of a man laying down holy writ.
“Nonsense,” Mrs Alcott retorted from across the room. “One hour is sufficient. Two hours and it goes flat.”
“Claret does not go flat. You are thinking of ale.”
“I am thinking of nothing of the sort. I was housekeeper here for twenty-seven years and I know perfectly well how to manage a cellar.”
“You were housekeeper here in a century that had no taste,” Mr Graves said, and Mrs Alcott’s expression suggested she was seriously considering whether a ghost could box another ghost’s ears.
In the long gallery, the two children were waiting. They stood motionless this time, holding hands, watching Elizabeth approach, round-eyed and solemn, as though they had been told to behave but were not entirely sure why. The boy was perhapsten, the girl a year or two younger, and they wore the clothes of the late seventeenth century, well-made but plain.
“Edmund and Charlotte,” Nana said. “My husband’s younger brother and sister. They died of scarlet fever a few years before I came to the house. They have been chasing each other through this gallery ever since, which I permit because they are children and children must play, but I draw the line at them running through the breakfast room during meals.”
“We only did that once,” the boy said.
“You did it four times in a single week, and Mr Darcy, the current Mr Darcy, remarked on the draughts.”
Elizabeth looked at them, these small, solemn faces, and felt the familiar ache that came with children who had died too young. They were not distressed, not confused; they had Nana, who they must have watched arrive at Pemberley as a young bride and live there for nearly eighty years after that. She must have been the most consistent person they had ever known; since her death she had accepted them as family, managing them with the same iron hand she applied to everything else. But they were so young, two children playing games that nobody else could see, and Elizabeth’s chest tightened.
“I am very pleased to meet you both,” she said, and meant it.
