“So,” Kitty said, after a long pause, in a voice that was carefully level. “We need evidence that does not depend on ghosts. Real evidence. The kind a living person could have found through ordinary means.”
“Yes.”
“Then we must investigate. Quietly. The way we have always done things: you listen to the dead, and I watch the living, and between us we find out what really happened.”
Elizabeth looked at her sister, standing in the rain in her muddied cloak, only seventeen years old, fierce and frightened and refusing to be anything less than equal to this. “Kitty. Thisis not covering for me at breakfast. This is not knocking over a glass when I look at something I should not. This is dangerous.”
“I know,” Kitty said. “Everything about your gift has always been dangerous. We have simply been fortunate, until now, that the danger was small.”
They stood on the path, the rain falling around them, the great house behind them looming against the grey sky. Somewhere inside it, Darcy was in his study, wondering what was wrong with his wife. Georgiana was at the pianoforte. Mrs Reynolds was directing the household. And somewhere in the unseen corridors of Pemberley, George Darcy was waiting, with a patience that was not patience at all but rage held in check by the thinnest thread of hope, for Elizabeth to find a way to keep the promise she had made.
“We should go in,” Kitty said. “We are both soaked, and if we catch cold, Mrs Reynolds will dose us with something medicinal and we will lose a week.”
Elizabeth almost smiled. “One moment.”
She looked back at the house. From here, she could see the parlour window, the window where she had stood watching Georgiana and Kitty in the rose garden, the morning sunlight, Lady Margaret’s smile, in the last moments before everything changed. The window was dark now, streaked with rain.
“I am going to write to Jane tonight,” she said. “And tomorrow, I am going to begin asking discreet questions. About Mr Darcy’s father, about his last days, about Wickham. The sort of questions a new bride might naturally ask.”
“And I will be beside you,” Kitty said. “Making sure nobody wonders why.”
They walked back to the house together, arm in arm, their hems heavy with rain. Elizabeth held on to her sister and felt the fear settle into something she could carry, if not comfortably, then at least without breaking.
Chapter Ten
ThecodedlettertoJane took Elizabeth three attempts.
The first was too transparent. Anyone who intercepted the post would have understood she was implying Wickham murdered Mr George Darcy, and Elizabeth could not afford that. The second was too opaque; she read it back and could not understand it herself. The third struck the balance she needed, woven into a chatty account of the household and the rose garden restoration and Kitty’s music lessons with Georgiana.
“The house continues to reveal its character in the most unexpected ways. I have learnt a great deal about the family history, some of it difficult to hear. One particular chapter concerns the passing of my husband’s father in the presence of person we both know, whose conduct, I am coming to believe, was far worse than any of us imagined. I need your counsel, Jane. Not your comfort, though I will take that too. Your judgement. I find I do not trust my own.”
Jane would understand. Jane always understood. She would read “a person we both know” and her mind would run through the possibilities, and she would arrive at the right answer, because Jane, for all her sweetness, was far from being a fool.
Elizabeth sealed the letter, set it on the tray for the morning post, and sat for a moment in the candlelight, trying not to think about how long it would take to reach Netherfield.
She began the necessary investigation with Mrs Reynolds the following morning, over the menus.
This was the natural order of things: the mistress of the house consulting the housekeeper about meals, about provisions, about the running of the household. Elizabeth had been doing it since her arrival, learning the rhythms of Pemberley with dutiful attention, because she understood that a great estate ran on a thousand small decisions, each one apparently trivial andeach one essential. Mrs Reynolds had been patient with her, gently guiding her through the complexities of a household that numbered, between family, guests, and servants, upward of fifty souls. And that was just the ones that were alive and needed feeding.
Today, however, Elizabeth had a different purpose. She needed Mrs Reynolds to talk about the past, and she needed it to sound like nothing more than a new wife’s curiosity.
“I have been looking at the family portraits in the gallery,” Elizabeth said, as Mrs Reynolds poured her tea in the housekeeper’s sitting room. It was a warm, cluttered space, fragrant with dried lavender and the particular beeswax polish that Mrs Reynolds favoured. “Georgiana has told me a little about her mother, and I should like to know more. I feel I ought to understand the family I have married into, and there is a great deal of it.”
Mrs Reynolds’s face softened, the way it always did when Lady Anne was mentioned. “Lady Anne was the finest woman I ever knew, ma’am. I came to Pemberley the year she married Mr Darcy, and she was kindness itself from the first day. She knew every servant by name within a fortnight, and she never forgot a birthday or a sick child. When she died, this house lost its heart.”
“And Mr Darcy? The late Mr George Darcy, I mean.”
“A good man, ma’am. A very good man.” Mrs Reynolds set down the teapot. “He was not easy to know, not at first. Reserved, like his son. But fair, always fair, and generous with it. He loved his children fiercely, though he did not always show it in ways theycould see. After Lady Anne died, he closed in on himself. The house felt it.”
“The house felt it?” Elizabeth looked at the housekeeper with interest.
Mrs Reynolds paused, and something moved behind her expression, a hesitation that was not reluctance but something more careful, as though she were choosing how much of herself to reveal. “Pemberley is an old house, Mrs Darcy. Very old. I have been here a long time, and I have learnt, well. I have learnt to feel when things are right and when they are not. After Lady Anne died, the house was not right. I cannot explain it better than that. There was a heaviness, a coldness in certain rooms. The master felt it too, I think, though he would never have said so. He spent more time in his study, alone.”
Elizabeth realised Mrs Reynolds was describing an awareness of the house’s unseen residents that went beyond intuition. Lady Anne had not lingered as a ghost, but the ghosts would have grieved her passing.
“Did Mr Darcy have many visitors in his last months?” Elizabeth asked, keeping her voice light, curious. “I know so little about that time.”
“Not many, ma’am. He had withdrawn from society after Lady Anne. Lord and Lady Matlock visited several times; Lady Matlock was worried about Miss Georgiana having no mother, of course, and Colonel Fitzwilliam came regularly; the master was very fond of his nephew. And Mr Wickham, of course.”
