“Nana,” Elizabeth said, turning to the ghost. “This is Georgiana. Your great-great-granddaughter. Is there anything you would like to say to her?”
Nana looked at Georgiana closely. The sharpness in her face softened, not entirely, because Nana’s face was not built for softness, but in the same way it did when she watched Edmund and Charlotte run, a way that was reserved only for those born to the house of Darcy. “Tell her that while I see the Darcy features in her, I see her mother too,” Nana said quietly. “Annie’s colouring, Annie’s hands. She holds herself the same way, as though she is afraid of being too tall. I have been watching this child her whole life and never been able to tell her so.”
“Nana says you have your mother’s colouring,” Elizabeth told Georgiana gently. “And her hands.”
Georgiana’s fingers curled in her lap. Her eyes were bright. “She knew my mother?”
“Nana has known every woman who married into this family for over a hundred years. She knew your mother very well.”
Georgiana sat motionless, and then said, in a voice that was trying hard not to shake, “Is my mother here? At Pemberley?”
Nana’s expression shifted. She looked at Elizabeth, and there was something in that look, a warning, a request, that Elizabeth could not quite read. Then Nana turned back to Georgiana, though Georgiana could not see her, and spoke with a tenderness Elizabeth had not heard from her before.
“Your mother was at peace,” Nana said. “From the moment she died. She loved you and your brother with everything she had, and when she went, she went gently, without struggle, without regret. She did not linger. She did not need to. She knew her children were safe at Pemberley.”
Elizabeth repeated this, word for word, watching Georgiana’s face as each sentence landed. Tears slid down the girl’s cheeks, silent and unwiped, and she did not try to stop them.
“She was the best of them,” Nana added, more quietly. “The best woman who ever married into this family. I include myself in that judgement, and I do not say it lightly.”
Elizabeth relayed this too, and Georgiana let out a breath that sounded as though she had been holding it for sixteen years.
“And my father?” Georgiana asked. “Is he...”
Elizabeth was watching Nana’s face and saw something close over it as Georgiana asked the question, a door shutting behind the eyes. It happened in less than a heartbeat, and if Elizabeth had not been watching closely she would have missed it. But she was watching, and she did not miss it, and what she saw was not grief, or at least not only grief. It was something guarded, something deliberate.
“Your father,” Nana said, her voice now brisk again, clipped, restored to its usual authority, “is a subject for another day. I have told you about your mother because you asked and because you deserve to know. But I will not discuss the whole family in a single afternoon; there are a great many Darcys.”
It was a masterful deflection. The tone said:I am an old woman and I decide the pace of these conversations.The words said:not now.Georgiana, who had just been given the most extraordinary gift of her young life, accepted this without question. Of course Nana would not rush. Of course there would be more to learn.
But Elizabeth had seen the door close. She had seen the fraction of a second when Nana’s composure had cracked, and something urgent and unresolved had looked out through the gap before being firmly shut away. George Darcy was not a comfortable subject. George Darcy was not a subject Nana wished to discuss at all, and the reasons for that avoidance were not the reasons she had given.
Elizabeth said nothing. She filed it away, the way she had learnt to file things away over a lifetime of listening to the dead, and turned her attention back to Georgiana, who was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and smiling.
“Thank you,” Georgiana whispered. “Thank you, Elizabeth.”
“Do not thank me. Thank Nana. She is the one who remembers.”
“I always remember,” Nana said. “It is both my gift and my burden. Rather like yours, Mrs Darcy.”
Kitty appeared at the parlour door at half past four, slightly flushed from her fitting and trailing a faint smell of new wool. She took one step into the room, looked at Georgiana’s tear-streaked face, looked at Elizabeth’s careful expression, and stopped.
“What happened?”
“Georgiana knows,” Elizabeth said.
The colour left Kitty’s face. She looked at Georgiana, then back at Elizabeth, and her mouth compressed into a thin line. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and turned the key.
“How?” The word was clipped.
“She came through from the music room while I was in the gallery. I was speaking to Edmund and Charlotte. She heard me.”
Kitty closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she crossed the room, but she did not sit beside Georgiana. She stood in front of her, and her expression was one Elizabeth had never seen on her younger sister’s face: fierce, frightened, and absolutely serious.
“Georgiana,” Kitty said. “Do you understand what you have learnt today?”
Georgiana nodded, her eyes wide.
“No,” Kitty said. “I do not think you do. Not yet.” She knelt so that she was level with Georgiana on the settee, and took bothher hands. “If anyone discovers what Elizabeth can do, anyone at all, she could be destroyed. Not embarrassed. Not whispered about. Destroyed. They would call her mad. They would have her locked away in an asylum, Georgiana. Your brother’s name would be disgraced, his judgement questioned, his marriage made a subject of public ridicule. And Elizabeth would lose everything. Her freedom. Her husband. Her life as she knows it.”
