“Walk with me,” she said to Kitty, appearing in the music room doorway with her pelisse already buttoned and her bonnet in her hand.
Kitty took one look at her face, set down the sheet music, and stood. “I will fetch my cloak.”
They went out through the side door, the one that led past the rose garden and down toward the lime walk. The rain was fine and grey, more mist than shower, the kind that soaked through fabric slowly, thoroughly, turning the paths to soft mud. The grounds were deserted; no gardeners, no grooms, nobody to overhear them except the spectral gardener who was pruning a hedge that no longer existed. He paused as they passed, squinted at the lime walk, and muttered, “Too close to the trunk. I said so in ‘sixty-three,” before returning to his phantom shrubbery.
Kitty walked beside her in silence for several minutes, waiting. She had always known when to wait. It was one of her greatest qualities, this patience that people who thought they knew Kitty Bennet would never have credited her with.
“George Darcy came to see me yesterday,” Elizabeth said. “Darcy’s father. He is a ghost. The most solid ghost I have ever encountered.”
Kitty nodded. Her face was calm, attentive.
“He told me he was murdered,” Elizabeth said. “Poisoned. Here in his own house, six years ago.”
Kitty stopped walking. She turned to face Elizabeth. The rain beaded on her cloak, ran down in thin rivulets. Her expression did not change except for a tightening around her mouth that Elizabeth recognised as Kitty controlling a strong reaction.
“Who?” Kitty said.
Elizabeth looked at her sister, at this girl she had once underestimated, and said, “Wickham.”
Elizabeth watched Kitty’s face as the word landed, as the implications unfolded one by one: Wickham. Their sister’s husband. The man who had eloped with Lydia. The man Darcy had paid to marry, to save the Bennet family from disgrace. The man who sat at their table, called their father “sir”, kissed their mother’s cheek, complained about his commission, drank too much claret, and was, apparently, a murderer.
“Lydia,” Kitty said. One word. Everything that mattered.
“Yes.”
Kitty turned away and walked three steps along the path, stopped, came back. The rain had darkened her hair; her cloak was spotted with mud. She looked, in that moment, not like the silly girl she had been and not like the sharp young woman she was becoming, but like someone caught between those two selves, trying to find the one that could bear what she had just been told.
“Does he know?” she asked. “The ghost. Does he know Wickham married Lydia?”
“No. He knows Wickham is walking free. He does not know Wickham married into my family. I did not tell him. We cannot tell Darcy either,” Elizabeth said. “Not yet.”
“No,” Kitty agreed, and her voice was steady even though her hands, Elizabeth noticed, were clenched inside her cloak. “If you tell Darcy that Wickham murdered his father, he will act. Immediately, and probably violently, and certainly without waiting for evidence that anyone else would accept. And if you tell him how you know...” She did not finish the sentence.
She did not need to. They both knew what happened to women who claimed to see ghosts. The wordBedlamhung between them, unspoken, as present as the rain.
“We cannot tell Georgiana either,” Elizabeth said. “She knows about my gift now, but this, the murder, Wickham. She has her own history with Wickham, from Ramsgate; has she told you of it? Yes, I thought she would have by now,” when Kitty nodded. “Learning that the man who tried to seduce her when she wasfifteen also murdered her father would be too much for her to bear, I cannot put that on her. Not yet. She is too young, and the knowledge is too dangerous, and while she will keep my secret from her brother until I give the word, this is not my secret. We cannot ask that of her.”
“Agreed.” Kitty was nodding, her expression settling into something Elizabeth recognised: the look she wore when she was working through a problem, sorting the pieces, finding the edges. “So. You know. I know. The ghosts all know, but they can’t tell anyone. Who else?”
“No one living. I need to write to Jane.”
“Yes. In code.”
“Obviously in code.”
They walked on. The lime walk stretched ahead of them, the trees bare in their autumn undress, the drizzle blurring the view of the grounds beyond. A spectral groom led a spectral horse along the path ahead of them and vanished around the corner of the stable block. Elizabeth barely registered him; her mind was too full.
“There is another thing,” she said. “A thing I have been turning over since yesterday, and I cannot see a way around it.”
Kitty waited.
“Even if we could prove it, even if we found evidence a court would accept, what then? Wickham hangs. Lydia is a murderer’s widow at sixteen. The Bennet name will be in every scandalsheet in England, ruining your and Mary’s prospects of ever making a good match, dragging the Bingley and Darcy names into the mud as well. And the question everyone will ask is: how did Mrs Darcy know? How did the new mistress of Pemberley, married less than a month, come to accuse her own brother-in-law of a murder that happened six years before she arrived?”
“You would have to reveal your gift.”
“Which I cannot do. Not publicly. Not in a way that anyone outside our family would hear. Because if I do, I am not a woman seeking justice. I am a madwoman. And a husband, in law, can do what he likes with a madwoman.”
Kitty flinched. It was a small flinch, quickly controlled, but Elizabeth saw it. She hated herself for putting it there, but she had to say it anyway, because this was the shape of the trap and Kitty needed to see every wall of it.
