She was also doing something else, something Elizabeth had not expected. She was learning Pemberley. Not just the geography of the house, though she was learning that too, memorising corridors and staircases with a speed Elizabeth hadnot quite expected from this sister she was coming to realise she had always slightly underestimated. Kitty was learning the social geography: how Mrs Reynolds ran the household, which servants could be relied upon, how Georgiana’s shyness worked and how to navigate around it. She was studying the rhythms of the great house the way she had once studied the rhythms of Meryton, and she was adapting to them with a quickness that would have astonished anyone who still thought of her as silly Kitty Bennet, Lydia’s shadow.
After breakfast, Elizabeth walked the grounds with Darcy. He showed her the home farm, the tenant cottages visible from the ridge, the stream where he had fished as a boy. He spoke about his plans for the estate with the quiet passion she was learning to recognise: Darcy did not enthuse exactly, he simply became more specific, his sentences growing longer and more detailed as his interest deepened. Elizabeth listened, asked questions, and found that she was genuinely interested. The management of a great estate was a subject she had never had cause to study, yet it appealed to the same part of her mind that enjoyed problems, patterns, the satisfaction of things done well.
She was also, simultaneously, aware of four ghosts watching them from various points along their walk. The spectral valet, trailing Darcy at a respectful distance. A gardener from the previous century who was tending a flower bed that no longer existed. One of the groom brothers from the staff lineup,considerably more solid out here in the grounds than he had been in the entrance hall, exercising a spectral horse. And, standing on the bridge over the stream, a man in late Tudor dress who watched them pass with an expression of profound displeasure.
“That bridge,” the Tudor gentleman called after them, his voice carrying the outrage of someone who has been nursing a grievance for two hundred years, “was built in the wrong place. I said so at the time. Nobody listened then, and I do not suppose anyone will listen now.”
Elizabeth kept her face admirably still. Darcy, walking beside her, pointed out a stand of oak trees his grandfather had planted and said something about timber yields.
“I shall speak with you later,” Elizabeth murmured, under the cover of examining a hedgerow, and the Tudor gentleman looked so startled at being heard that he fell silent for what she suspected was the first time in two centuries.
The morning was beautiful, the grounds were beautiful, her husband was beautiful, though with Darcy it had always been less about the arrangement of his features than the earnestness of his attention. He took her hand as they walked back toward the house. She held it, and for whole stretches of time she was simply a woman walking with the man she loved through grounds that belonged to them both, the ghosts no more than a secondary awareness, a familiar hum at the edges of her perception.
But then they would pass through a doorway; a spectral servant would bow, or a translucent figure would drift acrossthe corridor, or Nana would appear at her elbow with a reminder about the faded curtains in the drawing room. The two worlds would collide, and Elizabeth would have to smooth her expression, turn back to Darcy, say something about the weather or the wallpaper as though she had not just been addressed by a woman who had been dead for half a century.
This was her life now. This had always been her life, but the scale of it here, in this vast, ancient, ghost-crowded house, was something she had not been prepared for. She was managing. She would go on managing. But the effort of it, the relentless performance of normality, was beginning to settle into her bones like a weariness she could not shake.
Kitty found her in the parlour before luncheon, sat beside her without speaking, took her hand, and held it.
“I am all right,” Elizabeth said.
“I know,” Kitty said. “I am holding your hand because I want to, not because you need me to.”
Elizabeth smiled, and felt the weariness ease, just slightly, and thought:I can do this. I have Kitty, and I have Nana, and I have a husband who loves me even if he does not yet know all of me.
She didn’t have a lot of choice, after all.
Chapter Seven
ItwasKitty’sfault,which was unfair, because Kitty had not done anything wrong.
Elizabeth had summoned the dressmaker. This was an act of love; though no efforts or expense had been spared in assembling Elizabeth’s trousseau and she was well equipped for her new life as Mrs Darcy, Kitty had arrived at Pemberley with a wardrobe suitable for Hertfordshire, and that would not do. If Kitty was to accompany Georgiana to London in the spring, she would need gowns that did not mark her as acountry gentleman’s daughter the moment she walked into a room, and the Lambton dressmaker, recommended warmly by Mrs Reynolds, had come to the house that morning with fabric samples and fashion plates quietly determined to do Mrs Darcy’s sister proud.
It would be two hours at least, Elizabeth calculated. Two hours in which Kitty would be pinned, measured, and turned about, and in which Elizabeth would be, for the first time since arriving at Pemberley, entirely without her safety net.
She had not intended to go to the long gallery. She had been walking to the library, meaning to spend a quiet hour reading in the company of the spectral Miss Pardoe. But Edmund and Charlotte had found her in the corridor, breathless and insistent, tugging at her attention the way living children tug at a sleeve.
“You promised,” Edmund said, planting himself in her path with the immovable certainty of a boy in the right.
Elizabeth had not, in fact, promised anything. She had said she would visit the gallery soon, which Edmund had apparently translated into a binding contract.
“Please,” Charlotte added, and the word carried the devastating weight of a child who had not been able to ask for anything for a century and a half.
So Elizabeth went to the gallery. She had never been able to resist children, living or dead; Darcy was out of the house, Georgiana and Mrs Annesley were in the music room, and Sarah Dunn had promised to warn her if any of the living servants came near.
The gallery was quiet, the October light falling in long pale columns through the tall windows. Edmund and Charlotte were more solid here than anywhere else in the house, their features sharper, their clothes crisper, the details of their faces clear enough that Elizabeth could count Charlotte’s freckles. They had been running through this gallery for over a century, and the place knew them, held them, gave them substance.
“Tell us about outside,” Edmund demanded, settling cross-legged on the floor with the air of a boy preparing for a siege. Charlotte sat beside him, tucking her skirts around her knees in unconscious imitation of her brother.
“Outside?”
“Beyond the grounds. Beyond the park. We cannot go further than the ha-ha, and Charlotte has never been past the bridge.”
“I went to the bridge once,” Charlotte corrected. “But it made me feel thin.”
Elizabeth lowered herself to sit on the window seat, arranging herself so that she faced the children but could also see the length of the gallery. A precaution. The door at the far end was closed, and Sarah Dunn would drift through it and gesture if anyone was coming.
Or so she believed.
