“How astonishing,” Georgiana said, and a small, wondering smile touched her mouth. She paused. “Does my brother know? About… that you can see them?”
“No,” Elizabeth admitted.
“Will you tell him?”
“Yes. When I am ready. I have not found the right moment, and I confess I have been afraid of finding it.”
Georgiana considered this with the seriousness she brought to everything. “He will believe you,” she said at last. “He believes everything you tell him. I have never known him to trust anyone the way he trusts you.”
The words landed somewhere beneath Elizabeth’s breastbone, in the place where guilt and gratitude had been keeping uneasy company since her wedding day. “I hope you are right.”
“I am rarely right about things,” Georgiana said, with a flicker of self-deprecation that reminded Elizabeth painfully of Darcy. “But I am right about my brother.”
Edmund chose this moment to announce, “She is sitting on my spot.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together. “Edmund says you are sitting on his spot.”
Georgiana startled, looked down at the window seat, and then laughed, a bright, surprised sound that rang through the gallery. “I beg his pardon. Where ought I to sit?”
“He is ten years old and has been dead for a hundred and fifty years, or thereabouts. He can yield a window seat.”
“I heard that,” Edmund said, and Charlotte laughed, a bright, tinkling sound that produced the very slightest of breezes.
Georgiana must have felt it, because she touched her cheek, her eyes widening. “Is that…?” she asked timidly.
“Charlotte is laughing at her brother,” Elizabeth said warmly. “She looks quite like you, you know, though her hair is darker. The Darcy resemblance is strong.”
Both Charlotte and Georgiana appeared delighted that Elizabeth thought they looked alike, and Georgiana seemed to relax, a little.
Nana appeared within the hour, drawn, Elizabeth suspected, by some instinct that told her something significant had shifted in the household.
She materialised in the doorway of Elizabeth’s parlour, took one look at Georgiana sitting in the chair by the fire, still a little pale in the face, and said, “Ah.”
“Georgiana knows,” Elizabeth said.
“I can see that she knows. The girl is sitting in my chair.” Nana swept into the room, radiating displeasure at the disruption to her routine. “Move.”
“Nana,” Elizabeth said. “She cannot hear you.”
“Then tell her.”
Elizabeth sighed. “Georgiana, you are sitting in Nana’s chair. She would like you to move, and unlike Edmund, I don’t think she will yield.”
Georgiana stood up so quickly she nearly knocked over the fire screen. “I am sorry, I did not, how, where should I...”
“Sit anywhere else,” Elizabeth said. “Nana will tell you if that is wrong too.”
Georgiana chose the settee, perching on the edge of it, her eyes wide and darting about the room as though she might suddenly develop the ability to see what Elizabeth saw. “She is here? Right now? In this room?”
“She is always in this room at this hour. She has a schedule.”
“I have standards,” Nana corrected. “There is a difference.”
“She says she has standards,” Elizabeth relayed, and Georgiana made a sound that was half laugh, half gasp, and pressed both hands over her mouth.
“Nana is Mrs Dorothea Darcy,” Elizabeth said, as Nana sat down and arranged her skirts. “She is your great-great-grandmother, and she lived until she was almost a hundred years old. Long enough to hold your father in her arms when he was a baby.”
Georgiana looked quite awed, and made a respectful little bow of her head towards the seat she had just vacated.
