He was right, and she knew it. Catherine had been quiet at meals, civil when addressed, and had kept largely to her rooms. But quiet and civil were not Catherine’s natural states, and their presence was more alarming than her usual fury.
“What can she do?” Elizabeth asked, rearranging the items on her desk because she needed to do something with her hands. “Darcy confronted her. Lord Matlock took his side. She has lost her spy, and she will lose Anne too.”
“She can go back to Rosings and write letters to every connection she has, telling them whatever story serves her purpose. She can whisper about your marriage, about your family, aboutthe Wilson child. The truth does not matter, Elizabeth. What matters is what people believe, and Catherine has the ear of people who will believe her because it is easier than questioning her.”
“You are very cheerful this afternoon.”
“I am dead. Cheer is not my forte.”
Elizabeth smiled despite herself. George’s humour was rare, dry, and always delivered as though it surprised him as much as anyone. He gave her that rare, brief twitch of his mouth that passed for a smile before sobering again.
“There is one more thing,” George said. “Fitzwilliam has been in my study. Going through my papers.”
“I know. He told me he intended to.” She had looked in on him that morning, between consultations with Mrs Reynolds about the supper menu. He had been sitting on a footstool in the study, surrounded by stacks of journals and papers, his coat off and his shirtsleeves rolled up. He had looked up at her and she had seen the frustration in his face, the set of his jaw that meant he was not finding what he wanted but was not ready to stop. She had brought him tea and left him to it.
“He will not find anything. I did not write down what Wilson told me. I sent a rider to Wickham carrying a note, asking him to come to Pemberley. There is no memorandum, no record of any kind. I was going to deal with it in person, and then I was dead, and the evidence died with me.” George paced to the window and back. “My son has been in there since this morning. He has been through the desk drawers, the correspondence files, thehousehold accounts for that year. He found my will, which he has already seen. He found a letter from Wickham thanking me for a gift of fifty pounds on his birthday, which made him angry. He found some letters I wrote to Annie, after she had passed; they were just a way for me to order my thoughts, manage my grief, but I kept them. They made him sad. But he did not find what he was looking for, because it does not exist.”
“He needs to look,” Elizabeth said. “Even if there is nothing to find. He needs to feel that he has been thorough, and I can’t tell him there is nothing to find, George, because there is no way I could know that. Only you could know that, and now is not the time for me to tell him about you.”
“I know. But I am...” George stopped pacing. He stood at the window with his back to her, and when he spoke again his voice was rough. “I am proud of him for it. For looking. For caring. He came back to the study after luncheon and started on the bookshelves, checking for papers tucked inside the volumes. I watched him take down every book on the second shelf, shake it, check for loose pages, and replace it. He is methodical. He always was, even as a boy; he would not leave a puzzle until he had solved it.” He turned from the window. “He is a better man than I was, Elizabeth. I favoured a charming boy over my own son, and my son grew up to be the man I should have been.”
Elizabeth set down the pen she had been turning over in her fingers. George did not often say things like this. When he did, she could hear what it cost him, and she did not know where to look.
“He would be glad to know you think so,” she said.
“Then perhaps you ought to tell him.”
She met his eyes. George looked back at her, steady, waiting, and the challenge in his face was not unkind but it was real.
A month ago the idea of telling Darcy about the ghosts had felt impossible. Now, after everything he had absorbed without flinching, after Sally Wilson, Catherine’s accusations, the slow, steady building of the case against Wickham, the idea of sayingyour father is here, and he is proud of youseemed less like madness, more like mercy. But the ball was in three days. The house was full of guests. If she told him now and it went badly, she would have to stand beside him and smile at three hundred people while her marriage fell apart. That was, of course, if she was not immediately locked up in a madhouse.
“It is not the time,” she said again. “But... soon. After the ball, when the house is quiet again, I will tell him everything.”
She had saidsoonso many times that the word had lost its meaning. But this time she meant it. She thought George could tell, because he nodded, once, then went back to his pacing. Elizabeth went downstairs to dinner.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Thedaybeforetheball, Elizabeth walked through Pemberley and found it ready. Or rather, the living half of Pemberley was ready. The dead half was in uproar.
The ballroom gleamed. The chandeliers had been cleaned until every crystal threw light. The chairs were arranged along the walls in neat rows, upholstered in pale gold silk that Nana had chosen forty years ago and that had so little wear they still looked almost new. The musicians’ gallery had been swept and dusted, the music stands set out, the candles in their sconcestrimmed and ready. The refreshment tables were placed at the far end, draped in white linen, bare now but waiting.
And on the ballroom floor, lined up alongside the living maids, Sarah Dunn was on her hands and knees, scrubbing away at floorboards she could not actually touch. Her cloth passed through the wood without friction, but her form was perfect, her elbows pumping, her face set in the grim concentration of a woman who had polished these floors throughout her life and was not about to stop simply because she was dead.
“She has been at it since dawn,” Nana said, falling into step beside Elizabeth as she crossed the ballroom. “I told her it was unnecessary. She informed me that a ball at Pemberley required properly polished floors and she did not trust the new girls to get into the corners. She is not wrong about the corners.”
“The new girls have been here for fifteen years, Nana,” Elizabeth said, speaking under her breath. She had learned that Nana could hear her perfectly well at this volume, and it enabled Elizabeth to talk to her in public with nobody noticing. Most of the servants kept their gazes below her face, so they did not see her lips moving.
“As I said. New.”
Nana walked beside her, inspecting. Not pacing, not restless; walking, the way she had walked these rooms when she was alive. She seemed particularly solid today, almost as solid as George Darcy appeared, and Elizabeth thought of what George had said about Pemberley’s reputation for entertaining having been created during Nana’s tenure. Did Nana seem so solid because she was interested in what was happening? Nanaran a critical eye over the flower arrangements, the candle placements, the supper tables, and Elizabeth braced herself.
“The lilies should be closer to the entrance,” Nana said. “Guests should smell them as they arrive. It sets the tone.”
“I will tell Mrs Reynolds.”
“The roses are wrong. They are too dark for the room. We used pale roses, cream and blush, because they catch the candlelight. Dark roses absorb it. The room will look heavy.”
“I believe the force-houses have already been stripped of blooms. We are too late to change them, I fear.”
