It was, Elizabeth reflected afterward, the most unsettling thing Nana had ever said to her. Not because of the words themselves, but because of what they implied: that the danger was not only in the past but in the present, not only to the dead but to the living, and that the longer she took to find a solution, the more people stood to be hurt by a man who had already proved that he would kill to protect himself.
Somewhere in the house, Darcy was waiting for his wife to come down to dinner. She would go. She would smile. She would sit across from him, be charming, warm, present, and she would not tell him that she had spent the afternoon with his dead father and his dead great-great-grandmother, discussing the plant that had been used to murder one of them, the man who had done it, the sister who had married him, the impossibility of bringing any of it to light.
Chapter Twelve
MrsAnnesleyleftthefollowing Tuesday, for an extended visit to her sister in Nottingham. It had been planned for some time; with a new mistress in residence at Pemberley, and Kitty for company, Darcy had agreed that Georgiana could well do without her companion for a month or two.
Elizabeth had not given much thought to Mrs Annesley’s role in the household until she was gone. She was a quiet, steady woman who made everything run smoothly by the simple expedient of always being in the right place, sayingthe right thing, ensuring that Georgiana’s days had shape and purpose without ever seeming to impose either. She had been Georgiana’s companion since Ramsgate, hired by Darcy in the aftermath of that near-disaster, and she had done her job so well that her presence had become essentially invisible, the way all truly competent people eventually become.
Her absence was not invisible at all.
Georgiana found Elizabeth in the library on the first morning, hovering in the way she did when she wanted something but was not quite sure she was allowed to ask for it. She was dressed for the day, but she looked slightly unmoored, as though she had gone to the breakfast room and found that the person who usually anchored her morning was not there.
“May I sit with you?” she asked.
“Of course,” Elizabeth said. “Always.”
Georgiana sat, looked at her hands, then looked at Elizabeth. “Are any of them here now?” she said, carefully casual, as though she had been rehearsing the question.
Elizabeth glanced around the library. Miss Pardoe was in her usual chair, reading. “Miss Pardoe,” she said. “The governess; she always sits in that chair half-hidden between the shelves. She is reading, as she always is. I don’t think she has turned a page in sixty years, but she seems content.”
Miss Pardoe looked up at the sound of her name, regarded Elizabeth with the mild displeasure of a woman who had been discussed as though she were a fixture, and returned to her book.
Georgiana’s eyes went to the chair where Miss Pardoe sat, and her expression was a complicated mixture of fascination and unease. She could see nothing, of course. The chair was empty to her, as it was to everyone except Elizabeth. But knowing that someone was sitting in it, someone who had been dead for decades, someone who had lived and breathed and read books in this room, changed the way Georgiana looked at the space around her.
“Does she know I am here?” Georgiana asked.
“She is aware of you, yes. But she is not much interested in the living, I’m afraid. When she discovered I could see her, she spoke to me briefly, which is how I know her name and that she was a governess here sixty years ago, to your grandfather’s sisters, I think, but she has not spoken to me since. She is quite absorbed in her book.”
“What is she reading?”
“I’ve never been able to see the title. I have tried, but it seems to be part of her, if that makes sense. The book she was reading when she died, or perhaps the book she most loved. It does not change.”
Georgiana absorbed this. She had a hundred questions; Elizabeth could see them queuing behind her eyes, and over the course of that morning she asked most of them. How did Elizabeth’s gift work? Had she always been able to see ghosts, or had it come upon her at a certain age? Was she the only one in her family who could see them? Could she see every ghost, or only some? Did they know they were dead? Could they touch things? Could they leave the house?
Elizabeth answered as honestly as she could. She had been seeing ghosts since before she could remember; her mother said she had talked to empty rooms as a baby, and the family had assumed it was the babbling of infancy until it became clear that Elizabeth was holding conversations with people nobody else could see. So far as she knew, nobody else in her family could see them, though her father had speculated once that her grandfather on her mother’s side, old Mr Gardiner, had seemed to have knowledge he should not have at times, which made him an uncommonly successful businessman. But he had died before Elizabeth was born, so there was no asking him now. Not every ghost was visible to her, she thought; she suspected there were spirits so faint, so far gone, that even her gift could not reach them. Every ghost she had encountered knew they were dead, though some took longer to accept it than others. They could not leave the places they were bound to, which was why Pemberley’s ghosts were all connected to the house or its grounds. And they could not, as a rule, touch things.
“As a rule?” Georgiana said.
“Some ghosts are more solid than others. It depends on, I’m not entirely sure what it depends on. How long they have been here, how strong their connection to the place, how much unfinished business holds them. Nana is remarkably vivid, wholly present, but she cannot move objects or open doors. Others are fainter, barely there, more like impressions than people.”
She was walking a line and she knew it. Every answer she gave led Georgiana closer to the question Elizabeth could not answer, the question that was sitting in the room as surely as Miss Pardoe was sitting in her chair:what about my father?
It came after luncheon.
They were in the music room, Georgiana at the pianoforte, Kitty turning pages. Elizabeth was pretending to read. The music was Handel, something stately and formal that Georgiana played with a fluency that made it sound effortless, though Elizabeth could see the concentration it took.
Georgiana finished the piece, rested her hands in her lap, and said, without looking up, “Nana said my mother moved on. That she was at peace. She did not linger.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “That is what Nana told me.”
“But my father.” Georgiana’s voice was steady, and she looked up, directly at Elizabeth. “Nana would not speak of him. She changed the subject.”
Kitty, who had been sorting through the sheet music, stopped moving.
“Georgiana,” Elizabeth said.
“I’m not a child, Elizabeth. I know when I am being managed, and Nana was managing me, as you are managing me now. Which means there is something about my father that she did not want me to know, and I have been thinking about it ever since, and I cannot think of a reason for the silence unless...” She stopped, drew a breath. “Unless he is here. Unless my father is a ghost at Pemberley, and Nana did not want to tell me.”
