“What would you like to know?” she asked.
“Everything,” Edmund said.
“That is a rather large subject.”
“Start with London,” Charlotte said. “Nana says London is noisy and smells of horses and the streets are a disgrace to civilisation. But she has not been to London since she was alive, and that was ages ago, so she might be wrong.”
“Nana is rarely wrong,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “London is noisy, and it does smell of horses, and the streets are frequently a disgrace. But it is also full of wonderful things. Theatres and bookshops and parks, and the river, and more people than you could count if you spent a whole year trying.”
“Are there ghosts in London?” Edmund asked.
“A great many, I should think. I have not spent enough time there to know them well; I have only been to my uncle’s house there once or twice, and it is new. No ghosts at all.” They looked almost disappointed at that, so she quickly added “But there are buildings in London even older than Pemberley. Some that were built even before the Normans came; we stopped briefly at a coaching inn which boasted that. I was glad not to have to go inside, to be honest.”
“There would be a lot of ghosts there,” Edmund said, sounding quite satisfied about it.
Boys were still boys, with an interest in the gothic and the macabre, Elizabeth thought, concealing an amused smile. Even when they were themselves dead.
“They would be different, though,” she pointed out. “London’s ghosts would be mostly strangers, passing through. Here, you are all family, or very nearly. That is not the same thing at all.”
Charlotte beamed. “Nana says we are part of Pemberley. She says the house would not be the same without us.”
“Nana is right about that too.”
“She is right about most things,” Edmund said, resignedly; he had tested this proposition many times and been defeated on each occasion. “She says you are acceptable, which is the best she has said about anyone who was not born a Darcy since Annie.”
“That is Lady Anne,” Charlotte whispered. “Your Mr Darcy’s mother. Nana loved her.”
“Did she?” Elizabeth filed this away. Nana had spoken of Lady Anne with approval, even warmth, but hearing it confirmed by the children gave it a different texture. Nana’s approval was not given lightly; her love, Elizabeth suspected, was given even less so.
“She cried when Annie died,” Edmund said. “I did not know ghosts could cry. But Nana did.”
Elizabeth was about to answer when she heard, too late, the soft creak of a door. Not the one at the far end of the gallery she had been watching, where Sarah Dunn was posted to warn of intruders. The door behind her, the one that led, through an anteroom, to the music room.
She turned. Georgiana stood in the doorway, one hand still on the latch, her eyes wide.
The silence that followed was the loudest Elizabeth had ever experienced.
Georgiana’s gaze moved from Elizabeth to the empty air beside her, to the place where Edmund and Charlotte sat on the floor, invisible to her, and back to Elizabeth’s face. Her expression held none of the alarm Elizabeth had braced for. There was surprise, yes, and curiosity, and beneath both, a flicker of recognition, as though a question she had been carrying for a long time had just begun to find its answer.
“Elizabeth,” Georgiana said carefully. “Who were you speaking to?”
A dozen lies presented themselves. The acoustics of the gallery. Rehearsing a letter aloud. Talking to herself, a bad habit, mortifying. Any of them would have served, delivered with the right laugh, the right wave of the hand. Elizabeth had been making such excuses her whole life and she was good at it.
But Georgiana’s eyes were steady, and there was no fear in them, and Elizabeth found that she was bone-tired of lying to people she loved.
“Will you come and sit down?” Elizabeth said.
Georgiana crossed the gallery and sat on the window seat, her hands folded in her lap, her back rigid. She looked, Elizabeth thought, like a girl who had been preparing for something without knowing what it was.
“I can see the dead,” Elizabeth said. “I have been able to do so since I was a child. There are two ghosts in this gallery, Edmund and Charlotte, distant relatives of yours, who are children. I was talking to them. I know how that sounds, and I know you have no reason to believe me, and I will understand completely if you think I have gone mad.”
Georgiana was quiet. Elizabeth watched her face, looking for the flicker of doubt, the edge of withdrawal, the careful blankness that would mean she had lost her.
“I do not think you have gone mad,” Georgiana said slowly. “I think you have explained something I have wondered about for years.” She looked down the gallery, her gaze moving along the windows, the portraits, the long stretch of polished floor. “This room has always felt different. When I was small, I used to sit in here and feel as though someone was sitting with me. Not frightening. Just, present. As though the room were not quite empty, even when I was the only one in it. Sometimes I wanted to run, though not to run away; as though I was playing a game of chase with another child.”
Elizabeth looked at Edmund and Charlotte. They were beaming and nodding happily.
“You were not the only one in it. And they were trying to play with you. You must have sensed it, in some way.”
