The name landed in Elizabeth’s chest like a stone.
“Mr Wickham visited often?”
“Indeed, ma’am. The master had been very good to him, educated him alongside Master Fitzwilliam, treated him almost as a second son. Mr Wickham had a way about him, very easy, very charming. The master enjoyed his company.” Mrs Reynolds’s mouth tightened, barely perceptibly. “He visited rather unexpectedly, just before the master’s death. I remember it particularly because the master had seemed, well, not distressed exactly, but unsettled. As though something weighed on his mind. And then Mr Wickham arrived, quite unannounced. Though Mr Darcy did not seem surprised, as I recall. Perhaps he had written to summon Wickham for something or other.”
Kitty, who had accompanied Elizabeth on the pretext of discussing the linen cupboards, was examining a shelf of preserves with studious concentration. She did not look up, but Elizabeth saw her shoulders tighten.
“And Mr Darcy’s death,” Elizabeth said carefully. “Was it sudden?”
Mrs Reynolds was quiet for a moment. The lavender-scented room felt close, the ticking of the mantel clock unnaturally loud.
“It was, ma’am. Very sudden. He had been quite well, or so it seemed. He dined as usual that evening, retired early, and in the morning he was gone.” She pressed her lips together. “The physician said it was his heart. A sudden failure, he called it. These things happen, he said, in men of a certain age, though the master was not old. Not old at all.”
“It must have been a terrible shock.”
“For the whole house, ma’am.” Mrs Reynolds stopped, and when she spoke again her voice had changed, dropping into something lower, more private, as though she were sharing something she had never quite put into words before. “I had thought the house heavy when Lady Anne passed. But after Mr Darcy died, it was nothing like that. It was as though the very stones cried out against the master’s passing.”
Not the stones, Elizabeth thought.The ghosts.George Darcy’s rage, reverberating through every corridor, felt by a woman who could not see its source but whose instincts were sharp enough to register its presence.
She looked at Mrs Reynolds more closely, at this practical, warm, thoroughly sensible woman, and saw something she had not noticed before: a faint awareness behind the eyes, a quality of attention that went beyond the ordinary. Mrs Reynolds did not have Elizabeth’s gift. She did not see the dead or hear them. But she was sensitive to them, she felt them, the way some people felt a coming storm in their bones, and she had been feeling them for thirty years without ever understanding what it was she felt.
“And Master Fitzwilliam,” Mrs Reynolds continued, her voice thick now. “He was away, in London. He rode day and night when the express reached him, though his father was long gone. I have never seen a young man look as he looked when he came home and took Miss Darcy in his arms. He has carried it ever since, though he would never say so.”
Elizabeth set down her teacup and found that her hand was steady, though the rest of her was not. “Thank you, Mrs Reynolds. I know this cannot be easy to speak of.”
“It is not, ma’am. But I am glad you asked, because you deserve to know, and it would be more painful for either Mr or Miss Darcy to tell you about it.” Mrs Reynolds hesitated, then added, carefully, as though she had been turning something over for quite some time and had never found anyone to say it to, “I was fond of the late master. Very fond. And I have always thought, though it is not my place to say so, that his death did not sit right. Nothing I could put my finger on. Just a feeling. The house has never been the same since, and I do not mean only the grief. Something is unsettled. Something has been unsettled for six years, and I have never spoken of it to anyone, because what would I say? That the house feels wrong?”
“Feelings,” Elizabeth said quietly, “are not nothing, Mrs Reynolds.”
The housekeeper looked at her with an expression that was almost startled, as though she had expected to be dismissed and found instead that she had been heard. “No, ma’am,” she said, finally. “I do not believe they are.”
They parted at the door of the housekeeper’s room, and Kitty fell into step beside Elizabeth as they walked back through the ground floor. She was quiet until they were out of earshot, and then she said, low, “You cannot tell him, Lizzy.”
Elizabeth did not pretend to misunderstand. “I know.”
“I mean it. I watched your face in there. You were thinking about it. You were thinking: if only Darcy knew what Mrs Reynolds feels, if only I could explain it to him, he would understand.” Kitty caught her arm and stopped her in the corridor. “He would not understand. He would think you had gone mad, or that you were cruel, raking over his father’s death for some reason he could not fathom.”
“Mrs Reynolds feels it too, Kitty. She has felt it for six years. I am not the only one who knows something is wrong.”
“Mrs Reynolds feels uneasy in old rooms. That is a long way from ‘your father’s ghost told my wife he was poisoned.’” Kitty’s grip on her arm was tight. “Promise me. Promise me you will not tell him until we have real evidence. Something that does not begin and end with you seeing things nobody else can see.”
Elizabeth looked at her sister’s face, fierce and frightened. She thought of Darcy, patient, genuinely concerned, waiting for a truth she could not give him.
“I promise,” she said.
Nana was waiting in the parlour when Elizabeth returned.
She was in her chair, naturally, her small frame rigid with contained impatience. She had something to say and had beenwaiting to say it for longer than she considered acceptable. Elizabeth checked that the corridor was empty of the living, closed the door, and sat.
“You spoke to Mrs Reynolds,” Nana said.
“I did. She told me a great deal. More, I think, than she intended to.”
“Good. She is a sensible woman. I have been working on her for years.”
Elizabeth looked at Nana sharply. “Working on her?”
“She feels things,” Nana said, with the matter-of-fact air of someone describing a useful household tool rather than a human being. “She always has. Not seeing, not hearing, nothing so definite as that. But she is aware of us, in her way. When I stand near her, she shivers. When I am displeased about something, she becomes uneasy until it is put right. I learnt early on that I could direct her attention to things that needed fixing, matters the living staff had overlooked. A cold draught near a neglected window. An unsettled feeling in a room where the furniture had been wrongly placed. She does not know why she notices these things. She believes it is instinct, or experience, or simply the accumulated wisdom of twenty years in an old house.”
