Charlotte’s face split into a grin. Edmund maintained his dignity for approximately three seconds before asking, “Can you really see us? Properly? Not just shadows?”
“Properly,” Elizabeth confirmed. “Every detail. Your stockings do not match, Edmund.”
He looked down, alarmed. Charlotte burst into delighted laughter, and even Nana’s mouth twitched.
From the gallery, Nana took her to the yellow drawing room, where the elderly gentleman in the wig was still dozing. “Sir Roderick Darcy,” Nana said, lowering her voice, though Elizabeth was not entirely certain ghosts could be woken. “My husband’s great-grandfather. The oldest ghost at Pemberley we can identify; there are a few of the wispier shades clearly older by their dress, but they do not speak and we do not know their names. None of us have ever spoken with Sir Roderick or seen him awake. He simply sits, and sleeps, and does not trouble anyone. I would prefer him left undisturbed.”
“I had no intention of disturbing him.”
“Good. He had a reputation of being an exceptionally disagreeable man when awake.”
The library held the reading woman, who turned out to be a former governess called Miss Pardoe. She had served the family in the 1740s, had loved the library above all other rooms, and had simply never left it after the influenza took her one bitter winter. She barely looked up when introduced, murmured something polite, and returned to her book with an air that seemed to indicate she had been interrupted quite enough for one century.
But it was the rose garden that stopped Elizabeth in her tracks.
They stepped out through the side door into the October morning, the air cool and sharp, the garden spread before them in all its overgrown, neglected glory. And there, sitting on the stone bench beneath the old climbing rose, was a woman Elizabeth had not seen before.
She was quite young, perhaps thirty, and she was dressed in the elaborate style of the Elizabethan period: a stiff ruff, an embroidered bodice, a farthingale so wide it occupied most of the bench. Her dark hair was pinned beneath a jewelled hood, her hands were folded in her lap, and she was smiling.
Not at Elizabeth. Not at Nana. At the roses.
“Lady Margaret Darcy,” Nana said, and her voice had gone quiet, stripped of its usual command. “Sir Roderick’s wife. She planted the first roses in this garden. Before my mother-by-law, before me. She laid out the beds and brought the damask varieties from the estate in Kent where she was born. She has been sitting here ever since.”
“She does not speak?”
“She has never spoken. Not to me, not to any ghost I have known. She sits, and she smiles, and she tends her garden in whatever way the dead tend things. She is the oldest of us, along with Sir Roderick, and the most peaceful.”
Elizabeth watched Lady Margaret for a little while. The ghost’s smile was serene, untroubled, and directed entirely at the roses, which, even in their current state of neglect, were still beautiful in the way that old, established things are beautiful: the bones ofthe garden visible beneath the overgrowth, the structure sound even if the detail had been lost.
“I will restore it,” Elizabeth said, and this time it was not a concession but a decision. “Not just for you. For her.”
Nana said nothing. But she inclined her head, and the gesture carried more weight than any words she might have offered.
Breakfast that morning was a test of endurance.
Elizabeth arrived at the table having just spent an hour being introduced to the spectral population of a four-hundred-year-old estate. She was expected to sit down, eat toast, make conversation as though nothing of consequence had occurred. Darcy was already seated, reading a letter from his steward. Georgiana was buttering bread with the careful concentration she applied to everything. Mrs Annesley had the slightly glassy stare of someone who had not slept well and would rather still be in bed. Kitty was the last to arrive, slightly breathless, her hair not quite as tidy as it ought to have been; she had been exploring the grounds before breakfast, she said, and had found the most marvellous walk along the river.
“You look well this morning,” Darcy said to Elizabeth, setting aside his letter. “The country air suits you.”
“I have always preferred the country,” Elizabeth said, accepting tea from the footman and noting, from the corner of her eye, the spectral valet hovering behind Darcy’s chair and wincing at a crease in his coat. “Though I confess Pemberley’s country air is rather grander than Hertfordshire’s.”
“Everything about Pemberley is grander than Hertfordshire,” Kitty observed cheerfully. “Even the breakfast rolls are larger. I should like to know how the cook achieves it.”
“A good kitchen and a willing baker,” Mrs Reynolds said, appearing in the doorway with the morning’s household correspondence. “Mrs Darcy, if you have a moment after breakfast, I should like to discuss the menus for the coming week.”
“Of course,” Elizabeth said. “I should also like to discuss the rose garden, if you have time. It seems to have been somewhat neglected.”
Mrs Reynolds looked surprised, then pleased. “It has, ma’am, since old Gregson passed. I have mentioned it to the new man, but he has his own ideas.”
“Then perhaps he and I should have a conversation about whose ideas ought to take precedence,” Elizabeth said mildly, and caught, from the corner of her vision, a flicker of movement by the doorway that might have been Nana, nodding.
Kitty glanced at Elizabeth across the table, quick and assessing. Elizabeth returned the look with the faintest shake of her head:I am fine.Kitty held her gaze for half a beat longer than necessary,reading something there that satisfied her, and returned to her breakfast.
It was seamless. It had always been seamless. At Longbourn, the system had been built among the sisters over years of practice: the silent checks, the manufactured distractions, the way the other girls could sense when Elizabeth’s attention had split between the visible world and the one only she could see. Here at Pemberley, with the stakes so much higher, the ghosts so much more numerous, and only Kitty to watch her back, the system was working harder than it ever had, but it was holding.
Georgiana caught Kitty’s eye and smiled, a shy, tentative smile, as though she were still not entirely certain she was allowed to be happy. “Shall we walk to the lake after breakfast? I should like to show you the folly up close.”
“I should like that very much,” Kitty said, and the eagerness in her voice was genuine, not performed. She had been studying Georgiana with the same quiet attentiveness she brought to everything at Pemberley, and she was learning, rapidly, which subjects made Georgiana bloom and which made her retreat. London was exciting but frightening. Her brother was adored but slightly terrifying. Music was safe ground. Wickham was not, though Kitty did not yet know why. Elizabeth would not press that; Georgiana would reveal it in her own time, or not. Kitty navigated all of it with an instinct that Elizabeth found quietly remarkable.
